Movie Name | Character | Release Date | Overview |
The Reluctant Dragon | Robert Benchley | 1941-06-19 | Humorist Robert Benchley attempts to find Walt Disney to ask him to adapt a short story about a gentle dragon who would rather recite poetry than be f… |
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How to Watch Football | Football Fan | 1938-10-07 | Humorist Robert Benchley illustrates the fine points of attending an American football game…. |
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Flesh and Fantasy | Doakes | 1943-10-29 | Anthology film of three tales of the supernatural. The first story is set at the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The second involves a psychic who predicts… |
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The Sex Life of the Polyp | Lecturer | 1928-07-25 | Dr. Benchley is addressing the Ladies Club on the subject of the reproductive habits of the polyp, a small aquatic organism. Although he is not able t… |
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How to Be a Detective | Mr. Benchley | 1936-10-17 | This Robert Benchley ‘How To’ comedy short attempts to teach us how to profile criminals by physical characteristics…. |
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How to Sleep | Host / Narrator | 1935-09-14 | A humorous look at the problems people have trying to sleep…. |
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The Treasurer’s Report | Treasurer | 1928-03-11 | Assistant Treasurer Benchley reports on the annual expenditures of the club for its home for “boys between the ages of 14”, and other projects…. |
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How to Start the Day | Lecturer | 1937-11-11 | Benchley tries his best to demonstrate the routine one should follow to start the day right…. |
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How to Behave | Mr. Benchley | 1936-04-25 | Two men working below a manhole cover wonder what they would do if a woman was to fall in. This leads to one of the workers saying that Robert Benchle… |
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How to Eat | Lecturer / Joe Doakes | 1939-06-10 | Humorist Robert Benchley discusses the issue of food and how different situations can affect one’s ability to consume and digest food, using his stock… |
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Important Business | Joseph A. Doakes | 1944-04-29 | Robert takes a train ride to Washington, DC, on “important business.”… |
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My Tomato | Joseph A. Doakes | 1943-12-04 | Joe Doakes is lamenting to his wife the lack of variety in his meals. In particular, he misses eating stewed tomatoes, the fruit which he believes inc… |
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How to Train a Dog | Lecturer / Dog Owner | 1936-07-01 | This comedic short provides a lesson in how NOT to train a dog…. |
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Mental Poise | Psychoanalyst / Mr. Ostegraf | 1938-12-10 | In this comedic short, a psychoanalyst encounters a patient who eerily resembles himself…. |
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An Hour for Lunch | Lecturer / Joe | 1939-03-17 | Benchley shows how to budget one’s time during lunch hour to get things done efficiently. Unfortunately, things don’t go as planned…. |
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The Romance of Digestion | Joe Doakes | 1937-03-13 | A brief, illustrated lecture on digestion. Aburdist humor is the hallmark of this pseudo-scientific description of biting, chewing, swallowing, and di… |
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How to Vote | Mr. Robert Benchley | 1936-09-04 | A candidate has laryngitis, so his assistant must make a speech in his place. Both the speaker and his audience are soon befuddled…. |
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Why Daddy? | Joseph A. Doakes | 1944-05-20 | When Joe Doakes listens to a quiz show on the radio and knows all the answers, his wife encourages him to go on a quiz show himself. He appears on a n… |
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A Night at the Movies | Husband | 1937-11-06 | A Night at the Movies is a short film starring Robert Benchley. It was Benchley’s greatest success since How to Sleep, and won him a contract for more… |
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See Your Doctor | Lecturer / Joseph H. Doakes | 1939-12-16 | A lecturer tells the audience that it is National Take Care Week. He tells the story of a man who gets stung in his garden and the problems the man ha… |
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Home Movies | Joe Doakes | 1940-02-17 | A comedy short staring Robert Benchley. He tries to show us how to make our own movies…. |
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Nothing But Nerves | Mr. Benchley | 1942-01-02 | After some investigation, Robert Benchley finds his nerves are in a bad state. He has the jitters so bad he can’t hold his cup still enough to drink h… |
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How to Read | Lecturer | 1938-08-27 | Robert Benchley offers a humorous lecture on how to avoid different types of strain during reading…. |
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That Inferior Feeling | Joseph H. ‘Joe’ Doakes | 1940-01-20 | Joe Doakes, like most men, is unable to cope with personal emergencies or those in a position of authority (real or imagined)…. |
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Home Early | Joe Doakes | 1939-05-26 | A businessman goes home early to surprise his family and is treated with suspicion, mostly by his wife’s bridge club…. |
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Your Technocracy and Mine | | 1933-03-31 | Robert Benchley explains Technocracy with visual aids in his classic befuddled manor…. |
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How to Raise a Baby | Lecturer Father | 1938-07-01 | American humorist Robert Benchley provides a comedic look at the difficulty in being a father…. |
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Dark Magic | Joe Doakes | 1939-05-12 | A man buys a magic set for his son, but the tricks worked better in the store than they do at home…. |
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How to Sub-Let | Joe Doakes | 1939-01-29 | A man fumbles through a sub-let assessment while his wife is away…. |
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The Forgotten Man | Joe Doakes / Father | 1941-05-22 | Robert Benchley’s wry forerunner to “Father of the Bride” detailing his perspective of the upcoming nuptials…. |
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The Courtship of the Newt | Zoology Lecturer | 1938-07-22 | Robert Benchley revamps his pre-code classic “Sex Life of the Polyp” for a new generation…. |
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The Day of Rest | Joe Doakes | 1939-09-05 | Joe Doakes tries to take a day off…. |
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Opening Day | City Treasurer Benchley | 1938-11-12 | The City Treasurer stands in for the mayor, throwing out the first pitch on Opening Day…. |
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No News Is Good News | Answer Man | 1943-12-18 | Robert Benchley answers questions ranging from across the political spectrum…. |
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David O. Selznick: Your New Producer | Master of Ceremonies | 1935-01-01 | Clip-filled promotional short by MGM Studios celebrating the body of work by producer David O. Selznick…. |
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Keeping in Shape | Joe Doakes | 1942-06-22 | Robert Benchley lectures on physical witness in middle age…. |
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An Evening Alone | Joe Doakes | 1938-05-13 | Robert Benchley’s everyman spends an evening home alone…. |
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Waiting for Baby | Joe Doakes | 1941-01-24 | Robert Benchley aims his keen observational skills toward expectant fathers…. |
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How to Take a Vacation | Husband | 1941-10-09 | In this Robert Benchley instructional video, he demonstrates the pitfalls of a homebody husband attempting to take a vacation apart from his wife…. |
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Crime Control | Sgt. Benchley / Joe Doakes | 1941-04-11 | A police officer alerts his audience to the fact that inanimate objects can be as dangerous as human criminals. He then displays several offenders tha… |
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The Witness | Joe Doakes | 1942-01-01 | As Joe Doakes is reading the newspaper, he begins to talk to himself. Questioned by his wife, he explains that he is disturbed by the paper’s account … |
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The Trouble with Husbands | Joe Doakes | 1940-11-08 | Benchley, in his own unique way, starts to drive his wife crazy. First he waits until just as she is serving dinner before he goes to wash his hands a… |
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Music Made Simple | Robert Benchley | 1938-03-16 | Benchley fills in for a music critic on a radio show. His performance is less than stellar…. |
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The Spellbinder | Robert Benchley | 1928-12-13 | The Spellbinder is a comedy short…. |
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Furnace Trouble | Robert Benchley | 1929-02-04 | Furnace Trouble is a 1929 comedy short…. |
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Lesson No. 1 | Lecturer | 1929-02-12 | Lesson No. 1 is a 1929 comedy short…. |
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Stewed, Fried and Boiled | Lecturer | 1929-03-29 | Stewed, Fried and Boiled is a 1929 comedy short…. |
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How to Break 90 at Croquet | Joe Doakes | 1935-06-04 | Robert Benchley shows how to successfully play croquet…. |
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Snafu | Ben Stevens | 1945-11-22 | A 14-year-old boy lies about his age and enlists in the United State Marine Corps without his family’s consent or knowledge. He is sent into battle in… |
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How to Figure Income Tax | Joe Doakes | 1938-03-01 | A man humorously attempts to give an overview of income taxes…. |
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I Married a Witch | Dr. Dudley White | 1942-10-30 | Rocksford, New England, 1672. Puritan witch hunter Jonathan Wooley is cursed after burning a witch at the stake: his descendants will never find happi… |
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You’ll Never Get Rich | Martin Cortland | 1941-09-25 | A Broadway choreographer gets drafted and coincidentally ends up in the same army base as his object of affection’s boyfriend…. |
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The Sky’s the Limit | Philip ‘Phil’ Harriman | 1943-07-13 | Flying Tiger Fred Atwell sneaks away from his famous squadron’s personal appearance tour and goes incognito for several days of leave. He quickly fall… |
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Bedtime Story | Eddie Turner | 1941-12-25 | A Braodway playwright wants to keep on writing plays for his wife to star in, but all she wants is to retire to Connecticut and, following a few ‘worl… |
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Live, Love and Learn | Oscar | 1937-10-29 | A starving, uncompromising artist and an heiress fall in love on first sight and immediately get married. She loves his outrageous behaviour, his stra… |
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Pan-Americana | Charlie Corker | 1945-03-22 | A New York magazine sends its editors to South America to find beautiful girls…. |
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The National Barn Dance | J.B. Mitcham | 1944-09-24 | This film gives a fictionalized version of how the popular real-life radio program of the title began…. |
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The Major and the Minor | Albert Osborne | 1942-09-16 | Susan Applegate, tired of New York after one year and twenty-five jobs, decides to return to her home town. Discovering she hasn’t enough money for th… |
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Three Girls About Town | Wilburforce Puddle, hotel manager | 1941-10-23 | Faith and Hope Banner, sisters, are “convention hostesses” in a hotel. A body is discovered next door as the magician’s convention is leaving and the … |
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Hired Wife | Roger Van Horn | 1940-09-13 | Ad man Stephen Dexter asks his secretary Kendall to marry him as a loophole in order to protect his finances during an important business deal. Once t… |
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Young and Willing | Arthur Kenny | 1943-02-05 | For those, if any, who have wondered why so many Paramount contractees appeared in United Artists’ films during the war years, this is another one of … |
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Rafter Romance | Hubbell | 1933-09-01 | A working girl shares her apartment with an artist, taking the place in shifts…. |
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The Stork Club | Tom P. Curtis | 1945-12-28 | Director Hal Walker’s 1945 musical comedy stars Betty Hutton as a hat-check girl at New York City’s famous nightclub. The cast also includes Barry Fit… |
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The Sport Parade | Radio Announcer | 1932-11-11 | Two Dartmouth football players fall in love with the same girl following college graduation…. |
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Social Register | Robert Benchley | 1934-03-10 | Chorus girl Patsy Shaw crashes a high-society party, meets playboy Charlie Breen, they fall in love, and are on their merry way to wedded bliss. Howev… |
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Her Primitive Man | Martin Osborne | 1944-05-29 | An anthropologist unwittingly takes a man disguised as a “primitive man” back to New York as a specimen…. |
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Song of Russia | Hank Higgins | 1944-02-10 | American conductor John Meredith and his manager, Hank Higgins, go to Russia shortly before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Meredith falls in l… |
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Nice Girl? | Prof. Oliver Wendel Holmes Dana | 1941-02-21 | Jane is a nice girl and has had her eyes on a young man who seems more interested in his hand-built car than in Jane. She decides to shed her “nice gi… |
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Syncopation | Doakes (scenes deleted) | 1942-05-22 | A young trumpeter rises through the jazz world and finds love…. |
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Take a Letter, Darling | G.B. Atwater | 1942-05-06 | A struggling painter takes a job as a secretary to a female advertising executive. While working to obtain an account from a tobacco company, they end… |
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Janie Gets Married | John Van Brunt | 1946-06-22 | Newlywed Janie’s (Joan Leslie) World War II-veteran husband (Robert Hutton) goes to work at her father’s (Edward Arnold) newspaper…. |
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Kiss and Tell | George Archer | 1945-10-04 | Film adaptation of the Broadway hit, about the comic mayhem that erupts in a small town when a 15-year old high-schooler (Shirley Temple) is wrongly s… |
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Practically Yours | Judge Robert Simpson | 1944-12-20 | In this screwball comedy a WW2 US pilot bombs a Japanese aircraft carrier, is assumed to be dead, and then is misquoted in the press as fondly remembe… |
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Walt Disney’s Fables – Vol.6 | Robert Benchley | 2004-05-31 | Two classic animated shorts from the Disney studios. In ‘The Reluctant Dragon’ (1941), a young boy and a famous dragon fighter team up to teach a doci… |
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Piccadilly Jim | Bill Macon | 1936-08-14 | Jim’s father wants to marry Eugenia, but her sister Netta refuses to allow it. When Jim sees Ann at a club, he falls for her even though she is with L… |
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The Bride Wore Boots | Uncle Todd Warren | 1946-06-05 | Rich and beautiful Southern heiress Sally Warren loves horse-racing and running her horse-farm although her husband of seven years hates the four-legg… |
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Janie | John Van Brunt | 1944-09-02 | Teenage Janie (Joyce Reynolds) falls in love with a private (Robert Hutton) from an Army base opposed by her editor father (Edward Arnold)…. |
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Foreign Correspondent | Stebbins | 1940-08-16 | The European war was only beginning to erupt across national borders. Johnny Jones, an American crime reporter dispatched by his New York publisher to… |
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Showbiz Goes to War | Archive Footage | 1982-12-31 | While a few Hollywood celebrities such as James Stewart and Clark Gable saw combat during World War II, the majority used their talents to rally the A… |
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Dancing Lady | Ward King | 1933-11-24 | Janie lives to dance and will dance anywhere, even stripping in a burlesque house. Tod Newton, the rich playboy, discovers her there and helps her get… |
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Week-End at the Waldorf | Randy Morton | 1945-10-04 | Anything can happen during a weekend at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria: a glamorous movie star meets a world-weary war correspondent and mistakes him for … |
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Headline Shooter | Radio Announcer | 1933-07-28 | A newsreel photographer neglects his love life to get the perfect shot…. |
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Hollywood Victory Caravan | Robert Benchley | 1945-09-30 | A girl is desperate to get to Washington D.C. to be with her lonesome brother, a wounded G.I. She persuades Bing Crosby to let her join his caravan…. |
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Sunkist Stars at Palm Springs | | 1936-08-05 | Winners of the Lucky Stars National Dance Contest – one woman from each state of the United States – are welcomed to Palm Springs. Palm Springs being … |
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China Seas | Charlie McCaleb | 1935-08-09 | Captain Alan Gaskell sails the perilous waters between Hong Kong and Singapore with a secret cargo: a fortune in British gold. That’s not the only ris… |
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It’s in the Bag! | Parker | 1945-04-21 | The ringmaster of a flea circus inherits a fortune…if he can find which chair it’s hidden in…. |
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Road to Utopia | Narrator | 1945-11-01 | While on a ship to Skagway, Alaska, Duke and Chester find a map to a secret gold mine, which had been ‘stolen’ by thugs. In Alaska to recover her fath… |
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Broadway Melody of 1938 | Duffy | 1937-08-20 | Steve Raleight wants to produce a show on Broadway. He finds a backer, Herman Whipple and a leading lady, Sally Lee. But Caroline Whipple forces Steve… |
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Hollywood: The Selznick Years | Self (archive footage) (uncredited) | 1961-12-31 | Henry Fonda hosts this retrospective on the career and films of iconic filmmaker David O. Selznick, who epitomized the era of the auteur producer in t… |
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Sunday Night at the Trocadero | Robert Benchley | 1937-10-02 | MGM short in which Reginald Denny introduces various singing and dancing acts, with cameo appearances by many Hollywood celebrities of the time…. |
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Show-Business at War | Self | 1943-05-21 | A multi-studio effort to show the newsreel audience the progress of the Hollywood war effort…. |
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The Ten-Year Lunch | Himself (archive footage) | 1987-09-28 | The story of the legendary wits who lunched daily at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City during the 1920s. The core of the so-called Round Table grou… |
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Duffy’s Tavern | Robert Benchley | 1945-09-28 | The staff of a record factory drown their sorrows at Duffy’s Tavern, while the company owner faces threats of bankruptcy…. |
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The Big Parade of Comedy | (archive footage) | 1964-09-02 | Film clips highlight the funniest scenes and brightest comic stars in MGM’s history…. |
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That’s Entertainment, Part II | (archive footage) | 1976-05-16 | Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire present more golden moments from the MGM film library, this time including comedy and drama as well as classic musical num… |
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The Pixar Story | Robert Benchley (archive footage) | 2007-08-28 | A look at the first years of Pixar Animation Studios – from the success of “Toy Story” and Pixar’s promotion of talented people, to the building of it… |
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