After a year away (with occasional visits), during which time she and husband Skitch Henderson hosted a local variety show in New York City, Faye returns to the panel as the fourth regular.
A German shepherd dog: “My great-grandfather
was Rin-Tin-Tin”
The panel is blindfolded, and Garry answers for the canine guest, slyly saying, "...if our
guest were to answer with their own distinctive voice, the panel would
certainly recognize their identity.” After the game, trainer Lee Duncan comes out and shows how he taught the dog to perform one of his tricks. Not to be outdone, Garry later brings out his own dog Sam who knows precisely one trick, how to "sit." As an American soldier during World War One, Duncan rescued the original Rin Tin Tin from a French battlefield. Upon his return to the US, Duncan trained the dog and got him work in silent movies. Eventually, Rin Tin Tin became a huge international star. The dog's offspring also appeared in movies under the Rin Tin Tin name, to lesser success. Duncan is grooming this dog, Rin Tin Tin IV, to be the star of a new television series.
The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin
(1954-1959) would indeed debut on ABC just nine days after this appearance. However, this dog proved to be a weak performer on camera, and the vast majority of what kids saw on
their
TV screens each week was the work of other German shepherds not related to the Rin Tin Tin line. Duncan would die in 1960 having never trademarked the Rin Tin Tin name. Without legal protection, the decades that followed would see a lot of lesser projects, including a cameo-filled spoof called
Won Ton Ton, The Dog Who Saved Hollywood
(1976). Though some continue to try and
maintain
the legacy, "Rinnie" and his progeny are largely forgotten today.
Roy
Miffleton of Washington DC : “I was arrested for kissing my wife”
In 1949, at Mayo Beach on Chesapeake Bay, Miffleton and his wife kissed near a woman who objected to the romantic display. Words were exchanged, tempers flared, and what could have been a minor matter soon drew the attention of a crowd, and eventually the police. A few days later, a judge fined Middleton $12.50 for disorderly conduct. The judge made a point of saying that Miffleton was not being charged for the kiss itself, but for the ruckus afterwards. Still, the story made human-interest headlines, and even merited a mention in Time Magazine. A friend of Miffleton, who loudly defended the couple, was also fined. Mrs Miffleton was not.
Special guest Buster Keaton: "I'm sitting on a custard pie"
Technically, he's sitting on a small wooden crate that holds the pie. Keaton has the panelists ask their questions in pantomime, which they do admirably as Garry playfully "translates" their motions into questions. After the game, Keaton teases Garry and the panel with the now exposed and "throwable" pie, before hurling it into the camera lens, effectively at us, the viewers. A pie in the face as slapstick humor was first seen in 19th century music hall performances long before it became a silent movie staple. Keaton threw a pie in his film debut in The Butcher Boy (1917), but in general wasn't known in his day for pie-in-the-face antics. That was typically the domain of other directors, primarily Mack Sennett and his Keystone Studios, home of his namesake "Cops." Still, as a representative of that period of film history, and in a time where those silent movies were harder to access than they are today, Keaton leaned into that comic cliché in later life appearances like this one.
This episode HAS been reviewed (at The Paley Center in New York City) but is not generally in circulation among collectors.
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