THE ABBOTT & COSTELLO SHOW - PRIVATE EYE (1954)

 "I'M A DETECTIVE, DO YA HEAR ME!!!"

  Lou Costello has been taking classes from the Watchdog Correspondence School and today he has received his diploma; he is now a Private Eye.  Landlord Mr. Fields is on hand as Lou opens the box containing not only a diploma but also a badge, handcuffs (which Lou mistakes as a pair of folding eyeglasses)

and a gun (which proceeds to go off just as Bud is entering the apartment and shoots his hat off).  Mr. Fields can't believe that someone who hasn't been able to find a job in two years will be able to find anything!  He offers Lou $50 if he can find something Mr. Fields lost years ago:  his hair.  Of course, mayhem ensues when Lou locks himself and Bud in the handcuffs and, during a struggle for the key, the key flies across the room and falls into a hole in the wall.  Halfway through the episode, Dot (a woman who lives in Lou's apartment building) has had a deceased grandfather leave her everything in his will.  This includes a haunted house filled with secret panels and $50,000 in bonds that are hidden somewhere in the house.  When the boys get to the haunted house, we hear some nice spooky wind sound effects which sound like they come directly from the Disney Haunted House sound effects record. 

Naturally, there are a bunch of crooks inside the house the boys don't know about, trying to find the money.  Patented old dark house tropes occur such as a hand emerging from a secret panel to knock Lou's hat off and a guy pretending to be a painting on the wall.  This is all very evocative of one of those THREE STOOGES shorts in which the trio find themselves inside a haunted house but given an Abbott & Costello slant.  When Lou opens a wall safe, a hand with a boxing glove punches him in the face.  Clutching hands emerge from a secret panel behind Lou's rocking chair.  We've seen all these haunted house tropes in countless horror comedies but they're still fun here.  But there's even better to come:  a penguin on roller skates!!!  For no earthly reason, the crooks have a penguin in a cage and set it loose in the house.  And yes . . . a penguin on roller skates careens through the room and Lou gapes at it.  OK, points for originality there! 

So it's not ALL tried-and-true haunted house cliches.  F'rinstance, Lou puts on his red-and-blue cardboard 3-D glasses to look at the painting and the guy pretending to be a painting takes a swing at Lou but freezes when Lou looks at him. 

"Isn't that 3-D beautiful!" enthuses Lou.  3-D . . . very topical for the mid-50's.  While up in the attic, Bud finds a picture of a menacing Bobby Barber on the wall.  "Oh no, you've gotta go" an unnerved Bud mutters and tosses the picture out the window.  The picture, of course, lands on the branches of a tree RIGHT OUTSIDE the window where Lou is resting on a couch; so the picture looks like a menacing, scary guy swaying back and forth looking in the window.  I mean, none of these gags are groundbreaking but it's all in how you do 'em and they're a lot of fun here.  This isn't a movie; it's a mid-50's TV comedy show so I have a lot of good will towards it.  The fact that it's the wonderful Abbott & Costello, admittedly at the tail end of their career together, still delivering the fun after all these years.  This episode is from the second season of THE ABBOTT & COSTELLO SHOW and aired on February 20, 1954.  I watched it on the beautifully-restored ClassicFlix dvd of the second season which is truly phenomenal.  I don't make a dime from them but you really should pick up both volumes if you are at all an Abbott & Costello fan.