I don't know how many of you are familiar with a very silly man named Dayton Allen. Dayton was a member of Steve Allen's little stock company of funny people and he was one of the main performers (voicing puppets and playing characters) on Howdy Doody. He also did a lot of cartoon voice work including all or almost all of the voices on Deputy Dawg and was heard in a lot of commercials.
Around 1960, he did a whole series of little 5-minute TV shows that looked like they were shot for about a dollar each. The more elaborate ones may have cost two dollars. They also sold for very little money and a lot of TV stations around the country bought them, figuring it would be handy to have that kind of "filler" material around. If a movie ran 75 minutes, you could drop in a couple of Dayton Allen shows to pad out the time and start the next show on the half-hour. They were easy to watch and the canned laughter sure enjoyed them a lot. Needless to say, we have an example of one here…