Today's Video Link

Here's a strange piece of video. It's an "industrial" film about Dodge trucks for 1965. It runs a hair over 16 minutes and it stars Don Knotts. Industrial films are not made for the general public. This was almost certainly made to be shown to people involved in the marketing and maybe even the manufacture of Dodge trucks, and it may have been shown at some big convention of those folks and nowhere else.

The cast is full of people who were probably working a lot as day players in TV shows and movies at the time but the only one I can name is the gent with the mustache. That's Dick Wilson, who was better known later on as Mr. Whipple in the commercials for Charmin bath tissue. There are no credits so we have no idea who wrote it, directed it, produced it, etc. Howard Morris directed a number of films of this kind but this doesn't feel like his work…and if he'd done it, the cast would have been filled with his friends and I'd recognize a lot of them.

The style and humor are very dated and it's an example of the way women were often depicted at the time. If you can put that aside, you might be impressed by how much Don Knotts was able to do with a script like this. He really was one of the greatest comic actors of all time…