The other night, the City of Centerville, Ohio and the Centerville Arts Commission presented "Hooray for Hollywood," a concert in Centerville Pops! series consisting of music and film clips from great movies. The program featured the Centerville Community Band, the Centerville Community Chorus, the Centerville Pops Strings, the Centerville Pops! Vocalists and students from the Ballare School of Dance performing "Hooray for Hollywood" followed by excerpts from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Batman: The Movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, some James Bond flicks and The Phantom of the Opera.
Naturally, it is the inclusion of my favorite film — It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — that interests me most. The conductor preceded this section of the program with some "trivia" about the film and managed to get an awful lot of it wrong, repeating a lot of things that my pals Paul Scrabo, Mike Schlesinger and I debunked on the commentary track of the Criterion DVD and Blu-ray. Oliver Hardy, for example, did not pass away just before the movie was to begin filming. Hardy died in August of 1957 and Mad World began shooting in April of 1962. Jack Benny was not driving a Model T Ford in the film. It was, I believe, a 1932 Cadillac. And so on.
But here is the entire program as it was recorded and uploaded to YouTube. If you'd like to just watch the segment on It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, you can jump to the start of it with this link.