Once Upon a Honeymoon (1956)
Newlyweds Jeff and Mary keep postponing their honeymoon while Jeff finishes a song for his show; a guardian angel named Wilbur intervenes to help him complete it, and Mary passes the time imagining a modern home fitted out with Bell's new colored telephones.
Directed by the Broadway choreographer Gower Champion for Jerry Fairbanks Productions, Once Upon a Honeymoon dresses up a product pitch for Bell Telephone’s colored desk and wall phones as a musical fantasy, and later picked up a cult following of its own through a 1996 Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.
Background
Once Upon a Honeymoon was directed by the Broadway choreographer and director Gower Champion for Jerry Fairbanks Productions, sponsored by Bell Telephone to promote the Western Electric Model 500 desk phone and Model 554 wall phone, both newly available in a range of colors meant to complement mid-century home decor. The 14-minute musical fantasy stars Virginia Gibson and Ward Ellis as newlyweds who keep postponing their honeymoon because the husband has a song left to finish, with a guardian angel named Wilbur sent in to help him get it done.
What to watch for
The film’s real subject is the telephone, not the romance; the wife passes her waiting hours imagining a thoroughly modern home outfitted with Bell’s colored phones in every room, and the dial clicks on one of them end up supplying the husband’s missing musical inspiration for his song. The commercial purpose is never disguised, and that unembarrassed product-pitch quality, set inside full musical numbers, is what has made the short a minor cult object; it was featured on a 1996 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which introduced it to an audience far removed from the appliance showroom it was originally made to serve.
