I'll Take Vanilla

When Tommy Bond tells his aunt, Betty Mack, that he won't eat his spinach if he doesn't get some vanilla ice cream -- Popeye would be shocked -- she enlists the help of ice cream man Charley Chase, much to his destruction.

It's not the best of Chase's sound shorts, but it has its charms, including a song by Chase and Roach staffer Leroy Shields, Bond at his brattiest, and the usual impeccable Chase construction of both plot and gag sequences; the one that ends the short, a horde of policemen pursuing and futilely shooting at Chase's fleeing ice cream truck is as dark and funny as any of his movies.

I'll Take Vanilla refers to young Tommy Bond's preference for ice cream flavor and the spoiled young man is driving his aunt Betty Mack to her wit's end trying to please him while she's babysitting.

Into their lives drives Charley Chase with his ice cream truck and while the tow of them hit it off, the hapless Charley gets sucked into their lives as another babysitter while Mack goes off to get a prescription filled.

While Charley is babysitting Tommy he happens to swallow a whistle which gives his voice a rather peculiar quality that's good for several laughs. When Mack doesn't come back, they go off in Charley's truck looking for her.

But when she does come back, she panics when she finds Chase and Tommy not home and calls the cop. The cop she gets is Harry Bowen who must have graduated from The Police Academy back in the day and might have been David Graf's great grandfather. Bowen gets almost as many laughs as Chase does in their scenes together.

It was not a good day for Charley Chase on his ice cream route that day, but it was a great day for the Hal Roach studio when they turned out a very good comedy short.

In "I'll Take Vanilla", Charley Chase plays a door-to-door ice cream vendor. When he stops at one house, he becomes infatuated with the pretty lady and instead of going about his rounds, he sticks around for a while while she babysits her incredibly bratty nephew (Tommy Bond, of the Little Racals fame). Soon the boy ends up making Charley's life miserable...and yet he agrees to stay and watch the kid while she runs to the pharmacy. What's next? Plenty!

This is an okay Chase short....not among his better nor among his worst. It has a few funny bits but a few that also fall flat, such as the cop at the end of the film. Overall, a very mixed bag but watchable if you are a Chase fanatic. But be forewarned...although this is not a great Chase film, the ending is simply horrid. It's definitely slapstick and makes no sense whatsoever.

It's an old adage that one should never share the stage with children or animals. The thought is that if you do, they'll steal the show from you. Here Charley Chase lets a good portion of the laughs come from young Tommy Bond, who plays the impossibly obnoxious young boy whom Charley, an ice cream man, must serve while he flirts with his aunt. Along the way, of course, chaos ensues and he ends up chased by the police as a kidnapper.

Charley, however, knows that the funniest performers don't hog all the laughs for themselves, and that he only seems funnier if the people around him are funny too. The result, with Charley reacting ever less enthusiastically to Junior's terrors, is a very funny short.

It's also helped by beginning with one of Charley's best songs, a very cheerful and witty ditty about, of course, the selling of ice cream. The dialogue has a sparkle here too, and a novelty sound gag in which Charley swallows a whistle would be borrowed a couple of years later by Laurel and Hardy for their bit in "Pick a Star." Betty Mack is good as Charley's leading lady, and it all makes for a breezy delight of a two-reeler.