Young Man's Fancy

This short is about a guy returning home and bringing a friend to stay over. A friend who is also a guy and sends the sister into a frenzy. Apparently there were incredibly desperate girls back in the day ready to throw themselves at the first guy new in town. Well he does not quite take to her at first as he is more interest in devices and an upcoming lecture about fungus. So there is the problem, what is this short trying to accomplish? Hm, there are several mentions of electricity within this short, but there is also several mentions of the fungus lecture. One can also not rule out that this is some workshop meant to help young girls lure men into marriage by pretending to be interested in the same things. I am going to have to go with the electricity as there seems no need to mention how everything, including the water heater, is electric and how great all the electric stuff in the house is if it was not some vague short put out by the electric company about how wonderful electricity is. Still, they could be a bit more direct as there are some that are going to focus in on that fungus lecture and wonder if they too could grow and raise fungus in the basement. The acting is over the top, the sister comes across as very immature someone who should not be helped in her quest to find a boyfriend, and the parents wooden. Still, it was more entertaining than other shorts I have seen from this era.

A Young Man's Fancy is a short to be missed. The whole thing is incredibly dumb and suffers from a severe lack of reality. Basically a young woman has the hots for a guy in her class. When her brother brings this guy to their place for a dinner, this "heart throb" is more interested in the gadgets in the kitchen than her. Plenty of bad acting here as well. Rightfully skewered on Mystery Science Theater 3000 for its preposterous plotline and bad acting.

Am I really the first to comment on this one? Wow! A #1!

If you hang out with the Ricardos, the Cleavers, or that "Father Knows Best" gang, you'll feel right at home with the...the...come to think of it, we never do get the name of the family in this thing. Let's call them the Cumberdales.

The story is a basic one: Smarmy Bob Cumberdale brings home a college chum, Alexander Phipps, for a few days. Sister Judy falls hard for Alex but he's not having any, being more interested in hydraulics, time and motion study, and mushrooms than girls. Judy brings Alex around by harnessing the power of electric kitchen appliances, and by playing extremely dumb, as was the custom at the time. Convinced at last that Judy can cook, and that she's willing to listen to him prattle endlessly on about the configuration of a modern kitchen, Alex invites her to go dancing. We're spared the jump cut to later in the evening, as Alex goes into his third hour of explaining the art of efficiency and Judy silently wills the car to get her home a little faster.

This is really just a sitcom-shaped commercial for the wonders of electrical appliances. I suppose people needed to be sold on such things in the early 50's, or at least be made aware of their new purchasing opportunities, and the producers must have thought that the new medium of the situation comedy was the way to reach the most people. The MST3k guys pummel it mercilessly, although they fail to capitalize on the line "You'll give her the reds" by making a joke about the anti-Communist hysteria of the time. Regardless, it's a fine time with Mike and the bots.

"Young Man's Fancy" is getting slammed by the other reviewers, and unjustly it seems to me, for being unrealistic and poorly acted. Judgment over the acting is a matter of taste I suppose; so all I can say is that the performances aren't really all that different than anything else I've seen in the average range from that time period. They are generally credible, given the situation as it has been created by its authors, if a bit over the top. And as for the situation itself being "preposterous" as one reviewer put it, let's look at that. A young girl is attracted to a visiting young man but is having trouble catching his attention. In order to finally break through she resorts to feigning interest in one of the young man's hobbies. Is such a scenario really so outlandish? The only thing about that I found difficult to accept is the constant references to the miracle of electric appliances. That might have been the way people would have reacted twenty years earlier, but did anyone in America really need to be convinced of the value of an electric dishwasher or range in 1952? Yes, I know MST3K had a field day with this short; but if you're looking for outlandish propositions, try another short they skewered, "Out of This World", where a demon and an angel fight for the soul of a bread delivery man. Now that's preposterous, in spades!

Here's an industrial film touting the benefits of an all-electric house: kitchen, laundry room, the entire panoply of modern home conveniences is pressed into service to allow a young woman to entice the handsome -- if rather serious-minded -- young man her brother has brought home from college.

It's produced by the Edison Electric Institute, which is the trade group for publicly owned electricity producers.

It's a rather message-driven show, which uses the attempts of Bonnie Baken to interest Robert Casey. The setting has her starting out as a sloppy young girl, but as the movie progresses, she cleans up, dresses up, and cooks a ham steak for her family, all thanks to the all-electric, all-American kitchen.