Freddie Becomes a Star-Gazer – The Red Skelton Show season 2, originally aired May 31, 1953
Freddie Becomes a Star-Gazer – Red pantomimes people leaving for work, Freddie uses a telescope for larceny, Willie Lump Lump tries to go home.
Red opens the program with some street scenes of how different people go to work in the morning, such as the energetic type, the tired kind, and a man who just can’t leave his lady without loads of hugs and kisses. Not necessarily his wife, mind you …
Freddie Becomes a Star-Gazer
It begins with a dance number by the Moultrie Brothers, portraying shoeshine boys, and doing an excellent, energetic dance. They’re eventually joined by Freddie the Freeloader, who does a very good dance routine himself. Freddie has “borrowed” a telescope from the observatory and is selling a gaze at the moon for ten cents. While his customers are staring through the telescope, Freddie steals their wallets. But one of the victims catches Freddie because he turns out to be Fingers Malone, the President of Pickpockets, Inc! As usual, a Tide commercial is integrated into the sketch. And Freddie and Fingers have a pickpocketing competition. Fingers takes Freddie’s suspenders! And after he’s gone, Freddie demonstrates that he’s stolen Fingers’ woolen underwear!
Willie Lump Lump
The second Skelton Scrapbook, untitled, features Willie Lump Lump returning home at 3:00 a.m. in the back of a milk wagon and trying to get into his house without his key, which he forgot. It’s a very funny skit, that Red recreated years later with Pat Carrol in The Pied-Eyed Piper.
Cast of characters
- Red Skelton … Self – Host / Freddie the Freeloader / Willie Lump Lump
- Peter Brocco (Our Man Flint) … Fingers Malone
- David Rose and His Orchestra … Themselves
- Sandra Gould (The Ghost and Mr. Chicken) … Mrs. Lump Lump
- Sid Kane (Invasion of the Star Creatures) … Astronaut-Star
- Lucille Knoch (Executive Suite) … Blonde Woman Outside Apartment Bldg
- Bob LeMond … Announcer
- Eddie Marr (I Was a Teenage Werewolf) … Milkman
- The Moultrie Brothers … Themselves – Dancers
- Gil Perkins (I Died a Thousand Times) … Police Officer
- Buddy Piper … FBI Agent
- Almira Sessions (Blondie for Victory) … Woman Watching Dancers-Star
- Bob Warren … Sketch Player