Remember Candy Candido? He’s the comic singer I thought I’d never heard perform before last month who it turns out I’d known all my life, in everything from The Wizard of Oz and Sleeping Beauty to the ’60s TV series Gentle Ben, where he provided the voice of … the bear.

I fell in love with the guy, and immediately tried to track down everything about him I could, which in addition to the videos I’d shared earlier led me to a 1988 radio interview and something far more mysterious—a reference to a TV pilot unmentioned by either IMDb or Wikipedia.

A man named Ray Fiola, whose company Chelsea Rialto Studios restores classic film soundtracks, mentioned on a bulletin board that he owned “a very rare 16mm print of a Hal Roach TV pilot, BOTSFORDS BEANERY, in which he co-starred with Don Barclay.” How rare is info about this pilot? So rare that the only reference I could find anywhere online was in 1949 and 1952 issues of Billboard, as well as Hal Roach’s 1992 obituary in the L.A. Times—none of which mentioned Candido. No wonder the project wasn’t turning up on any Candido-related pages!

Apparently, as the market for film shorts was dying, Hal Roach, famous for his Our Gang and Laurel and Hardy films, decided to enter the TV market, and so filmed six TV pilots, of which Botsfords Beanery was one. As far as I can tell, though some local stations aired some of these as one-offs, none of them ever made it to series.

I immediately contacted Fiola and begged him for a copy. But he did better than that—he posted the entire pilot to YouTube, so now you get a chance to see it, too.

The star of the pilot is Don Barclay (perhaps best known to modern audiences as Mr. Binnacle in Mary Poppins), playing restaurant owner Montgomery Botsford, with Ann Triola (best known for her comedy numbers in Lullaby of Broadway) as Agnes his wise-cracking waitress. Candido, who gets third billing, is the proprietor of Joe’s Barber Shop, with broad strokes reminding me of another TV Italian from that era, Joe Kirk as Mr. Bacciagalupe from The Abbott and Costello Show. (more…)