Here Come the Co-Eds

Here Come The Co-Eds is a 1945 film starring the comedy team of Abbott and Costello.

Plot

Three friends, Oliver Quackenbush (Lou Costello), Molly McCarthy (Martha O'Driscoll), and her brother Slats (Bud Abbott) work for the Miramar Ballroom as taxi dancers. Slats plants a phony article in the local newspaper that declares Molly's ambition to raise money to attend Bixby College. The dean of Bixby (Donald Cook) reads the article and offers her a scholarship. She agrees, but only if her two friends can accompany her, so they are hired as caretakers.

Meanwhile, Chairman Kirkland (Charles Dingle), whose daughter Diane (June Vincent) also attends Bixby, holds the mortgage on the college and he threatens to foreclose if the dean continues to ignore traditions and does not expel Molly. Slats and Oliver run into some problems of their own as they continue to fail at every task assigned to them by their supervisor, Mr. Johnson (Lon Chaney, Jr.).

Slats and Oliver devise a plan to raise $20,000 to save the school by having Oliver wrestle the Masked Marvel. However, just before the match the Masked Marvel becomes ill and is replaced in the ring by Mr. Johnson. Despite this wrinkle, Oliver wins the match and Slats takes the $1,000 winnings and bets it on the Bixby basketball game, at 20-to-1 odds. Unfortunately the bookie is not pleased with the prospect of losing the bet, so he hires a professional team to play in place of Bixby's opponent. Oliver dresses in drag to join the Bixby team, and halfway in the game he receives a bump on the head and believes he is Daisy Dimple, "the world's greatest woman basketball player" as Oliver described her. The Bixby team starts to win again, but Oliver suffers another bump on the head and regains his memory, and ends up losing the game for Bixby, causing everybody (including Slats) to hate him for that. To make up for it, he steals the bookie's money and after a crosstown chase (in a sailboat on a trailer), they manage to arrive in time to pay the mortgage and save the school.

Production

• It was filmed from October 24 through December 6, 1944.

• North Hollywood Park was the filming location of Bixby college, while the school's main building was a Universal backlot "Shelby" home (Colonial Mansion 1927) that was also used in another Abbott and Costello film, The Time of Their Lives.

• Lou Costello was a real-life basketball star in high school, and performed many of the trick shots himself, without special effects.

Rerelease

This film was re-released in 1950.

Routines

• This film includes the "Oyster" routine, where Costello attempts to eat a bowl of soup containing an oyster that spits the soup back at him whenever he tries to take a sip. (The routine was used in another Abbott and Costello film, The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap. That film used a frog instead of an oyster).
• Another routine, previously used in One Night in the Tropics, is "Jonah and the Whale". In this routine, Costello attempts to tell a joke that he claims to have written himself, but Abbott informs everyone of the punchline.

DVD release

This film has been released twice on DVD. The first time, on The Best of Abbott and Costello Volume Two, on May 4, 2004, and again on October 28, 2008 as part of Abbott and Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection.

External links

• Here Come the Co-Eds at the Internet Movie Database