For Paramount Pictures in the 1940s, it was an opportunity that seems like a no-brainer in hindsight. The studio had two contract players of enormous popularity in the broadcast medium, who had already established an obvious on-stage rapport with each other on their respective programs, and were clearly poised to become a popular comedic screen duo. Armed with their radio gag writers to bolster the screenplays, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby hit the "Road" with a string of popular comic adventures laden with outrageous sight gags, in-jokes, and humorous asides to the audience, to say nothing of the presence of the alluring Dorothy Lamour (usually cast as South Sea sirens). The fourth entry in the series, Road to Utopia (1946), takes full advantage of each of these winning elements and is still considered one of the best entries in the series. The Oscar®-nominated script, courtesy of longtime Hope scribes Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, opens with the three principals in age makeup, as the wealthy Chester Hooton (Hope) and his wife Sal (Lamour) are idling in their mansion, wistfully dwelling on how they gained a fortune and lost their best friend. At that moment, the long-thought-dead Duke Johnson (Crosby) arrives on their doorstep, and the narrative segues to Gold Rush-era San Francisco, where Duke and Chester were unsuccessfully plying their trades as song-and-dance men and bunco artists. In dodging the cops, they wind up on a steamship bound for the Yukon. The balance of the tale involves the expected romantic rivalry, a raucous race to the claim with the heavies, and an ending that somehow got past the censors of the day.