Here's the TCM premiere of four movies starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, the most popular comedy team in the movies of the 1940s and early '50s, before they were overtaken by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Abbott was the tall, caustic straight man; Costello the roly-poly, childlike cutup who constantly got the pair into hot water. Their highly verbal comedy had made the two hugely popular on the radio before they entered films.

Their first top-billed movie was Universal's Buck Privates (1941), in which they accidentally enlist in the Army and perform some of their best-remembered skits, including "The Dice Game" and "The Drill Routine." That patriotic movie was a huge success that put the pair at the top of the comedy heap, where they remained for the first half of the 1940s.

Just as their popularity was fading, they found fresh success by mixing humor and horror in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Costello, hilarious when projecting abject terror, could react not only to Glenn Strange as the Frankenstein monster but Bela Lugosi as Dracula and Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Wolf Man. The formula of laughs and chills was repeated in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) and Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). The duo also starred in other genre parodies such as Mexican Hayride (1948), which spoofs bullfights and South of the Border customs, Africa Screams (1949), a satire of jungle safari films and (the TCM debut of) Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950), a comic takeoff on Beau Geste and other desert adventures.

by Roger Fristoe