TV Comedies - Lost TV Comedy (Little Amy / Daddy-O / Time Out For Ginger / Dennis Day Show) (DVD)

The family sit-com receives a riotous send-up in these four, long-unseen TV comedy gems from the past. June and Ward Cleaver wouldn't know what to make of these hilarious households of jinxed children, delirious grandparents, manipulative tomboys and neurotic celebrity fathers.

DADDY-O: TV executives must have panicked when they saw this never-aired 1961 pilot whose sarcastic views of TV sit-coms was decades ahead of its time. Don DeFore plays "reluctant television actor" Ben Cousins, star of a highly-rated TV series whose skirt-chasing producer is addicted to overblown laugh tracks.

THE DENNIS DAY SHOW: The Irish tenor and Jack Benny sidekick delighted audiences from 1952 to 1954 with his half-hour NBC variety show co-starring Cliff Arquette as Charley Weaver. In this blarney-filled episode, the singer's granddad encounters a leprechaun (Billy Barty) who makes the entire world sing exactly like Dennis Day!

LITTLE AMY: It's 1962 suburbia and precocious Amy has convinced herself that accident-prone neighbor Arthur is future marriage material. Alas, the boy is too busy making a fool out of himself on the football field to take much notice, so Amy hatches several disastrous schemes to help him succeed. A young Jack Nicholson appears in a brief cameo as an assistant football coach!

TIME OUT FOR GINGER: She's just an angel in jeans in her terrible teens! That's Virginia "Ginger" Carol (Candy Moore), the feisty, boisterous, unstoppable teenage girl based on Ronald Alexander's hit 1953 Broadway play of the same name. Desperate to find a car for her sister's big date, Ginger considers buying her a new one! Margaret Hamilton joins in the fun as Lizzie the housekeeper.

• television