Desi Arnaz and His Orchestra -Jitterumba

A longish (15-minute+) video that will give Desi Arnaz fans (of which I'm one) a pretty good taste of what his nightclub act was like before the I Love Lucy days. Desi gets in a dig at his old boss, Xavier Cugat, while introducing the beauteous Dulcina, who flies out onto the stage into a wild rumba and I kept expecting that crazy red-head who always wanted to break into show business to show up instead.

The short from Castle Films was originally released in 1947 as Jitterumba and then re-released in 1949 for the home 16mm film market in 1949 as Melody Masters #5. Apparently nobody at Castle could be bothered to correct the misspelling of Arnaz's name over the intervening two years. But, as Mark Evanier reports, Arnaz himself once let an entire season of Lucy go by with his name misspelled in the credits.

Full info on the short can be found here.