Toodles gets taken over Michael's knee for a good spanking, with a couple of extra whacks thrown in by the other guy.
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I'm sure everyone caught the gratuitous "Cabin 69" reference, especially since we made a big deal about it in the video clip.
How can we be sure it's gratuitous? Well, technically we can't, but 69 cabins would be a lot
for a kids' music camp, don't you think? It's not a U.S. Army camp, after all. You'd
have at least 68 possible other numbers to write into the script, meaning the probability of this being completely innocent
is at most 1/69 or about 1.4%, and so we choose the believe the worst.
Why make a big deal about it? Well, it's not that we're offended by something so juvenile - there's a lot of more offensive
things than that going on in this world right now, and for that matter also in 1941 when a little tea party called
World War II was just starting to roll - so our real interest lies in questioning whether a proclivity for sexual
innuendo might also be conducive to including a spicy spanking scene in the script as well. Not that this one is all that spicy,
as we'll see. As for our question, we can only speculate. Now let's get on with the spanking.
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The spanking itself is just so-so, partly because although Toodles is stubborn, she's not quite aggressivly
bratty enough. You know what we mean - once a brat tried to provoke us by banging our kitchen cabinet doors,
which succeeded in earning her a trip over our knee - and absent that, you can't help feeling a little sorry for her,
as if she were the victim of bullying rather than the recipient of well-earned chastisement. It's a small point, but we
think it's valid. On the other hand, it is a nice long scene with plenty of whacks being delivered, and it's
unintentionally public as well since unknown to Michael, the sound is being broadcast throughout the camp. (Did the
behavior of the other girls improve after that, we wonder?) Another good thing is that Toodles' attitude does indeed
get adjusted, and as we see her trying on the dress Michael says, with some satisfaction, "Now we're getting somewhere!"
Indeed, once again spanking saves the day! 
By the way, we've seen Susanna Foster once before, when she got bent over a ping-pong table for a paddling from
Donald O'Connor in This is the Life (1944, three years after There's Magic in Music). Did someone
in the casting department remember her portrayal of a struggling spankee in the earlier film? (A
nice still picture may be found here; we see now that we never posted a video clip for some reason, and we really should.)
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. The plot seems to involve Jones trying to run a music camp for
young students, one of whom is a reluctant Susanna Foster. The film seems to be fairly typical of B-movie
musicals of this era. Before we get to the spanking, however, we happened to notice that someone had slipped in a bit
of sexual innuendo past the Hayes Office and the Motion Picture Production Code. It involves the number "69,"
a well-known sexual graffito, which when it appears is rarely innocent. (Al Capp did the same
thing with the comic strip Li'l Abner, familiar to all of us here at CSR, taking a real and foolish risk because had
the syndicate caught on they would have been most unhappy).
