A glamorous film star rebels against the studio, her pushy press agent and a family of hangers-on.

Famous actress Norma Shearer's jewels are stolen… (Star-packed promotional short film intended to raise funds for the National Variety Artists Tuberculosis Sanatorium.)

The story of the short film from the beginning of the movies in the 1890s, when all movies were shorts, through the 1950s when short subjects virtually disappeared from theaters.

Steve Allen hosts this collection of clips of some of the greatest comedy teams in movie and television history, including Our Gang, Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Brothers, Burns and Allen, The Three Stooges, The East-Side Kids, Abbott and Costello, and Martin and Lewis.

The gang trades places with a group of orphans about to take a train ride.

The schoolchildren lost their last teacher because she got married and quit her job. When the brother of their teacher Miss Crabtree comes to visit, the children mistake him for a suitor. The children tell abominable lies about Miss Crabtree to try to discourage the man. Meanwhile, one of the children is selling answers to the upcoming oral exam. Unfortunately for the students, the young entrepreneur used a book of minstrelsy and blackface as his source for the "answers".

The kids' adopted grandma decides to sell her store, but can't decide whom to sell it to. The kids try to help her out.

Stymie takes Dickie for a ride in his runaway car and cures his stiff neck.

While the rest of the gang goes fishing, Spanky gets stuck babysitting.

The gang finds what they think is a magic lamp.

Jackie prepares a series of elaborate jokes for his new teacher.

A truant officer spots the kids in an amusement park. They try to escape him.

Part of a gold shipment has been stolen and the Sergeant suspects Louis LeBey. When Louis is attracted to newly arrived Nedra Ruskin, Woolie-Woolie becomes jealous and tells the Sergeant where Louis hid the gold. First Louis rescues the Sergeant whose dog team crashes chasing him and then he saves Nedra from an avalanche. When he returns the injured Nedra to the settlement, the Sergeant takes him prisoner.

While staging a play, Spanky finds his father's hiding place for the family "fortune."

The kids help capture a family of thieves.

Wheezer pretends to be sick in order to get his parents to stop fighting.

Mickey overhears the gang rehearsing a play and thinks it's real.

Wheezer and Dorothy are forced to live with her evil stepmother and her brat son.

Miss Crabtree, the teacher Jackie has a crush on, rents a room at Jackie's house.

The gang goes to a circus sideshow to visit Dickie, Dorothy, and Spanky's uncle, mistakenly believing he is "The Wild Man from Borneo."