As the director of the largest toy manufacturer in the world, "Mother" (Julie Newmar) is always looking for new products which will excite children. So when she happens to see an imaginative man by the name of "Clyde King" (Wally Cox) making simple gadgets which impress her target audience even more than those made by her company she decides to hire him at all costs. To do that she turns to her subordinate "Lyle 'Skippy' Burns" (Victor Bruno) who has discovered his primary weakness-attractive women. So he hires several beautiful women to try to get him to sign a contract by seducing him. What none of them know is that, although Clyde is very attracted to women, he is very inexperienced and as a result he prefers to just follow them around-and nothing else. Needless to say, this leaves both Mother and Lyle quite frustrated. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this film had a number of things going for it with the presence of Julie Newmar being a definite asset as she always adds a certain level of beauty and charm to whatever role she accepts. Likewise, having several attractive women like Claire Kelly (as "Miss Boota"), Angelique Pettyjohn ("Miss Honeysuckle") and Thordis Brandt ("Debra Sur") certainly didn't hurt the scenery in any way either. Unfortunately, rather than rely more heavily upon these positive factors the director (Don Joslyn) chose to center the film around both Wally Cox and Victor Bruno. This turned out to be a bad decision on both counts as neither were capable of carrying the brunt of this film in any meaningful manner. As a result, rather than a witty and spry comedy everything became rather dull, slow-moving and redundant. In short, although this film certainly had potential, it wasn't achieved and for that reason I have rated it accordingly. Below average.
2 Reviews
Catwoman And King Tut Meet Underdog!
Mvpkinger19 June 2014
Warning: Spoilers
Take the Monkees' movie "Head" (1968), "The Love God?" (1969) with Don Knotts, and Russ Meyer's "Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls" (1970), and put them in a blender. The resulting concoction would resemble "Up Your Teddy Bear" (a/k/a/ "The Seduction Of A Nerd.") Wally Cox stars as Clyde King, a toy designer who lives in a house filled with toys. He also likes to follow beautiful women as they're walking down the street. Mother (Julie Newmar) desperately wants him to work for her toy company. Her morbidly obese son Lyle "Skippy" Ferns (Victor Buono) gets the brilliant idea of having beautiful women seduce Clyde, which would persuade him to go to work for the Mother Knows Best Toy Company. Because Clyde has a Mother fixation, he can't bring himself to work for her company, no matter how beautiful the women tempting him are, including Angelique Pettyjohn. The groovy music for this movie was supplied by the legendary Quincy Jones. Wally Cox's dancing scene at a nightclub was hilarious. The scenes in which Wally was singing were painful to listen to. Victor Buono's scene where he attempts to get into a small compact car was painfully unfunny. Victor's scene where he dressed up in drag as a hooker was strangely reminiscent of Divine in "Pink Flamingos" (1972), and was one of the highlights of this film. Julie Newmar, who didn't appear in the movie nearly enough to satisfy me, was stunningly beautiful. In one of the bonus features, Julie is interviewed, around 35 years after the movie was made. She has high praise for the film and her fellow actors. Not surprisingly, she still looks beautiful!
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