Having slept past Easter, the Easter bunny tries to distribute his eggs on Mother's Day, the Fourth of July, and Halloween, but no one is interested until finally Santa Claus is able to get him back on track.

In 1939, fifty million Americans went to the movies every week, Louis B. Mayer was the highest-paid man in the country, and Hollywood produced 530 feature films a year. One decade and five thousand movies later, the studios were faltering. The 1940s became the decade of Hollywood's decline: anticommunist hysteria excommunicated some of its best talent, while a 1948 antitrust consent decree ended many of the business practices that had made the studio...