Television has subtly sullied the reputation of Bob Hope. To post-Boomers, Hope calls to mind fusty holiday specials, padded out with bland musical numbers and the star's stingless, marginally topical one-liners (delivered with a nonchalance that drifted too frequently into indifference). But during his string of Paramount movie hits in the '40s, Hope displayed exquisite poise, a sense of timing that earned him the nickname "Rapid Robert," and a yen for self-reference that Woody Allen acknowledges as the inspiration for his early spoofs. Universal has been issuing Hope's Paramount output on DVD as The Bob Hope Collection, and though the Hope/Bing Crosby "road picture" box set and the extras-laden editions of his classic comedies The Paleface and The Ghost Breakers are the prizes of the series, the greatest value may lie in two Hope double features: one pairing The Big Broadcast Of 1938 with the same year's College Swing, and the other grouping 1942's My Favorite Blonde with Star Spangled Rhythm. Only My Favorite Blonde is a proper Hope feature, with the comedian as a vaudevillian penguin trainer who gets shanghaied into a round of espionage-busting by the slippery Madeleine Carroll. Hard-to-follow action and a silly, inconsistent tone work against the film, but Hope's reluctant can-do attitude and wry comments keep the energy level up. The rest of the programming on the two-for-ones comes from Paramount's radio-inspired variety pictures, with Hope as a featured player alongside the likes of Martha Raye, W.C. Fields, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Edward Everett Horton, and Jack Benny, as well as some of the studio's dimmer comedic and musical lights. Star Spangled Rhythm holds together best, given its tenuous but amusing through-plot about sailors on leave, touring the Paramount lot and meeting Hope, Benny, Crosby, Preston Sturges, Cecil B. DeMille, Fred MacMurray, and others. College Swing relies too heavily on Gracie Allen's stupefying density as the newly appointed Dean Of Men at a prestigious university, but the pale swing music generates unintentional laughs, and Hope and Allen have a classic setpiece at the climax, as he tries to transmit test answers to her via radio earphones. The highlights of The Big Broadcast Of 1938 divide evenly between Hope and Fields, with the latter coasting a little as an accident-prone tycoon aboard a luxury liner, while still mumbling priceless ad-libs. But Hope steals the picture as he and an ex-wife played by Shirley Ross serenade each other with "Thanks For The Memory," the song that would become his trademark. Typical of Hope, his post-film conversion of the song into a fanfare does a disservice to its real power. Leo Robin's original lyrics tell a suggestive tale of consuming passion undone by passing time and a clash of wills, and in Big Broadcast, Hope holds up his end of the duet with a dewy twinkle and a smile of regret. That's what made him a star.