text: Art Fern was the "Tea Time Movie" announcer, whose theme song was "Hooray for Hollywood". Carson once admitted on camera that this was his favorite character, based on late-afternoon and evening TV movie hosts who would deliver commercials throughout the movie. Each sketch usually featured three long commercials interrupted by four-second clips from old silent films. When the camera returned from each clip, Art was always caught off-guard and immediately reminded viewers that they were watching a film favorite. The movies always had unlikely casts and even less likely titles: "Slim Pickens, Patti Page, 'Duke' John Wayne, and Charlton Heston in another classic Western: 'Kiss My Saddle Horn'!" Carson originally played the fast-talking huckster in his own voice (as Honest Bernie Schlock or Ralph Willie), and finally settled on a nasal, high-pitched, smarmy drone, reminiscent of Jackie Gleason's "Reginald Van Gleason III" character, known as Art Fern, wearing a lavish toupee, loud jackets, and a pencil mustache. Actress Carol Wayne became famous for her 100-plus appearances (1971–1984) as Art's buxom assistant, the Matinée Lady. While Art gave his spiel, she would enter the stage behind him. Art would react to her attractive body by wincing, loudly shouting "Ho — leeeee!" and turning almost everything she said into a sexual double entendre. After Carol Wayne's accidental death in 1985, Carson kept Art Fern off the air for most of the next year, and finally hired Danuta Wesley and then Teresa Ganzel to play the Matinée Lady. Carson also used these sketches to poke fun at the intricate Los Angeles interstate system, using a pointer and map to give confusing directions to shoppers, often including points where he would unfold the cardboard map to point out, via the appropriate picture, when the shopper would arrive at "the fork in the road". Another freeway routine in the same theme centered on the "Slauson Cutoff", a slang term Carson popularized to describe the truncated Marina Freeway (which ended abruptly at Slauson Avenue in Culver City). Art Fern would advise drivers to take a series of freeways until they reached the Slauson Cutoff, and would then advise them to "Get out of your car, cut off your slauson, get back in your car," often followed by peals of laughter from the audience, led by McMahon.