Mom and Dad - Production

Production

Despite the commercially successful run of Babb's debut film, Dust to Dust—a reworked version of the 1938 film Child Bride—his production company Cox and Underwood disbanded, forcing him to form his own unit, Hygienic Productions. Having attended a meeting in Burkburnett, Texas, that discussed the alleged impregnations of young women by G.I.s from nearby Sheppard Air Force Base, Babb was inspired to shoot a film based on the subject. His future wife Mildred Horn drafted a screenplay which later evolved into Mom and Dad. Babb located 20 investors willing to fund the movie, and hired William Beaudine as director.

Production of the film cost Babb and his investors a total of $63,000. The movie was shot in five separate studios over six days in 1944, and was spread across various Monogram Pictures lots; co-producer J. S. Jossey was a Monogram stockholder. On January 3, 1945, Mom and Dad premiered at the Warner Bros. theatre in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

The plot is padded with a large amount of filler. Films of this type were usually produced quickly and at minimal cost, and while filler was sometimes used to increase the production value, the usual motivation was to extend its running time to qualify for feature length status. Eric Schaefer notes that the "primary purpose" of the plot of Mom and Dad was to "serve as the vehicle onto which the spectacle of the clinical reels can be grafted", such as the live birth scene. The marketing materials suggest the latter reason also, and many posters for the film promised that "You actually SEE the birth of a baby!" The dialogue is carefully worded, and uses period euphemisms rather than explicit terms that may have been controversial at the time. In particular, at no time does the film specifically mention sexual intercourse or pregnancy.