Lassie - Episode

Timmy enters the local newspaper's "Why I Love My Pet" contest, then gives Lassie the entry to give to the mailman. However, Lassie gets waylaid helping the neighbors and fails to get the entry to the postman for it to be delivered on time.
TRIVIA: The 1950s and 1960s are often coined "The Contest Era" when media "contests"exploded onto the public. Corporate brands, newspapers, magazines, automobile manufacturers, and TV/Radio stations - all organizing prizes and payouts for contests designed to ultimately advertise, sell, and promote to a wider audience. The majority of contests involved writing jingles or essays, cooking, outdoor activities, or social themes, tapping the creativity of the general public to generate ideas that could be used by the corporate sponsor. A payout was offered for the "winner" and sometimes runner-ups, of the contest. The winning ideas then becomes the sole legal property of the contest holder who promoted the idea sometimes with a mention to, and often a smiling photo of, the creative author of the idea, but most often not. Contests began to take a back seat when the TV sweepstakes and game shows offering big money took hold, but after the debacle of cheating and "fixing" scandles rocked the TV corporate world's boat a number of years later, the lowly contest, caught up in the aftermath, pretty much died a quiet death. However, the enduring concept of winning something, either big or small, has never lost its appeal, and the contest has once again resurfaced, returning in this decade as "crowd sourcing", and thus proving you can never keep a good idea down.