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http://tvwheniwasborn.blogspot.com/2014/02/wagon-train.html

“Radio and recording comedian turned TV advertising genius Stan Freberg once told a hilarious story about the TV commercial that may have been his masterwork. Singer and dancer Ann Miller would headline a team of chorus girls in a 1930s-type number for Heinz Great American Soups, and it would be directed like a Busby Berkley-type revue from that era...by the then-retired Busby Berkley himself.

The commercial was expensive enough—it had a kitchen that broke away to reveal a large stage, and a giant can of soup that came out of the floor while Miller danced on top of it—but still, they could only afford 20 dancers. And Berkley was used to directing huge revues, with as many as 100 and counting. So when he arrived for work, Freberg and his people broke it to him that he wouldn’t quite have a hundred dancers. The great showman responded, “Eh, don’t worry, I can even make 50 girls look like a hundred!”