Maybe I will add nothing new here on this forum but let's get started:
- where did Hanlon take this Ice cream guy uniform from?
- I wonder why did Hanlon clean this shoe prints on the first place? they would disappear after 5 minutes in this sun
- Mr Rizzo's english is quite hard to understand :)
- "strange way to make a funeral arrangements" <--- good line
- Columbo is quite straight with Mr Dobbs. It is quite unusual for him
- next english language question. Why Eve Babcock says "don't be so Cincinnati". I get the meaning of this but why Cincinnati?
- actor who plays the travel agent is the same actor who plays also the travel agent in "Lovely but lethal". Coincidence? the same guy played in another episode, some guy from the police staff. I guess it was Double Exposure
It's interesting that you mention Dobbs, because that first scene with him seems like one of the few times Columbo is very open about his "Columbo act" (as it's called). Because he tells Dobbs he'll stop annoying him with the small talk if he cooperates with him.
It's funny that Richard Stahl plays two people from travel agencies, since something like that happened to him on THE ODD COUPLE. Almost every time there was a wedding scene on that show, he played the clergyman.
Hanlon definitely screwed the pooch by not finding out ahead of time that there's no route for the Ding-A-Ling ice cream company to go into that neighborhood. As far as the footprints are concerned and washing them off, if he did leave them a good forensic team would have been able to know that someone else was there. You have to realize that this guy just committed a murder. His brain is not functioning 100%