Simply Hilarious / The Best of Three Stooges Cartoons (USA, 1936-1966) CAST: Moe Howard, Curly Howard, Shemp Howard, Larry Fine, Joe De Rita. (Columbia/Normandy)
I loved the Stooges as a kid but the canon is a single blob in distant memory, so if these weren’t first viewings they might as well have been. These two tapes were all that was left of a cheapie box set when I found them in the community book box. The four titles on the first tape are – surprise – their four titles in the public domain: one Curly and three Shemps. The Shemps are all very fun. Brideless Groom (Edward Bernds, 1947) is an energetic Seven Chances rip with unusually spirited female support. Malice in the Palace (Jules White, 1949) overruns an Orientalist stock scenario with an extended gag on eating household pets, and the joke’s on our heroes. Beyond the seemingly inevitable swarthfacing, “Spinach chin” is as close as it gets to racism, and the twist where the Ali Baba types are all crybabies is actually kind of cute. In Sing a Song of Six Pants (Jules White, 1947) they steal a bankroll from some escaped gangster. There’s a wild fight scene to close but a surplus of plot girdles the chaos somewhat. The same can not be said for Disorder in the Court (Preston Black, 1936), the Curly feature and the one true classic here, split about evenly between hyperextended riffs on every tiny stock aspect of courtroom cinema and utter cascading nonsense that abandons the premise entirely. It all holds up.
The second tape is a selection of just the animated sequences from their 1965-66 The New 3 Stooges TV series, directed by Edward Bernds with cartoons provided by Cambria Studios and voiced by Moe, Larry and the dreaded Joe DeRita. Animation quality is fair, Deputy Dawg territory let’s say. At under four minutes each, the plots are strict workplace-and-nemesis formula – park rangers vs termite, cheesemakers vs mouse, Hollywood extras vs lax safety protocols – and while they’re not original they’re not boring either. Phobia of Concerned Parents limits the violence to one measly bop on Curly Joe’s head per episode, which is a drag; but the dialogue, scenarios and insults retain an undeniable Stoogeism. With Larry left marble-mouthed by the team’s latest medical tragedy, Curly Joe gets more and better lines than him, and he’s surprisingly OK. The one I’ll remember though is where they work at a service station and when the bad guy gets taken to jail Moe says “Now there’s one station where he’ll get a lot of service!” and Larry and Curly Joe go heh-heh-heh-heh for a really uncomfortable length of time.
In summary…fuck Extended Play VHS! Future titles at this level of image degradation/scan-flipping will not merit a review.
JC Culp
JC Culp is a collage filmmaker and the founder of Unpopular Arts, which provides media production, preservation and presentation.