Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

How many Stooges are too many Stooges?

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • How many Stooges are too many Stooges?

    I'm rebuilding my Three Stooges collection from scratch, and have purchased a number of items. First and foremost is "The Ultimate Collection," which has all of the official Columbia shorts plus two features and some solo shorts. Really that ought to be enough for anyone. But I also ordered:

    SOUP TO NUTS, their first feature before Shemp bugged out for a solo career.

    "Classic Shorts From the Dream Factory," some god-awful two-strip Technicolor shorts with Ted Healy.

    GOLD RAIDERS/MEET THE BARON--really just wanted to see MEET THE BARON. ZaSu Pitts, FFS.

    A Blu-ray triple feature with TIME OUT FOR RHYTHM and (unfortunately) the two movies that are also in the "Ultimate Collection."

    I feel like that might be enough for me. Mildly tempted by the Shemp Vitaphone shorts. Even more mildly tempted by the later movies with "Curly Joe," but I remember them being absolute ass. Anyone want to put in a kind word for something I might have overlooked, or just talk about Stooges in general?
    Marshall Crist
    Senior Member
    Last edited by Marshall Crist; 06-04-2020, 05:17 AM.

  • #2
    My experience with the Three Stooges is limited to hungover/wake and bake Sunday mornings when they would play 2 hours of shorts on one of the classic TV channels. I admire your endeavour!

    Comment


    • #3
      I have both of the cheap three movie Blu Ray sets. There are a couple of their shorts in 3D included on The Mad Magician Blu Ray, although my main tv doesn't handle 3D anymore so I just watched them flat.

      These are fun if I'm in the right mood, but I don't feel the need to explore the entire catalogue.
      I'm bitter, I'm twisted, James Joyce is fucking my sister.

      Comment


      • #4
        My son was big into them when he was younger and has a bunch of the DVDs.
        Ŗǭƈḱ!Ꞩẖȫçꞣ!Ƥӧꝕ!

        Comment


        • #5
          Shemp is underrated.
          "Ah! By god's balls what licentiousness!"

          Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom.

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by agent999 View Post
            I have both of the cheap three movie Blu Ray sets. There are a couple of their shorts in 3D included on The Mad Magician Blu Ray, although my main tv doesn't handle 3D anymore so I just watched them flat.

            These are fun if I'm in the right mood, but I don't feel the need to explore the entire catalogue.
            Thanks for reminding me where those two 3D shorts landed. I had the anaglyph versions before and there was a lot of room for improvement. Ordered.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by Alex K. View Post
              Shemp is underrated.
              I broke down and ordered Shemp Vol. 2. If I love it, I'll go back and get Vol. 1, which seems like it's mostly Fatty Arbuckle.

              Comment


              • #8
                MEET THE BARON is their best feature length film, IMO although that's not saying much. It's much much more of a Jimmy Dutrante movie but a fun movie in the vein of the collegiate humor movies from around the time if that's your thing.

                GOLD RAIDERS is a bit of chore but is still heads and shoulders over the later features with that impostor Stooge Curly Joe DeRita.

                The Shemp solo shorts are really fun and worth checking out!

                As big of a Stooge fan as I am I only ended up getting the first three sets put out by Sony along with the BARON/RAIDERS double feature before I reached a saturation point, although I always intended to go back and pick up the rest of the SHEMP shorts but I never got around to it. Time and money and interest in other things and all that.

                I watched them endlessly when I was a kid and had a wealth of VHS tapes filled with hours and hours of Stooge shorts from whenever they played. The first two dvd sets by Sony were a revelation! In my experience some of the earliest shorts didn't play on TV all that much. The first one with Larry being married was completely new to me as were a few others. I think those earliest shorts are their best, they play like mini movies compared to the later ones that are more or less just a string of gags. I also like all the singing in the early shorts something I didn't think I would like.

                As much as I like Shemp they already started showing their age by that time he re-joined and scripts and gags were already starting to get recycled. It can get a little tedious if you watched a bunch of them in a row. Obviously everyone's mileage may vary.
                "When I die, I hope to go to Accra"

                Comment


                • #9
                  The two shorts on the MAD MAGICIAN blu-ray are a lot of fun. My two young sons particularly love "Spooks", the haunted house short.

                  I bought the Columbia Shorts collections as they were released, and the 190 shorts they made for Columbia would really comprise the "must have" part of any collection, I would think. As a result, I never got "The Ultimate Collection" since I already had the vast majority of that material, although I know it included some cool bonus stuff. It would be nice if they released that on Blu-ray.

                  Somehow, those Vitaphone Shorts collections with Shemp escaped my notice. Looks like I'll have to get those in the near future. (Are there any solo Shemp shorts in the box set that you got, or is it all Besser and DeRita solo shorts?)

                  Like you, I have the GOLD RAIDERS/MEET THE BARON double feature DVD, which is good. I also bought several of the "Columbia Pictures Presents" DVDs of their late-era feature films, with Curly Joe. THREE STOOGES MEET HERCULES and THREE STOOGES IN ORBIT are longtime guilty pleasures of mine, and feature some decent laughs. THE OUTLAWS IS COMING is so-so, but worth having (to me). I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I don't think I've even watched ...GO AROUND THE WORLD IN A DAZE, despite owning it for more than a decade! I also have SNOW WHITE AND THE THREE STOOGES, which isn't necessarily "good", but is bizarre enough to be worth owning (A musical? On ice? In color and Cinemascope? OK, I can't resist!). I also have an old (likely OOP) DVD from Anchor Bay, which had a hodge-podge of material, some of it pretty cool for the dedicated "Stoogephile".

                  Feel free to share some of your reviews on the DVDs you've purchased, after you've watched them.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    I loved them when I was growing up, watched damn near every day - even into high school when the shorts would run early in the morning before school. I have intermittently watched them over the years but never felt the need to buy discs. I guess I had seen them so often I was already getting a little burnt out. Curly is of course awesome but I like Shemp a lot too. Always dug seeing him in stuff like THE BANK DICK as well.
                    I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Good to see that people's children are enjoying these. When I was growing up the BBC would regularly show Laurel and Hardy shorts, Silent comedies, Buck Rogers serials, classic Sci-fi movies, Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry etc. No UK stations would touch this stuff nowadays, it's great that people are passing this stuff on whilst the broadcasters are just letting it rot.
                      I'm bitter, I'm twisted, James Joyce is fucking my sister.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by agent999 View Post
                        Good to see that people's children are enjoying these. When I was growing up the BBC would regularly show Laurel and Hardy shorts,
                        Don't forget Harold Lloyd on a Saturday(?) morning.

                        The BBC and Channel 4 used to have interesting programming, especially Channel 4's commitment to screening world cinema. Even ITV upped their game from time to time (with late night screenings of Spaghetti Westerns, etc). Now UK telly on the mainstream channels is wall-to-wall shiny floor nonsense, DIY and dating programmes. God help us.

                        When I was at school, one of our science teachers - I think he was actually a retired agency/substitute teacher who we had quite regularly - discovered that quite a few of us kids used to watch the Three Stooges shorts that were regularly screened on Channel 4, and I remember many a science lesson devolving into recollections of the best bits of the last Three Stooges programme we'd watched.
                        'You know, I'd almost forgotten what your eyes looked like. Still the same. Pissholes in the snow'

                        http://www.paul-a-j-lewis.com (my photography website)
                        'All explaining in movies can be thrown out, I think': Elmore Leonard

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          The Stooges used to be on Channel 4? I've never seen The Stooges and I was just thinking that they were a very American phenomenon as I don't remember ever seeing them about at all in the UK or Oz. I must just have been looking past them somehow.
                          "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Originally posted by Dom D View Post
                            The Stooges used to be on Channel 4? I've never seen The Stooges and I was just thinking that they were a very American phenomenon as I don't remember ever seeing them about at all in the UK or Oz. I must just have been looking past them somehow.
                            Yep, pretty sure it was Channel 4, Dom. Sometimes at the weekend but sometimes also on weekday afternoon, just as I'd get home from school (about 15h30 or so). There were some real gems on at that time including a dance (ballet?) version of Dante's 'The Divine Comedy' where the performers - most of them very curvy women - were fully naked. Very Ken Russell-esque. Blew my 12/13 year old mind, that did. (I was a latchkey kid.) You wouldn't get away with that today!

                            The late-80s TV adaptation of Mahabharat was also regularly on Channel 4 (EDIT: or was it BBC2) on weekday afternoons, as I recall. I became absorbed by that series and began setting the VHS recorder for it.

                            Those were the days!
                            'You know, I'd almost forgotten what your eyes looked like. Still the same. Pissholes in the snow'

                            http://www.paul-a-j-lewis.com (my photography website)
                            'All explaining in movies can be thrown out, I think': Elmore Leonard

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              5 Stooges is too many Stooges. Numbers 1-4 were brilliant. When they got to Joe Besser he sucked the life out them. Stooge number 6 was a fraud without his own identity. I feel like there a lot of similarities between Stooges and later members of KISS. I think I would have enjoyed Besser more if he played with an Ankh on his face.

                              It never panned out passed the pilot, and they were geriatric by then, but I think Emil Sitka would have been a fine replacement for Larry. At least he was already a part of the larger team and new the beats (pun firmly intended). I never saw the modern movie reviewed on the front page. Dear Lord it looks horrible. A period piece autobiography type thing would be more appealing to me. Played straight but honest like Downey Jr in CHAPLIN. But I get that will never be a thing.
                              "When I die, I hope to go to Accra"

                              Comment

                              Working...
                              X