The Three Stooges' Greatest Routines (DVD Intros)

Segment Years:  1965, 1966
Genre:  Comedy
Director:  Norman Maurer, Edward Bernds
Starring:  Moe Howard, Larry Fine, Joe DeRita, Emil Sitka
Introductions By:  Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy

The Segments

The title of "Three Stooges' Greatest Routines" might be a tad bit of an exaggeration.  While technically a lot of the routines featured on this disc are reworkings of some of the trio's greatest hits, they aren't quite up to the standard of the Stooges' heyday.  If one wants to see these bits done justice than any viewer should be encouraged to seek out superior counterparts from the 30's and 40's.

If these aren't the Greatest Routines, then what makes up this disc that dares calls itself such?  Why these are actually live action wraparound segments filmed for the 60's cartoon series The New 3 Stooges.  You see, in the 60's the Stooges were probably more popular than ever it's just that the audience was different.  The original shorts from Columbia Pictures had hit syndication and were a huge hit with children, causing a career resurgence but a more simplistic restructuring of the act to pander to the kids who wanted to see the Stooges back and playing their favorite funny parts.  By the time this happened the then-third-Stooge of the act, Joe Besser, retired from the act to tend to his ailing wife, prompting Moe and Larry to hire comedian Joe DeRita to fill the void.  But DeRita was never really his own Stooge, as he somewhat adopted the persona of the most popular Stooge, Curly, to make it almost seem as if the long-passed-on legend had come out of retirement.  While certain aspects of DeRita's "Curly Joe" character were distinctly his, most of what he does is fill Curly's void and work himself into Curly's bits.

It'd be easy to call the Stooges a nostalgia act at this point, but that's not entirely accurate.  A nostalgia act implies they were only doing the act to keep old geezers who remembered them happy and not worrying about creating a new audience.  The Stooges instead were nursing a new audience that were just blooming, which means they were still in the midst of a legendary career.  In the case of The New 3 Stooges, they were actually close to the end of it.  Having finished filming their final feature film, The Outlaws is Coming, the trio were spending their geriatric days concentrating on television, including this cartoon series, TV cameos, and a proposed travelogue series.  Unfortunately Larry Fine had a stroke in 1970 which left him partially paralyzed and forced the long time comedian to retire.  Moe and Joe had made plans to continue the act with Emil Sitka playing a new Stooge named "Harry," but Moe's ill health prevented any film projects from being made with this new group.  The Three Stooges were officially retired in 1975 when both Moe and Larry passed away and Sitka and DeRita decided it was best to retire the act.

Keeping this in context, these segments that make up The Three Stooges' Greatest Routines are a bit of a fascinating curiosity, because it's one of the final legacies of this group's career, but it would be for the best if you kept expectations in check.  We do get to see this wonderful group doing quite a bit of material and they're pretty spry for their age.  The problem is that they're done fast and on the cheap for children's programming.  There is very little production value, the timing is off, and the kinetic energy they had in their early years is just absent.  It's the Three Stooges, it's just not their best work.

Die hard Stooges fans may want to see this material at least once.  There are a few chuckles at least.  I for one enjoyed Curly Joe doing the Maharaja routine here.  There's also a pretty funny bit late in the compilation which has Moe trying to get a fortune at an airport weight scale which informs him that he has been fooling around so much that he has missed his flight.  This isn't stuff I'd watch on rotation, like the best Three Stooges shorts, but there are some diamonds in the rough.

The Intros

Mike and Kevin are back for another round of Stooge antics, and Bill is nowhere to be seen.  But I'd dare say that the intros on this disc are a bit stronger than the ones on the Three Stooges in Color disc, which might make this one worth having for someone's MST and Rifftrax collection.

This time about Mike and Kevin discuss various Stooge setpieces throughout the years and how they interact through them.  They have fun playing with typical props (yes, there is a pie, and I won't spoil whether or not it's thrown) and dissecting what types of settings the Stooges might find themselves in.  All of these conversations are humorous of course, and serve no insightful purposes whatsoever.  There are seven intros total, and even though they do delight they tend to feel somewhat similar and sort of "mesh together" after all eighty minutes is over.  If I were to pick a favorite I thought the scene in a dentist's chair was pretty funny, where Mike states he'd love nothing more than to receive dental work from a "small, ugly, rage-filled little man with a bowl haircut."  The garden spade intro is pretty fun as well.

The biggest drawback in this entire experience however is the material shown for the Three Stooges.  It's not horrible, it's just not that good.  And when that's the centerpiece, I have to knock the grade down a tad.  But if you're buying this disc for the intros alone then it's definitely a step over The Three Stooges in Color.  But if you're a Stooge fanatic the earlier disc is the one to get.

Average

The DVD

Being public domain material a lot of the footage on this DVD is in rough shape.  It's watchable and audio is coherent, but be prepared for this material to look its age.

Special features include three New 3 Stooges cartoons:  Baby Sitters, The Three Astronutz, and Three Jacks and a Beanstalk.  Like the live action segments, they're fine but targeted at a fairly young audience.  Also featured are colorized trailers for the following films:  Swing Parade (featuring the Three Stooges), The Three Stooges in Color, Africa Screams (featuring Abbott and Costello, Shemp Howard, and Joe Besser), March of the Wooden Soldiers (featuring Laurel and Hardy), The Jackie Robinson Story, and The Shirley Temple Collection.