The Three Stooges – Stooges On The Run

 

Picture: C/D (colorized)     Sound: C     Extras: D     Shorts: B-

 

 

In their time, The Three Stooges were subversive as compared to other comedy acts the way Warner cartoons were the edgy opposite of Disney product.  Since their heyday at Columbia Pictures, their popularity has only grown with new generations discovering them all the time.  The amusing animated cartoon from the 1960s has not hurt the cause either.  Stooges On The Run features four of their original film shorts in their original black and white versions, along with hideous colorized version assuming they are somehow less funny in their original monochrome.

 

Dizzy Doctors (1937) has the trio finding out simple cleaning fluid is somehow a medicine, but instead of hitting gold, they hit more trouble than they expect.

 

Calling All Curs (1939) has the guys running a veterinarian hospital when a dog is stolen, so they recruit another to find him and the real question is if they are as smart as the dog!

 

Disorder In The Court (1936) has The Stooges become the crucial witnesses in a murder trial, if they do not cause the courthouse to implode first.  If justice is not blind, they’ll blind her but good!

 

Pop Goes The Easel (1935) has the men “framed” for stealing art, when they decide to hide at the studio of a high artist, they’ll take everyone and their high culture down a notch or two.  The police on the hunt for them will only make things worse.

 

 

One of the reasons these hold up is because they do not feel like the usual product of any studio in the 1930s and are authentically funny with shtick routines, sight gags, linguistic subversions and other funny wordplay.  These are authentically entertaining and rarely commented on is the energy, though they needed to get on with it considering they only had about 15+ minute per short.  The Stooges themselves also had great chemistry and were not merely hitting each other in the head all the time.

 

We have looked at their material in lesser copies before and these are not perfect prints, but the black & white versions are the best we have seen to date.  The case says these were transferred in digital High Definition, but there is sometimes more picture area in the awful colorized editions.  I sometimes hear the idiotic theory that turning off (or down) the color will give you black & white copies, but that is wrong.

 

Turning off the color does not work because the junky paint-over, digital or otherwise, ruins the grey scale of the black and white for another ugly experience.  Both are 1.33 X 1 presentations, but while the black & white look good and have prints that could use some work and will look better in Blu-ray in any event, the colorized always looks liked warmed-over death.  Faces look like multi-colored baby powder has been plastered on dead skin and the choices of color are always pathetically oversimplistic like so many bad Music Videos and especially feature films where bad directors and cameramen get crazy with as if they just arrived in modern times.

 

The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is a little lower than expected in either case, sounding second generation, though 1930s optical mono is not easy to clean up.  There are no extras, unless the colorized versions and a Monty Python & The Holy Grail trailer count.  For this critic, they do not, but I wish more shorts could have been squeezed onto this disc, but remember, there are two versions of each, so there goes the extra space.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo