The Three Stooges – Hapless Half-Wits

 

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

 

 

Sony continues to issue the original short of The Three Stooges with Hapless Half-Wits with four more of their original film shorts in their original black and white versions.  Unfortunately, we again get awful colorized version, but the good news is that you can again compare the plastering of lame and inaccurate color to how goods the black and white looks.  They are funnier that way.  The shorts this time are:

 

I’ll Never Heil Again (1941) is a sequel short to their classic You Nazty Spy sending up Hitler, Fascism and the original Axis Of Evil as they form their own axis trying to take over a country appropriately known as Moronica!

 

Beer Bear Polecats (1945) has the guys going into the beer brewing business, but its all suds and stupidity all the way.

 

Brideless Groom (1947) has Shemp as a singing teacher as heir to a fortune if he can marry quickly.  The results could cause a new kind of Constitutional amendment!

 

Dopey Dicks (1949) has the Stooges becoming detectives on a case after a madman who wants to use them for surgical head transplants, but the joke may be on him and is crazy enough to break more than a few magnifying glasses.

 

 

As noted in the previous review of Sony’s Stooges On The Run set, 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 again little lower than expected in either case, sounding second generation, though 1930s optical mono is not easy to clean up.  There are no extras, but fans will again appreciate the improvements in performance of the monochrome copies versus the many lesser copies other companies have issued.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo