Monday, November 21, 2005

More Important Stuff

My TiVo keeps grabbing Three Stooges episodes from Spike TV, especially those that feature Shemp Howard or Joe Besser in the coveted post of Third Stooge. Every now and then, it'll get a Curly but it's mostly Shemp and Joe. (If you are woefully unfamiliar with the lineage of Stooge Membership, I covered it here.) Among Stooge buffs, the consensus seems to be that Curly was the undisputed greatest of all Stooges and that Shemp was a barely-acceptable substitute and then, only because of his bloodline. And Joe Besser was the pits, bettered slightly when "Curly Joe" DeRita happened along. In some Stooge circles, if you express a contrary opinion, you're likely to have someone poke you in the eyes, run a saw over the top of your head and slap you silly. At one point, I felt that way.

But as I occasionally watch the Stooge epics my TiVo collects, I'm struck by how much I've come to like Shemp and Joe. The lower quality of the films that featured them may simply have been a matter of money. Year after year as the Stooges made two-reel comedies for Columbia, there was less of a market for two-reel comedies and therefore, the increasing necessity to make them cheaper. Many were out-and-out cheats where the producers took an old Stooges short and shot a few new scenes, then edited them in and passed the result off as a different film. This saved enough cash to enable them to do other films that weren't mostly footage from earlier pictures...but even those look like they were shot on 8mm in someone's garage.

I wasn't conscious of the lowering of production values when I was a tot. That's because back then, they all looked cheap. In the sixties in Los Angeles, Channel 11 ran Stooge films, often hosted by a gent named Don Lamond who seemed to have no particular flair for doing a kid's show. He was, however, Larry Fine's son-in-law, so I guess that counted for something. The show he ran fluctuated constantly in length and time slot. It would be a half-hour a day for a few months, then they'd cancel something else and make it an hour for a while. Then they'd move it later and cut it back to a half-hour. Then they'd move it again, make it an hour and stick some cartoons in it. TV Guide never knew what time it was on and neither did those of us who wanted to watch. About three times a year, Lamond would have Moe, Larry and Curly Joe live in the studio where they'd plug Stooge merchandise and admonish the kiddos at home not to try the things they did in their films.

Most of the Stooges shorts originally ran between 17 and 19 minutes and you'd think one of them, plus commercials and Mr. Lamond's hosting, would nicely to fill out a half-hour of TV time. Channel 11 didn't see it that way. When the program was a half-hour, they always chopped the films down to get in two. If they had an hour to fill, they'd run four or sometimes three plus an unrelated cartoon. This rendered most of the Stooge films pretty far from coherent. In many cases, the editors didn't put a lot of thought into the cutdown. If six minutes had to come out, they'd often just chop out the first six minutes after the titles. The films didn't have much in the way of plot but whatever they had, they had in the first scene or two. In some cases, I suspect, scenes were lopped out because Channel 11's prints were simply falling apart, and there was at least one instance when they got pieces of two separate films confused. The action suddenly cut from Moe, Larry and Shemp running a tailor shop to Moe, Larry and Curly drilling for oil...or something like that. Between the scheduling and the editing, it felt like the Stooges were not only in the films but running the station, as well.

I was always curious why they didn't just run one Stooge film per half-hour and I came up with two possible reasons. One was just to keep things moving faster. The competition was running 6-minute Bugs Bunny cartoons and the Channel 11 execs may have felt the need to approximate that pace and to give the kids two stories per half-hour. The other reason was that they had all those Shemp and Joe shorts, and someone there may have wanted to prune things down so they could get a Curly into every show. They did run them in a completely random order which usually resulted in one Curly plus one non-Curly episode. Every so often, by sheer chance, the two films that shared a half-hour would include some of the same footage or one would be a remake of the other.

What this all meant was that my introduction to the Stooges was via the worst possible presentation of their work. I don't know how old I was when I finally saw shorts that were uncut and had all the scenes in the proper sequence. When that happened, I began to realize that the problem with the Shemp and Joe shorts wasn't Shemp and Joe. They just weren't good films and wouldn't have been much better with Curly. Given their paucity of opportunities for physical comedy, they might have been worse. Shemp and Joe were funnier than Moe and Larry when they had nothing to work with.

The films run relatively uncut on Spike TV, a channel which sometimes defines itself (see previous posting) as "entertainment to inspire men." I'm not sure the Stooges should be inspiring any man over about the age of nine but given some of the other things on that channel, you could find worse role models.

• Posted at 9:59 PM · LINK

Trio, We Hardly Knew Ye...

As we predicted some time ago, the Trio cable channel is going out of business. Well, actually it's going to become a "Broadband only" channel which, these days, is almost the same thing. This happens at the end of the year, which is when Universal (which owns Trio) is launching Sleuth, a channel that will be running detective and suspense shows 24 hours a day. So if your cable company is losing Trio, it may slot that in its place. No word yet on whether Sleuth will make it onto DirecTV.

Trio had some wonderful programs but it lacked an identity. I think it may be that people these days expect their cable channels to have a clear mission statement that can be summarized in five words or less — "all game shows" (GSN) or "all comedy shows" (Comedy Central) or "all snooty, slightly-gay programming" (Bravo). I don't know how you'd go about explaining to people what to expect if they subscribed to Trio. Maybe "Lots of esoteric programming with an emphasis on things that got cancelled." But that's more than five words.

• Posted at 7:25 PM · LINK