by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Abbott and Costello Go to Mars we got to see its double-bill partner, The
Three Stooges in Orbit, made in 1962 at an
odd juncture in the Stooges’ career. They had originally began as the sidekicks
of vaudevillian Ted Healy, who in 1930 got to make an early musical for Fox, Soup
to Nuts, written by cartoonist Rube
Goldberg. Healy ended up under contract at MGM as a contract player and brought
the Stooges along for some comic-relief scenes in illustrious movies like Dancing
Lady with Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Fred
Astaire and Nelson Eddy (the last two in their film debuts), only in 1934 MGM
decided that they’d keep Healy under contract but didn’t need his “stooges”
anymore. So Columbia, whose president Harry Cohn always liked it when he could one-up the mighty MGM and
make stars out of people MGM’s boss Louis B. Mayer had fired, put the Stooges
under contract and set them to making two-reel comedy shorts. At the time the
lineup of the Three Stooges was brothers Moe and Curly Howard (Moe was the one
who anticipated the Beatles’ pudding-bowl haircuts, Curly the shaved-headed guy
who invented the “N’yuk n’yuk” vocal noise that became a Stooges trademark) and
Larry Fine, the frizzy-haired one. Amazingly, the Three Stooges’ series of
shorts lasted from 1934 to 1957 and proved reliable moneymakers for Columbia;
the studio occasionally put them in minor roles in features but mostly kept
them in the two-reel salt mines. In 1946 Curly suffered a stroke and was
replaced in the team by a third Howard brother, Shemp, who’d previously played
important supporting roles in comedies with far more impressive stars, like The
Bank Dick with W. C. Fields, Hellzapoppin’ with Broadway sensations Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson,
and Buck Privates with Bud Abbott
and Lou Costello. When Shemp died in 1955 the Stooges got an unrelated but
quite amusing comedian named Joe Besser to replace him, but by that time the
advent of television was pretty much killing the market for movie shorts.
Columbia let the Stooges’ series die a natural death in 1957, but the following
year they started selling the Stooges’ movies to TV — a 20-minute two-reeler
was a “natural” for TV because it could be cut up to insert commercial breaks
and fit into a half-hour time slot — and they were sensationally successful,
especially when stations ran them in the late afternoon so schoolchildren could
watch them. Columbia re-signed the Stooges to make feature films, many of them
with a science-fiction bent (the first was called Have Rocket, Will
Travel), largely the result of director
Edward Bernds, who’d cut his teeth on the Stooges’ shorts, but when he stepped
up to feature films his career took an odd turn into science fiction.
According
to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster The Three Stooges in Orbit actually started life as an unsold color pilot for a
Stooges’ TV series — the first 20 minutes, in which the Stooges get thrown out
of a number of hotels for cooking in their rooms (a big bozo no-no in the days
of vaudeville — Stan Laurel remembered that when he and Charlie Chaplin roomed
together on tour with Fred Karno’s vaudeville troupe before either of them made
movies, Laurel would cook their meals over an open gas jet in the room and
Chaplin would cover up the sound by practicing his violin), come from their
failed TV pilot and are the funniest scenes in the film — before they hook up
with mad inventor Professor Danforth (Emil Sitka, who’d been a regular
supporting player in the Stooges’ shorts), who invites the Stooges to stay in
his mansion. What they don’t realize is that the mansion is haunted, not by the
usual ghosts or goblins but by Martians, including Danforth’s butler Williams
(Norman Leavitt), a Martian who’s been put through elaborate plastic surgery to
look like an Earthling. The Martians au naturel look as close as Columbia’s makeup department could
come to the Universal makeup for the Frankenstein monster without Universal
suing them for copyright infringement. When Williams fails in his mission to
neutralize Danforth’s invention — a peculiar contraption that has tank treads
to go on land, electric motors so it can travel under sea as a submarine, and
helicopter rotors so it can fly — because the Martians think it’s the only
possible craft by which the Earthlings can resist a War of the Worlds-style invasion, the Martians send Ogg (George N.
Neise) and Zogg (Rayford Barnes) — one wonders if they knew Yll and Ylla, the
bored middle-aged Martian couple who figured prominently at the beginning of
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles — and the movie is basically a series of slapstick sequences as the
Stooges try to get the contraption ready for a demonstration Air Force Captain
Tom Andrews (Edson Stroll) has arranged, largely out of incredibly blandly
depicted love for Danforth’s daughter Carol (Carol Christensen), only they end
up loading it with a water-activated atom bomb the Navy was testing as an
ultimate depth charge against an enemy’s nuclear submarines. There’s also a
straight cop of the gimmick from the 1935 Gene Autry science-fiction musical
Western serial The Phantom Empire
in which the Stooges have to keep getting back to the local TV station they
work for in order to do their show on time or risk getting fired.
The
Three Stooges in Orbit is a cute, clever
film whose target audience was probably still in single digits; people older
than that are likely to notice how old Moe and Larry had got — naturally it’s especially noticeable in their
close-ups — and how little they were doing the slapstick that had been their
stock-in-trade when they were making the shorts whose renewed popularity on TV
had led to the Stooges’ comeback. Part of the problem was the new “third
Stooge,” Joe DeRita, who had signed on when Joe Besser quit after the
cancellation of the shorts series. The Stooges christened him “Curly-Joe,” but
that only underscored how much less funny he was than the original Curly
Howard; apparently DeRita was unwilling to do too much pie-in-the-face or
finger-in-the-eye stuff (though the funniest scene in this film after the first
20 minutes is when the rotors of Danforth’s craft get caught in a batch of pies
and fling them at the Air Force brass there to watch the demonstration — an
automatic pie fight!) and his preference for dialogue comedy fit oddly with
Moe’s and Larry’s more restrained physical antics. The finale features Danforth’s
craft literally splitting in half, with the bottom half killing the Martians
who had hijacked it when the bomb explodes (invoking another, far superior Columbia release two years later, I
couldn’t help but sing “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when” as
the bomb went off and a mushroom cloud filled the screen) while the top half
delivers the Stooges to their TV studio right when the manager who’s never
liked them was about to fire them. They save their career with a new invention,
“electronic cartoons,” which basically means the Stooges cover themselves with
white makeup and get themselves filmed doing the Twist — the makers of this
movie had the idea of digital cartoons decades before computer technology
advanced enough to make them a reality — and there’s a clever tag scene in
which two surviving Martians see the Martian subtitle communicating the last
bits of English dialogue in the film (a reversal since earlier we’ve seen gag
subtitles in English purporting to translate what the Martians are saying to
each other), and one Martian shoots out all the letters in the subtitle except
the ones that read “the end.” (I miss titles that say “The End.” That’s how
old-school I am in my movie-watching!)
