Friday, April 20, 2012

Stooge Overload: Have Rocket, Will Travel (1959)


Well, with the Farrelly Brothers' Three Stooges movie out and me considering seeing it, why not talk a bit about other Stooges movies I've seen and like?

In this case, I happened to find 1959's Have Rocket, Will Travel on Veoh. Since this was indeed made in 1959, it was towards the end of the Stooges' career as a comedy act. It also meant that our heroes were Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Curly Joe DeRita.

The basic plot of this roughly 80-minute comedy/sci-fi flick is that the Stooges are janitors at a fictional early incarnation of NASA, where the lovely Doctor Ingid Naarveg is trying to invent rocket fuel. Doc Ingrid's not having any luck, and her boss threatens to fire her if she doesn't come up with something quick. The Stooges hear this and do what they always do: fumble about for a bit and somehow manage to pull a working formula out of their asses in the nick of time by using random stuff from around the lab.

Of course, the process of loading their concoction onto a handy rocket that had previously failed wakes the lab's head guy, who chases the Stooges into said rocket and inadvertently shoots them off to Venus, where the rocket had been programed to go before it crashed at the start of the movie.

While on Venus, the trio gets chased by a giant fire-breathing spider, meets and befriends a unicorn and has a battle of wits with a scatterbrained computer that makes robot copies of them. After escaping the computer and its half-baked robot minions, the Stooges bring the unicorn back to Earth and are made national heroes at a party scene they'd done a few times before in their classic shorts.

In the end, the Stooges, deciding they'd rather go back to Venus with the unicorn than stay at the party, sing us out and Moe takes a pair of pies to the face.

I'll say right now that I can't easily pick a favorite of these movies, because I think of my favorite scenes from all the ones I've seen when I think of them. This one comes to mind because the Stooges themselves sing the theme song to the movie. It's kind of cool because it shows that not only could the Stooges do comedy well, they were also pretty good singers.

This is amongst the movies I wish I actually had in my video collection, along with the other Stooges movies I'll be looking for on Veoh in the near future. Keep on the lookout for those to be on the way in the near future.

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