The Three Stooges - Festival

Rating:
Summary: Three Stooges
Review: The Three Stooges look great on DVD! The new "technicolor" imagery provides greater depth and a better viewing experience. Although, this DVD didn't have my favorite 3 Stooges clips, it was packed full of other hair-raising and ridiculously funny comedy the Stooges were famous for.

Rating:
Summary: Three Stooges
Review: The Three Stooges look great on DVD! The new "technicolor" imagery provides greater depth and a better viewing experience. Although, this DVD didn't have my favorite 3 Stooges clips, it was packed full of other hair-raising and ridiculously funny comedy the Stooges were famous for.

Rating:
Summary: Much of this material has been out there before
Review: There are about 5 Three Stooges shorts from Columbia that are in the public domain that have been released on DVD and VHS in different formats with different titles, but it is mostly the same old stuff. The same holds true with a number of rare items, such as the 1949 TV pilot, some solo Shemp shorts, and other TV guest appearances. Most of these compilations are from Good Times Home Video, as is the Festival title.

Three Stooges Festival is more of the same, but the good news here is that there is also a 4 DVD version under this same title. One of the DVDs is this one. There are two DVDs called Funniest Moments and Funniest Moments II. And one is called The Three Stooges Story.

Funniest Moments are taken from the live action intros the team did for the 1965 series of cartoons called The New 3 Stooges. The box proclaims that this shows the Stooges at the height of their popularity and are a rare glimpse of the team in color. All of that is true, but their peak actually came about 5 or 6 years earlier. The segments aren't very good, the accompanying music is tough to sit through, but the cartoons, which were of varied quality, have been edited out. The best thing is that on volume II, the very last segment is an 8 minute, black and white appearance of a rather amusing routine taken from the Ed Sullivan show. I can't remember if I saw this when it originally aired, but I know there were several appearances on Ed Sullivan, as well as Joey Bishop's late night show and others. If these could be found and released it would certainly be worth it to serious collectors.

The real find of this four pak is the documentary called The Three Stooges Story. It is more than twice as long as the other DVDs in the pak and is chock full of stuff I have never seen before. And it makes good use of snippets from stuff that has been out before.

If you can find this four pak, it is at a good price, only about what one would pay for a regular movie DVD for all four here, and well worth it for the documentary and that Sullivan clip.