The Three Stooges - All the World's a Stooge
If you want to hear "nyuk-nyuk-nyuk" in Spanish and Portuguese as well as in English, then the DVD format is for you.The Three Stooges: All the World's a Stoogegives a generous 124 minutes of seven Curly classics in a random order: "Grips, Grunts and Groans" (1937), "The World's a Stooge" (1941), "3 Dumb Clucks" (1937), "Three Little Pirates" (1946), "Uncivil War Birds" (1946), "Back to the Woods" (1937), and "Violent Is the Word for Curly" (1938). The shorts cover some familiar territory; "Grips, Grunts and Groans" is only the Stooges' 20th short in the Columbia series, and it is practically a rewrite of "Punch Drunks," the second. Here Curly is driven wild by a perfume rather than a song and is put into a wrestling ring rather than a boxing ring. Even the backscreen projection of the crowd is the same one used in the earlier film."Three Little Pirates" contains the famous "Mahah, Ah Ha" routine from their vaudeville days. "Back to the Woods" is one of their relatively rare costume efforts. The highlight of "Violent Is the Word for Curly" is a pleasant little vaudeville song about the alphabet. In "Three Dumb Clucks," Curly gets to play a double role. The audio and video are generally good. The film of "Three Little Pirates" used for the transfer to DVD, however, shows a defect 10 minutes into the episode in the form of vertical lines flickering to the left of the picture, which some might find distracting.--Frank Behrens