The Three Stooges Collection, Vol. 7: 1952-1954

The slide of the Stooges continues! This is volume#7 of the Three Stooges Collection featuring their shorts from the period of Jan/52 to Nov/54...and what a bumpy ride it was.Columbia continued to ramp up it's cheap tactics and it shows as this volume,even more so than the previous volumes,is replete with remakes using the same routines and/or old footage(wait until we get to volume#8!). Just a few examples of many:Missed Fortune is a remake of Healthy,Wealthy and Dumb,Corny Casanovas was remade w/footage from Rusty Romeos,He Cooked His Goose is remade w/footage from Triple Crossed,Up in Daisy's Penthouse is a remake of Three Dumb Clucks,Bubble Trouble is a remake w/footage from All Gummed Up,Scotched in Scotland is a remake w/footage from Hot Scots,Pals and Gals uses footage from Punchy Cowpunchers,and on and on.This last short was not edited very well as a few minutes into it the bad guy gets killed only to be resurrected later in a short scene listening to Christine McIntyre singing! In a totally bizarre entry called Cuckoo in a Choo Choo,we have a totally despicable and unlikable married Larry living in a train car on a siding(!!???)and after,and making trouble with, his best friends wives!Bad,bad and bad again! This is the volume which contains the Stooges only two entries into the then popular 3-D craze,Spooks and Pardon My Backfire.Neither short is anything to write home about and a television screen doesn't do justice to the 3-D effect at all.They are shown in widescreen format but again they were meant to be seen on a theater screen.However both come in a non-3-D format which is a blessing.Speaking of widescreen,as this technique had also come into its' own in the early 50s,the next two shorts after Pardon my Backfire are full screen.After that the rest of the shorts in this volume and the next,are in widescreen format.And you will notice that the subsequent use in the widescreen format of the reused full screen footage sometimes results in the picture getting chopped off on the top and bottom! By the the way this volume does INCLUDE two pairs of three 3-D glasses to view the appropriate shorts with.I'm use to the red and green lenses but these are purple and green. Shemp is still on the ball filling in for Curly but as the shorts progress I personally noticed Shemps joie de vivre waning.His energy and vitality are noticeably ebbing away from him.Then I recalled Shemp suffered a mild stroke in late /52 which probably would account for it.And of course earlier that year in January we lost Jerry Curly Howard.Speaking of which one can often see Moe,Shemp or Larry going into a Curly moment in the blink of an eye;whether going in a circle on the floor,over-crying at a frustration or barking like a dog.And this never changed right to the end of the Stooges tenure on film. Technically the films have been remastered,like the ones before,in Hi-Def and they look terrific. In this the next to last volume,the Stooges continue their downward spiral in quality.Columbia cheapness along with Jules White's leaden direction,is more than evident at this stage as the gag writers seem to have been given instructions not to come up with original material so much as to watch all the old films and see what kind of story they could come up with them!So simple an idea a child could have done it....and would have probably done it better! So it's on to the final volume and the worst of the worst. Rating: 3 (Robert Badgley, 2010-07-07) The Three Stooges Collection, Vol. 7: 1952-1954 customer review

SHEMP ! unlike most fans, my favorite Stooge isnt Curly or Moe or Larry...or Joe or Curly Joe...but SHEMP....thats right I said Shemp! So whatcha gonna do about it? Why you! I outta! Ruff Ruff. The DVD volume has great Shemp shorts and is pretty much to the very end of Shemp. Great stuff...a must own. Rating: 5 (G. Harper, 2010-07-03) The Three Stooges Collection, Vol. 7: 1952-1954 customer review

The best comedy money can buy! There's never been any comedy better than The Three Stooges. None of the Volumes are a let down and Collection, Volume, 7 is as good as all the rest. The picture quality of The Three Stooges now, on DVD, is awesome! Rating: 5 (LYLE D. MCDONALD, 2010-06-30) The Three Stooges Collection, Vol. 7: 1952-1954 customer review

For fans - ****; For casuals - ** = *** The Stooges successfully brought their 1930s style comic zaniness into the 1950s - they fought on, after losing their most popular component, the great Jerome Howard, and finding themselves a little bit older and *not* wiser (speaking of their characters). Seems the creative forces, the writers, directors, also had to find a way to keep the boat afloat, when fresh ideas appaently were at a minimum: Stooge historians will note the re-used footage (and the re-used gags). This group of shorts is not as strong as earlier DVD sets, for the above reasons, and it's tough to say: the sadistic violence factor is at an all-time high, which hurts an otherwise excellent short, Three Dark Horses - an adversary loses his toupe and Larry grabs a hammer and nail...'nuff said? Bad stuff. The Stooge lover will say, it ain't what they do, it's how they do it...and that goes a long way: the adlibs are usually hilarious and their timing and moves are pinpoint. For this reviewer (and may I say fan since 1959), the best films here are He Cooked His Goose; Income Tax Sappy; Musty Musketeers; Scotched In Scotland; Three Dark Horses (mentioned above); and Cuckoo On a Choo Choo (I do not recall this one - can someone out there tell me if it's a "Lost Stooges"?). As always, the Stooge troupers are terrific, especially the versatile Vernon Dent. Rating: 3 (Phil S., 2010-06-11) The Three Stooges Collection, Vol. 7: 1952-1954 customer review

Great Content! Awkward and Clumsy Menus, No Chapter Breaks I will not review the content. After all, if you're reading this - you already love the Stooges. I bought all the discs that included Curly Howard. The episodes are all there in great quality. No complaints. Well done. But there are no chapters within episodes. You must FFD or RVR within any given episode. Depressing the chapter button will merely take you to the next episode. I also found the menu squirrelly and hard to manipulate. I also HATED the CONSTANT warnings about illegal duplication. I have all but stopped buying DVD movies and video games because of the rampant threats and fear-mongering. And it's only getting worse. Expect to be threatened repeatedly while perusing these DVD's. It won't matter that you purchased the material legally. (I got mine here at Amazon and paid full price.) You will be harassed and warned, over and over, for as long as you own these discs. That's daunting. It's depressing. It's ugly and it will never go away. I'm stuck with it forever. I know 99% of humanity takes no offense from threats of imprisonment, over and over and over, having that plastered all over media they've paid nearly $100.00 for. I find it offensive and have sharply curtailed my purchases of movies and video games because of this. And there's always a million knuckleheads in the wings ready to apologize for this reprehensible behavior. Go ahead, you make my purchases for me, you buy the warnings and threats of imprisonment and fines. I'll sleep better knowing that the big execs are getting their dough, whether or not I'm giving them mine. But once you get past all the threats, the videos are quite nice... p.s. are the "big execs" even aware that video pirates rip out the warnings when illegally disseminating discs? So... the only people who are subjected to it are those who have legally purchased the material and actually own them... I ain't real bright, but ain't that irony or something? Rating: 3 (G. Parnell, 2010-06-07) The Three Stooges Collection, Vol. 7: 1952-1954 customer review