Movies With Michael : The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962)

Monday, April 11, 2022

The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962)

After the major success of The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962), it was only natural that Columbia Pictures would quickly follow with another feature film starring The Three Stooges. The film would be The Three Stooges in Orbit. This movie would have the boys facing off against aliens as they had previously done in their feature film Have Rocket Will Travel (1959) and their short film Outer Space Jitters (1957). To this movie's credit it never once feels like it is repeating anything from those previous pictures.

With the desire to recapture the success of Hercules, this film would have many members of the behind-the-scenes crew return. Edward Bernds would return to the director's chair, Norman Maurer and Edwood Ullman would once again co-write the movie, Paul Dunlap would again do the music and Edwin H. Bryant would again be the editor. Edward Bernds, Norman Maurer and Edwood Ullman, all had history with The Stooges' characters, predating Hercules. His first time directing the trio was Micro-Phonies (1945), a film considered by most Stooge fans to be a real classic. Though he started directing the Stooges in the Curly-era most of the Stooges shorts he directed were during the Shemp era. In my opinion he was my favorite director of the Stooges during that time period and his Shemp films were often my favorite Shemp shorts. However, working with the Stooges was only part of a long and varied career for Bernds. To quote Leonard Maltin, "He was never a household name, even in Hollywood, but I defy you to think of anyone else who worked with both Mary Pickford and Sam Peckinpah, wrote for Shemp Howard and Elvis Presley, and directed Hugh Hurbert and Zsa Zsa Gabor." Ellwood Ullman's first time writing a Stooges film was with Cash and Carry (1937) and he continued writing Stooges short films through 1957 ending with the Joe Besser short, Guns a Poppin (1957). He would continue to work with the Stooges on all their following starring feature films. Elwood Ullman and Edward Bernds would cowrite such movies as The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters (1954, which Bernds also directed), Bowery to Bagdad (1954, which Bernds also directed), Jail Busters (1955) and Tickle Me (1965). The two of them working on Tickle Me probably explains why it is Elvis' most slapstick movie. Norman Maurer was Moe's son in law and at this time The Stooges' manager. Before ever working on a Stooge film, he had written The Three Stooges comic books. He would work on all of The Stooge films following this one and would even write for The Stooge characters as a writer for the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio. There he would write the episode of The New Scooby-Doo! Movies, where the Mystery Inc. Gang met The Stooges and create the series The Robotic Stooges.

The Stooges start off this movie down on their luck. Their landlady (Marjorie Eaton) has had enough of their antics and kicked them out. Meanwhile their TV show is in danger of being cancelled unless they can come up with a new gimmick. Having been kicked out of their apartment the boys rent a room with Professor Danforth (Emil Sitka) and his daughter Carol (Carol Christensen). The professor is an inventor who believes evil aliens are after his invention. He agrees that if the boys help him out with his alien problem, then he will help them out with trying to save their TV show with his new invention, electronic cartoons.

While this may not be the best of The Stooges' later day feature films, it is still highly entertaining. Despite their ages, The Stooges prove to be just as great at delivering the slapstick goods as they were in their younger days. Each slapstick moment is delivered very well, and you can see that these old pros still knew how to make a joke work to its fullest advantage. It is true that this movie may not be as consistently hilarious as the best of their short films, there are quite a few good laughs to be found. This film even gives Curly Joe DeRita sone of his best moments with the Stooges as he gets a handful of pretty good lines. Also, while not every joke may be laugh out loud hilarious, none of them really fall flat either and they all help add to the joyful silliness of the movie. The fact that Stooge style silliness is the main goal of this film is also a great asset. While there is a romantic subplot (a sadly pretty bland one), it is fully kept in the background allowing The Stooges to fully be the stars of the picture. This is something that this Stooge fan loved. There are also some pretty clever gags in all this silliness. I loved The Stooges reading the Martians' subtitles to understand what they were saying, as well them saving Disneyland, Moe and Larry telling Curly-Joe how to make a hole in the wall and Joe practicing his TV speech.

However, if I were to complain about this film, my biggest complaint would be the Martians themselves. These are rather bland and boring villains that neither feel that funny or frightening. They are just typical evil movie aliens with nothing to distinguish them.

Boxoffice Magazine, 1962

This movie also benefits from a good supporting cast. This was the last feature film for Carol Christensen, who had begun her movie career only two years earlier with Freckles (1960). Edon Stroll, who played Prince Charming in Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961), returns to play Captain Tom Andrews here. TV fans will know him best for playing Virgil Edwards in McHale's Navy (1962-1966). George N. Neise who played the villain in The Three Stooges Meet Hercules again plays a villain in this film, as the alien Ogg. His partner Zogg is played by Rayford Barnes, like many of the costars of these 1960's Stooges movies, the majority of his career was spent on TV shows. His TV career began with a 1952 episode of Racket Squad (1950-1953) and ended with a 2000 episode of Touched By an Angel (1994-2003). Most of the time he played characters who only appeared in one episode of a show. In some shows, he would appear in multiple episodes as different characters in each episode. He appeared in two episodes of the show, The Invaders (1967-1968) and in both he plays aliens like he did in this film. One of the rare reoccurring roles he played on a TV show was as Ike Clanton in The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-1961). Stooge fan favorite Emil Sitka has a large supporting role in this movie. He first worked with The Stooges in Curly's last short film Half Wits Holiday (1947). During the Shemp-era and the Joe Besser-era he would become a regular face in The Stooges' short films. He will be forever beloved by Stooge fans for his immortal role in the short film, Brideless Groom (1947) where he delivered the immortal line, "Hold hands you love birds." He is a rare supporting player who appeared in Stooge films with all six of The Three Stooges.

The first day of shooting for this movie was April 6, 1962 and the last was April 27, 1962. However it is unknown what days the boy's were filming and what days no filming was being done. To save money on special effects some footage was reused from the sci-fi B-movie, Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1956).

Comic book adaptions were made for most of The Stooges' feature films of the 1960's. However, The Three Stooges in Orbit's comic book adaption was especially interesting because it used live action frame blow ups from the movie for its pictures.

With the Stooges' short films experiencing major popularity on TV in the late 1950's and early 60's, it was only natural that The Stooges would try to have their own half hour TV series at this time. One of the attempts for this was called The Three Stooges Scrapbook. The idea for this show was similar to the team's later TV series, The New Three Stooges (1965). It would feature the Stooges in both live action and animated segments and would be produced by The Stooges and Norman Maurer's Normandy Productions. TV Spots Inc. would agree to make 78 5-minute cartoons for the show. Each episode would feature two of these animated segments one with The Stooges as adults and one entitled Li'l Stooges, which would feature kid versions of the characters. Because the Stooges were becoming much more popular with children due to TV, parent groups were complaining about the violence of their films. However cartoons with equal amounts of violence were also popular with children and there were (at this time at least (by the 1970's this would have changed drastically) far less complaints about children watching these. So the plan was that the live action segments would feature much less violence while the cartoons would be more typically violent Stooges slapstick. Moe would speak about this in an interview for the show stating, "In the live portions of these films, we will cut out the deliberate physical horseplay and substitute unintentional violence - if you have to call it violence. In other words I won't purposely clunk Larry or Curly-Joe, but if I'm carrying a ladder, let's say and I make a quick turn, it could accidently clip Curly on the bean. The deliberate stuff will only be seen in the cartoon segments. That will make everybody happy." The TV series was never to be though. Though some sponsors were interested in the show, a good time slot could never be found. The only timeslots offered for the show would be after 10pm. Since The Stooges were hugely popular with children and had been aiming their act more at younger audiences at this time then they had been before, this slot would have alienated a huge portion of the show's audience. This was simply past kids' bedtimes and unacceptable for that reason. Because of this the sponsors that were interested in it all pulled out leaving the show to be shelved. However, this was not the end of the story. A pilot episode entitled Home Cooking (1960) had been shot. Much of the live action portions of that pilot appear in this movie. In fact, it is out of the pilot being unsold that this movie would be made. Norman Maurer would later state, "I approached the Columbia executives with the half-hour Scrapbook film (a $30,000 investment), and an expanded storyline, and they bought it." Though the pilot was shot in color and featured a laugh track, in this movie the footage appears in black and white and (thankfully) sans laugh track.