The Three Stooges were pretty much washed up by December 1957. The last of their two-reel shorts for Columbia Pictures had been completed and, the market for such things having dried up, the studio opted not to renew their contract. Joe Besser, the "third Stooge" following the incapacitation of Curly Howard and death of his older brother Shemp, decided to leave the act, and with replacement "Curly-Joe" DeRita original Stooges Moe Howard and Larry Fine embarked on a disastrous series of club dates performing before utterly disinterested adult audiences.

But television came to their rescue. In January 1958 Columbia, under their Screen Gems television subsidiary, began distributing classic Stooge shorts of the 1930s and ‘40s to local television stations and the Three Stooges became a bona fide sensation with children heretofore unaware of the team's glory days. This prompted the production of new Thr...Read the entire review