This is a Stooge short w/ a famous segment:
(Short # 32 in Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk: The Columbia Shorts of The Three Stooges)
A.K.A. The short with Swingin’ the Alphabet. Even if you’re not that familiar with the trio or their shorts, you may have stumbled across the only full-length musical number they did in their 190 shorts during their time at Columbia. As the story goes, the family maid of director/producer Charley Chase taught the song to his kids. Only decades later did people learn it was originally a 19th century song written by the tremendously-named Septimus Winner. The ditty is a catchy tune revolving around singing each consonant to all five vowels.
The rest of the short was also delightful. The trio have another blue-collar job: new employees at a Mobil gas station. They are bumbling in their full-service job while servicing Professor Feinstein, Professor Frankfurter & Professor Von Stupor. Via circumstances, they have to run away from the gas station in an ice cream truck w/ the bags of the professors. This is how they were mistaken by the faculty of Mildew College as the new educators.
There were plenty of creative gags at the gas station-such as Curly vs. a gas station tire pump, which continued once the setting changed to the world of academia. This ends… on a bang. As for the title-which has no bearing on the contents of the short-it references a long-forgotten 1936 Paramount movie, Valiant is the Word for Carrie.
Oh, and I’d be remiss to not mention a gag that almost turned tragic. Curly is in the back of the ice cream truck for over 3 hours, necessitating a thawing out. This is done—via being roasted like a pig on a spigot! Well, he was portly and the straps holding him came loose, and believe it or not, suffered some first-degree burns. Thankfully he was saved in the nick of time.
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