Sappy Bull Fighters

I'll say more about the Stooges tomorrow night but for now... the last short they ever did at Columbia. That long reign ended w/ a whimper instead of a bang: 

(Short # 190, and the final short, in Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk: The Columbia Shorts of The Three Stooges)

After nearly an entire year, this long product of viewing all 190 shorts The Three Stooges did at Columbia for a quarter-century is finally complete. I’ve known for years that The Joe Besser era was a downgrade from what came before and that Sappy Bull Fighters (the last one released, although not the last one they filmed) was bad… it’s not the worst they ever did but I’ll give overarching thoughts after I explain why Bull Fighters was lousy.

It was a remake of a Curly effort (What’s the Matador?) where the boys are stuck in Mexico as performers due to an unscrupulous promoter… they meet a pretty entertainer but due to them being victims of soicomestances, they run afoul of that entertainer’s possessive husband. Greta Thyssen was a pretty. young Danish blonde so that will be appealing to some-the Stooges did worse than this and at least a few chuckles were had.

However, as explained before this was made when Columbia was closing their shorts department, the last major studio to do so. The Besser era increasingly felt cheap & slapdash. Most of the second half is the trio at a bullfighting ring, doing a routine where Joe is dressed as a matador and the other two are in a bull costume… only for the jealous husband to bring out a real bull for Joe. I don’t love the Curly version of this short and this was a downgrade. The most flagrant example of this was when Joe “rode the bull”… besides them using stock footage where they didn’t even bother to edit out Curly’s “whoo whoos,” the effect they used to show Joe on the bull looked REALLY phony, and I’m sure its phoniness wasn’t supposed to be a gag.

For all of Matador’s faults, at least it was more energetic and Curly was funnier/more full of pep in his role than Joe was. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so harsh-by the time of filming Sappy, Moe had just turned 60-Larry and Joe weren’t far behind him. If you want to view them all or at least are morbidly curious, those are reasons to check this out. Otherwise… I’ll mention two actors. Mexican-born bilingual actor George J. Lewis portrayed the husband-he was also in Malice in the Palace. My late mother would know him for playing a key role in the Disney Zorro show that was on when she was a kid. As for a female background extra, there are conflicting reports on the validity of the tale that it was a young MARY TYLER MOORE. There’s no way for me to definitely answer that-instead, that is just noted as a rumor.

As for final thoughts after the completion of this voyage-well, I said more in the caption that starting tomorrow will accompany the list I have of all 190 reviews on Letterboxd. To try and not write War & Peace here, I saw some of those shorts as a kid-my dad introduced me to them because he saw the trio on TV as a kid. In fact, he spent some time in a hospital as a teen due to a bad auto wreck-one source of comfort was watching them on the television each afternoon.

As stated more than a few times by me in the past, comedy is the most subjective of genres-some not understanding or enjoying their slapstick humor is not difficult to rationalize. As an adult, no only do I enjoy their routines and their satire of such figures as the wealthy when in the roles of exaggerated buffoons who are still regular folk… their puns and wordplay are more appreciated by me as an adult.

Moe, Larry, Shemp and Joe were all veterans of the vaudeville circuit-while I haven’t seen Besser outside of the Stooge world, I’ll presume he’s just as talented a performer as the rest of the Stooges. Curly managed to become the favorite Stooge of many-he was naturally talented and had no formal comedic training. For all the faults of Columbia-not allowing Curly enough time to recover from his health problems, the decline of money during the Shemp/Joe eras, necessitating too many remakes with stock footage-they still provided talented supporting casts and production to create a majority shorts that range from “fine” to “classic.” My opinions are typically in line with the typical Stooge fan-at least in the United States, all their shorts are easy to track down, whether you use YouTube or Amazon Prime. The Curly era does have the best batting average although Shemp had his share of entries that were at least very good and even Joe had more than one that was fine.

As stated before, I’ve thought of starting this journey for years now-it should have been done much sooner. Alas… it likely won’t be anytime soon but eventually I need to view all the movies in the late 50’s through the mid 60’s that Moe, Larry, and Curly Joe starred in—I saw those as a kid, along with The New Three Stooges cartoon show where they did live-action wraparound segments. Doing this at least brought back nice memories of my youth and has helped make 2025 not so bad despite all the IRL chaos.