Have Rocket, Will Travel, Revisited

Now was the time to see The Three Stooges during their Curly Joe era. As I saw all 190 of their shorts at Columbia during 2025, it felt right to see the first time Curly Joe DeRita was part of the Stooges. After the shorts department at Columbia shut down and the Stooges were unceremoniously fired, Joe Besser left the act due to his wife’s health. DeRita was hired as he was also a veteran comedian who’d been around for decades. He shaved his head to accentuate his faint resemblance to Curly. The Stooges became popular on television so Columbia decided to capitalize by making this movie, using the sci-fi genre as those pictures were also popular at the time.

I now appreciate Have Rocket, Will Travel more than in the past now having seen all their routines on film from 1934 to 1959. Of course, the movie’s a silly affair where the trio have the blue-collar job of “maintenance men in this universe’s version of NASA.” Like with the attempts at exploring outer space at the time, many failures occurred. A rocket crashed right by where the Stooges lived. They do the nice thing and attempt to help Norwegian scientist Anna-Lisa (a pretty blonde from Norway) before the entire affair is shut down. They attempt to create better rocket fuel, and like what would commonly happen in their shorts, they accidentally succeeded.

As they were victims of circumstance (i.e. victims of soicumstance) they end up on the rocket as it lifts off and lands on Venus, where bizarre sights are seen & heard-including a kaiju-sized tarantula -along with villains that create robot duplicates of the Stooges. Me, I was happy to see modifications of old routines, along with new ones such as the boys dealing w/ the lack of gravity in space. Uncommon but not unheard of: Moe, Larry, & Curly Joe sing! Yes, it was the film’s theme song.

Ultimately, DeRita acclimated himself rather quickly to the role of Third Stooge, the movie felt more alive than too many of their shorts the last few years at Columbia, the rehashing of such ideas as “The Stooges poke fun at high society” didn’t feel hackneyed, and the movie was an easy 75-minute watch. I’ll only watch those movies on rare occasions yet it was nice to see the boys after viewing all 190 of their shorts in 2025. Of course Rocket wasn’t a classic like their best shorts from the glory days; at the same time, the movie still entertained me.

As a sidenote, I can’t speak for the public appearances the trio did all the way to 1970-when both Moe and Larry experienced failing health-but this was the last time an eyepoke was done by the Stooges in a film. Evidently, parents carped loudly that their children were poking each other without the foreknowledge of how the Stooges did it without injury.