Customer Reviews

Three Stooges - Dizzy Doctors

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've been a Stooges fan for many years, and up until recently, much like everyone else, I took the wonderful talents of Shemp Howard for granted. However, now whenever I watch a Stooges video or DVD, I find myself laughing non-stop at Shemp's lame jokes, funny faces, and hilarious cackle. This DVD is chock full of Shemp, but for you Curly-lovers, there's plenty of "nyuk nyuk nyuks" to go around, as well.

Dizzy Doctors (Curly): A great short where the boys try to sell "Brighto." Brighto, Brighto, makes old bodies new. We'll sell a million bottles, woo woo woo woo woo woo.

Bubble Trouble (Shemp): Not one of Shemp's best, as it is a remake. There's a few great scenes, including Shemp trying his hand at indoor fishing and the Stooges mixing chemicals in, what else, a boot!

Brideless Groom (Shemp): A classic! One of the best Stooges shorts, whether you're a Curly or Shemp fan! Too many great scenes to describe. Must see!

Termites of 1938 (Curly): Another great episode. The Stooges, as exterminators, are somehow mistaken for male escorts. An awesome scene ensues, where the guests at an upper class party rely on the Stooges to help them with their table manners!

Listen Judge (Shemp): A partial remake of "An Ache In Every Stake," which featured Curly. This one is great as well, especially for a remake. Great scene where Moe talks back to a French chef (played by the great Emil Sitka).

The Tooth Will Out (Shemp): One of the best Stooges Westerns. Even if you don't like the Western spoofs the Stooges made, you'll love this one, as dentistry is the main focus, not gunfights and damsels in distress. Shemp does his classic blind act while trying to pull teeth, and the Stooges mix up "The Amatuer Carpenter" with their dentistry manual. You can probably guess what happens from there.

I hope this review has been helpful, but I know if you're a Stoogs fan you probably ordered this DVD before even reading the reviews! "We're not ordinary people. We're morons!"

The good news with "Dizzy Doctors," Columbia's sixth release of stooge classics, is that every short is meticulously restored. Columbia was slacking on some releases, choosing inferior prints of some shorts for the video and DVD releases ("Monkey Businessmen" and "Three Smart Saps" were disgraceful). All six shorts on this DVD are crisp and sharp. The bad news is that Columbia is releasing Shemp shorts in great abundance, they are already releasing remade shorts, which are usually inferior to the originals. Case in point here is "Bubble Trouble," a remake of "All Gummed Up." If Columbia has any inkling of what Stooges fans want, they would stick to the original shorts for distribution, and return to the remakes at a later date. Columbia has also made the mistake of DVDing three Curly shorts that were filmed after his initial stroke (Why release "Uncivil Warbirds" instead of "Uncivil Warriors"?) In any event, this DVD is worth getting, since the quality is picture perfect.

Besides "Curly Classics", this one ranks as my second favorite Three Stooges DVD; the excellent shorts "Termites Of 1938" and "Dizzy Doctors" are worth the price of this disc! I know some people have wondered why Columbia included "Brideless Groom" here, owing to the fact that it's an often-used public domain film. Well, for the Stooges "completist", it would be wrong if it weren't included at some point. I will say that the quality of the film on this disc is markedly better than some of the really grainy, bad quality prints used in some of the cheaper priced Stooges discs!

A great DVD overall, but some suggestions to Columbia: I think we all could do without the annoying "pinball machine" intro, and the VERY annoying "slot machine" intro on the newer DVD's! Also, start making the discs so the shorts can be played continuously instead of stopping after each one!

For the most part, the shorts included here are great, even though most of them don't really fit in with the supposed theme of medical matters or being doctors. The shorts included are:

'Dizzy Doctors' (1937), the title short. This is a really strong and funny entry, with the boys forced by their wives to go out and get jobs instead of sleeping all day and being lazy. They find work as salesmen for Brighto, which they mistakenly believe is cleaning fluid. They eventually find out it's really medicine, and while hiding from a cop whose uniform they destroyed and a man whose car they ruined, they get into the back of an ambulance and wind up at a hospital, where they begin selling and demonstrating Brighto. Maybe not one of their topmost classics, but I'd consider it a strong second-tier classic.

'Termites of 1938' finds them working as exterminators who are called to a fancy party because the dimwitted maid of the lady of the house accidentally called Acme Exterminators instead of Acme Escort Bureau. They don't realise that the guests believe they are from an escort service, and for awhile the guests are imitating their uncouth table manners. The charade falls apart while they're trying to play musical instruments, when a bunch of mice get loose and they're able to get started with exterminating the place, in the process tearing the house apart, of course. When the errant husband of the hostess comes home, things get ugly. Another strong second-tier classic.

'Brideless Groom' (1947) seems to be most people's favorite Shemp short, and it probably is his most famous short. While it is hysterically funny and an undisputed classic, I personally don't hold it as my favorite from the Shemp era (though it probably would be somewhere on my Top 10 list). It also seems as though even most people who ordinarily dismiss him out of hand or don't like to watch him just because he wasn't his equally hilarious baby brother really like this short.

'The Tooth Will Out' (1951) was originally intended for inclusion in the awful 'Merry Mavericks,' the short that was released just prior to this one, but the scene in the dentist's office ran so long that it had to be left out of the final finished product. Instead of throwing the footage away, it was reused and made into its own short. The first half is great. The beginning, showing the boys losing two jobs in fast succession and then being chased down the street by a cleaver-wielding chef, hearkens back to a lot of their shorts from the Thirties and early Forties. It's also kind of uncommon to see one of their shorts shot in an outdoor location, even for just one scene, by this point in their career, since Columbia's budget had declined so much that more often than not they were reduced to filming everything in an apartment or some other indoor location. The scenes in the dental school are also pretty good. However, the pace just slows down and it gets much less funny in the dentist's office. The Old West setting also kind of gives the short a schizophrenic feel; I know it originated in footage from one of their Western shorts (a genre that never really suited them), but the first half seemingly takes place in the modern era. It's one of those cases where the individual scenes are funny, but taken together, they just don't flow well or feel very even. They're more like sketches than a coherent whole. The ending is also pretty abrupt.

'Listen, Judge' (1952) contains recycled elements from earlier shorts ('A-Plumbing We Will Go' [1940], 'They Stooge to Conga' [1943], 'An Ache in Every Stake' [1941], and 'Crash Goes the Hash' [1944]), but it's a shining example that a short that's remade from bits and pieces of earlier ones doesn't automatically have to be dull or unfunny. There are so many hysterical scenes in this one, like the exploding birthday cake, the boys' attempts to fix the doorbell by pulling the wiring out from the walls, and Shemp's attempts at preparing and cooking a turkey (in my opinion almost as funny as his attempts at cooking in 'Baby Sitters' Jitters' [1951]). Although as great as this short is, it's kind of sad to realise that 1952 was really their last consistently great year. There were some notable exceptions during the rest of their run, as there always are (such as 'Goof on the Roof' [1953] and 'Blunder Boys' [1955]), but from 1953 on the majority of their shorts were nothing more than remakes with liberal stock footage, not that many shorts with original plots and 100% fresh footage.

'Bubble Trouble' (1953) is just one of those pitiful remakes with so much stock footage that it's a wonder why the producer and director even bothered to shoot the new footage at all. Even the original, 'All Gummed Up' (1947), wasn't that great to begin with. Over half of the footage here is pirated from that earlier short; the only changes are that the scene showing the boys and Mrs. Flint (Christine McIntyre) eating the cake with bubblegum was moved from the end to the middle, and that Mr. Flint (Emil Sitka) turns into a gorilla instead of a baby, and Moe turns into a gorilla as well, after getting chased around the room and clobbered by Mr. Flint. At least here the ending scene was better than in the original.

These shorts may not all have anything to do with the self-professed theme of the disc, and there are two clunkers, but overall it's a pretty good collection.

This is an excellent DVD. The best one here, in my opinion, is BRIDELESS GROOM. A classic, a must-see. It's in my top 15 Shemp shorts. LISTEN JUDGE, BUBBLE TROUBLE, DIZZY DOCTORS, and THE TOOTH WILL OUT are also especially good. TERMITES OF 1938 was okay, but it dragged a little bit. Excellent DVD, maybe the best.

I've got the 12 pack as well as most of the other stand alone Stooge reels and they have never failed to induce uncontrollable laughter. To the reviewer that didn't like the grouping of similar themes, you have a point, but for the cost of a multi disc DVD player, and the slight hassle of hitting the random play button, you too could be happy. Embrace the technology.

Here's what you'll see in this collection: Moe,Larry and Curly by order of their wives take a job as salesmen. They try to sell Brighto,which they initially think is a multi-purpose cleaner. It removed paint from somebody's car & made a hole in a cop's uniform jacket. Not realizing Brighto is actually medicine,the Stooges' boss fires and rehires them. So they sell their entire supply to a hospital administrator,who owns the car the Stooges ruined! The Stooges exterminate termites at a black-tie party. Moe,Larry and Shemp fix a doorbell and serve as cooks and waiters at a party. After being fired from various jobs,they study dentistry and go out West to practice by the suggestion of their college dean. They also concoct a "fountain of youth" that works beautifully on their drugstore landlord's elderly wife but turns the landlord into a gorilla! Shemp,in order to receive bequeathed money by a deadline,marries a not-so-attractive chorus student. The titles are DIZZY DOCTORS(1937),TERMITES OF 1938(1938),BRIDELESS GROOM(1947),THE TOOTH WILL OUT(1951),LISTEN JUDGE(1952) and BUBBLE TROUBLE(1953). BRIDELESS GROOM was later used for 1956's HUSBANDS BEWARE. LISTEN JUDGE is basically the same as 1941's AN ACHE IN EVERY STAKE and 1943's THEY STOOGE TO CONGA. BUBBLE TROUBLE is a remake of 1947's ALL GUMMED UP. THE TOOTH WILL OUT is actually leftover footage from MERRY MAVERICKS.Director Edward Bernds decided to make another short out of the leftover footage rather than shelve it. Smart move,Ed! Other directors include Del Lord and Jules White.

First off, the title of this DVD compilation is not what Amazon originally listed it as -the cover illustration clearly identifies the title as Dizzy Doctors.
Lately Columbia TriStar Home Video has been releasing DVDs loosly around a theme (see Merry Mavericks which was mostly westerns, and Spook Louder, which featured the supernatural). Here the theme is medicine, and like the recent DVDs I've mentioned, the majority of the shorts on this compilation feature the line up of Moe, Larry and Shemp. One of these, Brideless Groom, is in the public domain and has been released in countless versions on both DVD and VHS. But this is the first ever released by Columbia TriStar and I'm hoping it will be a better transfer because of it.
With the exception of Brideless Groom, these are not necessarily among Shemp's best work with the Stooges. Bubble Trouble is a reworking of the earlier, and much superior, All Gummed Up, with liberal stock footage.
I am encouraged, though, by the release of the Shemp Stooges shorts. For decades, many Stooges fans felt Shemp got the short end of the stick. But they must be selling or Columbia TriStar wouldn't bother to keep releasing them. Now if they would only concentrate on selecting better representations of Shemp's work...

One of the shorts here is THE TOOTH WILL OUT. There's an interesting story behind it. When the Stooges made MERRY MAVERICKS, it was too long, and the extra footage was going to be cut. But it was decided the extra footage was too funny, so they shot some new scenes, and THE TOOTH WILL OUT was born.

I am glad that Columbia Tristar is recognizing Shemp, but the problem with this DVD is that they released one of the worst Shemp remakes in my opinion, "Bubble Trouble", but hey, I do enjoy every stooge short I see. Plus, they're releasing "Dizzy Doctors", one of Curly's best shorts. They are also finally releasing "Brideless Groom", a short that has been presented in poor quality in those cheap 1980s tapes for so long, and it is also considered the best short by Shemp fans. Now if they would only release some better remakes like "Of Cash And Hash" or "Loose Loot".