Spooks!
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| Spooks! | |
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| Directed by | Jules White |
| Produced by | Jules White |
| Written by | Felix Adler |
| Starring | Moe Howard Larry Fine Shemp Howard Philip Van Zandt Tom Kennedy Norma Randall Frank Mitchell |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
| Release date(s) | May 20, 1953 (premiere) July 15, 1953 (general release) |
| Running time | 15' 44" |
| Language | English |
| Preceded by | Tricky Dicks |
| Followed by | Pardon My Backfire |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Spooks! is the 148th short subject starring American slapstick comedy team the Three Stooges. The trio made a total of 190 shorts for Columbia Pictures between 1934 and 1959.
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[edit] Plot
The Stooges are private detectives that are hired to track down a kidnapped girl name Bea Bopper (Norma Randall). They decide to trace Bopper back to where she was last seen, which leads them to mad scientist Dr. Jeckyl (Philip Van Zandt) and his assistant, Mr. Hyde (Tom Kennedy). There is also a gorilla kept imprisoned in the house for experimental purposes. The Stooges arrive to rescue the kidnapped girl disguised as door-to door pie salesmen.
At one point, the Stooges encounter a bat with the "hidious, monsterous face" of Shemp on one close up shot (but the bat's face is normal on all other shots).
[edit] Production
Spooks! was the first of two shorts made by Columbia with the Stooges in 3-D, after the 3-D craze of 1953 began with Bwana Devil. It originally premiered on May 20, 1953 with the Columbia western Fort Ti (also in 3-D).
The Stooges' next short in the series, Pardon My Backfire was their next and final attempt at stereoscopic photography.
[edit] Technical notes
Both the Columbia 3-D Edmund O'Brien thriller Man in the Dark and Spooks! were originally sepia toned in order to allow for more light to pass through the Polaroid filters necessary for the dual-strip 3-D projection method of that time. The process did not work as expected and the idea was dropped after these two productions.
Spooks! is also the first short in the series filmed for flat wide-screen. Although some films of this period were composed for the Academy aspect ratio and released in wide-screen during the confusion, Spooks! was made on short enough notice that the full film is composed for a ratio of 1.75:1, Columbia's house aspect ratio at the time. Further shorts from then on were composed at 1.85:1.
[edit] Further reading
- Moe Howard and the Three Stooges; by Moe Howard (Citadel Press, 1977).
- The Complete Three Stooges: The Official Filmography and Three Stooges Companion; by Jon Solomon (Comedy III Productions, Inc., 2002).
- The Three Stooges Scrapbook; by Jeff Lenburg, Joan Howard Maurer, Greg Lenburg (Citadel Press, 1994).
- The Three Stooges: An Illustrated History, From Amalgamated Morons to American Icons; by Michael Fleming (Broadway Publishing, 2002).
- One Fine Stooge: A Frizzy Life in Pictures; by Steve Cox and Jim Terry (Cumberland House Publishing, 2006).
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