Today, July 23rd, is the 35th anniversary of a dark day in Stooges' history, and not due to any deaths. The local affiliate that broadcast them back then, 3 shows a day, 5 days a week, began cutting out the first 3-5 minutes of the last episode each day to add more useless commercials. Not all 190 shows were on then, but they were in multiples of 3, so the same 33% of the episodes were edited. It sure felt odd seeing shows "begin" when they did. For example, "Loco Boy Makes Good" opened with Curly shoving that cart towards the bad guy, knocking him out the window. And in "Beer Barrel Polecats," the show started with the beer boiling over the container. For "Healthy, Wealthy, and Dumb," Curly says "Oh boy, I hope I win this contest."
On June 4th, 1984, the channel changed its editing method, taking out bits and pieces here and there, sometimes with the obvious cut in the film. "I'm sawing a saw in half with a saw, see?" "Are you sure this cabinet will be in competent hands?" "Soitenly, we're all incompetent!"
These days, the current channel does a bit of both in many shows. The one that takes the cake (or pie, for the Stooges) is "We Want Our Mummy". The channel shows just 7:28 of the entire short, cut up so bad that nothing makes any sense.
So for 3.5 decades, the "slashing and trashing" of our favorite comedy group has been going on.
