I have a video copy of the final 2 minutes of Hello Pop!, which is all that is left of that picture, I think.
It IS possible to have a copy of the final two minutes of HELLO POP! (1933). I got a copy on video back in the mid-1980's. How is this possible?
The final two minutes or so of HELLO POP! actually consists of a Technicolor musical number taken from a 1929 MGM musical feature. So if one has that, then in a way you have the finale of the lost MGM Ted Healy & His Stooges short.
The musical feature the number is from is entitled IT'S A GREAT LIFE starring The Duncan Sisters and Lawrence Gray, and although certainly not as rare as HELLO POP! it was a very hard film to find for many years. It's a black & white movie with three Technicolor sequences: a fashion show and the production numbers "The Hoosier Hop" and "I'm Sailing on a Sunbeam", the latter being the one reused four years later in HELLO POP! In the early days of its availability to TV evidently the only print of IT'S A GREAT LIFE available was missing the color parts, so the whole thing ran less than an hour (that's about 30 minutes missing!). But a complete print was eventually found (which is what I got a copy of back in the 1980's). Unfortunately the print looked like it was decomposing before my eyes, and the soundtrack sounded like it was recorded with a tornado in the room!
In the late 1990's when Turner Classic Movies finally ran it, naturally I was hoping and expecting to finally see a complete restored version, looking and sounding as good as all the other MGM films on TCM. And sure enough it looked and sounded great...EXCEPT it was missing the final color number! And that was the one used in HELLO POP! Then a few years later that number was found, but instead of inserting it back into the feature where it belonged, for some reason TCM would run it separately, occasionally as a "filler" between movies. And to make matters worse, in addition to us viewers never knowing when it would be shown, they ran it with absolutely no opening title or identification to tell us what it was, who was in it, or that it was part of a feature movie that they sometimes showed without this number included. It would just come on and most viewers were probably wondering what the heck they were seeing!
But there's a happy ending (no, they haven't found HELLO POP! yet). The complete movie IT'S A GREAT LIFE is now available through Warner Archives. Yes...complete. They have finally inserted the "I'm Sailing on a Sunbeam" number back into the movie, and in its correct place.
The number was edited slightly when it was used in HELLO POP! Deleted was a brief part in which The Duncan Sisters sang a few lines of the song "There's a Rainbow Round My Shoulder" and the movie's theme song "I'm Following You". Added was a brief scene wrapping up the story with Ted Healy, Bonnie Bonnell, and The Stooges.
The complete production number "I'm Sailing on a Sunbeam" can be seen on YouTube here:
And you can hear Lawrence Gray's 1929 Brunswick 78 record of the song here:
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So we can see at least a brief part of HELLO POP! even if it contains no shots of Ted & His Stooges.
