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Nertsery Rhymes (1933) - Ted Healy and His Stooges

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Offline Paul Pain

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https://threestooges.net/filmography/episode/199
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024379/



It's a new sequence we see here.  NERTSERY RHYMES is the first short film featuring Ted Healy and His Stooges, and this was produced, in technicolor, 3 years after the quartet starred in SOUP TO NUTS.

This short was, like ROAST BEEF AND MOVIES, produced as a way to put cheap comedic filler around film cut from other productions.  As a result, we get two long, tiresome, and uninteresting song-and-dance sequences of such rejected film.  These take about 8 minutes of the film and badly interrupt what is fantastic interaction between Ted and the Stooges.  The best music/singing ironically comes from the "comedic" actors, who show here that they can really sing.

Ted and the Stooges, in these Moe, Larry, and Curly, really have a great dynamic.  He does a great job playing "Pop" to these overgrown manchildren, which is funny because Ted was between Shemp and Moe's ages!  Thry slap, they smack, they eye gouge, and they fall.  Everything is smooth.

Particularly, I enjoyed Curly's "musical head" leading into Ted singing.  Such little bits really show their teamwork.  It's a real shame that Ted was such a louse and a drunkard, because he would have made a great foil in some of the shorts the boys would go on to make without him.

I want to knock on a closet door and have a beautiful woman come out.

9/10 [poke] [poke] [poke] [poke] [poke] [poke] [poke] [poke] [poke]
#1 fire kibitzer


Offline metaldams

I’ll review the film later, but that movie poster - my Lord!  Ted Healy is the only thing G rated in that poster.
- Doug Sarnecky


Offline metaldams

      The potential is there, but The Three Stooges as we know them aren’t in full swing yet.  There are two reasons for this, MGM and Ted Healy.  MGM just couldn’t bring themselves to make a straight comedy short.  It’s almost like such a pursuit is beneath them, hence the need to pad these things with cutting room floor musical numbers.  I realize there is an audience for this stuff, I get the choreography aspect, but to a guy like me, all I see is a sea of pretty legs moving in synchronicity to some song I would never voluntarily listen to.  It’s basically padding and a way for MGM to show what big productions they have.  The comic gods doth frown.  Bah!

      As far as Healy himself, he can deliver a comic monologue and comes across as a guy who likes a woman or ten and delivering a slap or ten.  A bit more adult than The Three Stooges at Columbia.  He can sing a song too, as can The Three Stooges themselves and with what one sees here, you’d have to wonder how they’d all fare in a Paramount style Marxian comic musical number.  Healy is interesting, but being the head guy, the other Stooges become more alike and Moe is the one who is least like his future persona.  Healy, like I said, is interesting, but he’s not angry Moe interesting.  When Healy gets the musical bonk on the head to Curly, he’s more casual than Moe would be and The Three Stooges all act in unison to the violence instead of being deeper individual personas we all know and love.  In other words, the chemistry is totally different.

      Still, there’s a ton of energy in this thing and without the Moe persona, the boys are fun to watch in their own right.  We do get future Columbia short bits like, “little fly upon the wall” and the “$2-you don’t know my father.”  This makes me wonder how much of what we see in the Columbia shorts are holdovers from the Healy stage days.  I’m sure not every bit they did with Healy on stage was filmed with Healy.  It is interesting seeing the boys in technicolor and Bonnie Bonnell deserves a mention as the attractive female straight role to Ted and the boys.

      Historically interesting and always entertaining when Ted and the boys are on screen.  It would have been nice to see the four at Hal Roach, Vitaphone or some other studio not afraid to make straight forward comedy shorts, but I’m still glad this exists.
- Doug Sarnecky


Offline Paul Pain

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Ted Healy is the only thing G rated in that poster.

Care to explain?  Larry at least seems G rated to me...
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Offline Umbrella Sam

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Interesting as a historical curiosity, and nice to see the lineup with Curly in Technicolor, but this short is incredibly unorganized and clearly just a showcase for MGM dance numbers (keep in mind that this was the early 1930s, before MGM really got good with their dance numbers. The ones here are really boring).

Ted Healy’s delivery is alright, but it’s just weird to watch him as this dominating force while Moe is also there. He’s not like Moe who is domineering but otherwise just like the other two; he’s just a mean guy. To his credit, both he and the Stooges do well with their singing parts.

There are some gags representative of the future Stooges humor (the $1 bit comes to mind) and the Stooges at least have equal screen time with Healy (as compared with SOUP TO NUTS), but there’s just way too much padding for it to be a true Stooges vehicle. I saw PLANE NUTS a while ago and remember it being good, so MGM could do this right. This one’s alright, but still not entirely representative of what the Stooges (or even the Stooges and Healy) could do.

6 out of 10
“I’ll take a milkshake...with sour milk!” -Shemp (Punchy Cowpunchers, 1950)

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Offline metaldams

Care to explain?  Larry at least seems G rated to me...

Larry may have to ditch the drums, but do I really need to explain further?  LOL

Both ladies facing front have nipples popping out, the one with her back turned exposed side boob and the Stooges are in an - unusual pose for them.  I saw the Stooge pose at first and thought,  “Nah, typical Metaldams dirty mind tricks,” but then I saw the boobs below.  I’m convinced the artist they commissioned got paid diddly squat for drawing for an MGM two reeler and MGM themselves probably barely cared about the poster  so the artist decided to have fun.
- Doug Sarnecky


Offline Paul Pain

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Larry may have to ditch the drums, but do I really need to explain further?  LOL

Both ladies facing front have nipples popping out, the one with her back turned exposed side boob and the Stooges are in an - unusual pose for them.  I saw the Stooge pose at first and thought,  “Nah, typical Metaldams dirty mind tricks,” but then I saw the boobs below.  I’m convinced the artist they commissioned got paid diddly squat for drawing for an MGM two reeler and MGM themselves probably barely cared about the poster  so the artist decided to have fun.

Yes, I noticed the boobies but I still think you're making Moe and Curly to be dirtier than they are.  Nah. [pie]  Now the woman in just her underwear...
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Offline metaldams

Yes, I noticed the boobies but I still think you're making Moe and Curly to be dirtier than they are.  Nah. [pie]  Now the woman in just her underwear...

The woman in her underwear I think is supposed to be Bonny, who in the actual film wasn’t wearing all that much.  Ted Healy’s girlfriend in real life.
- Doug Sarnecky


Offline HomokHarcos

I came in here to state how much I love the woman in the shoes song that Healy and the Stooges sing. (It starts at 12:38 in the YouTube link)

It's incredibly catchy and probably my favorite song the Stooges ever sing in one of their films and makes the whole film for me. The scenes between Ted Healy and the Stooges are entertaining, but unfortunately most of it is recycled footage from other MGM movies that have nothing to do with the Ted Healy and the Stooges, and none of them are as great as the woman in the shoes song. I thought the film recycling got pretty bad in the late Columbia years, but at least it still featured The Three Stooges. The cutaways here completely ruin the pacing, and it would probably have been better as a one-reel short.

Now, I will go back to listening to the woman in the show song that they sing over and over again.


Offline metaldams

I came in here to state how much I love the woman in the shoes song that Healy and the Stooges sing. (It starts at 12:38 in the YouTube link)

It's incredibly catchy and probably my favorite song the Stooges ever sing in one of their films and makes the whole film for me. The scenes between Ted Healy and the Stooges are entertaining, but unfortunately most of it is recycled footage from other MGM movies that have nothing to do with the Ted Healy and the Stooges, and none of them are as great as the woman in the shoes song. I thought the film recycling got pretty bad in the late Columbia years, but at least it still featured The Three Stooges. The cutaways here completely ruin the pacing, and it would probably have been better as a one-reel short.

Now, I will go back to listening to the woman in the show song that they sing over and over again.

That is a cool little number.  Really does make me wonder how’d they fare at Paramount with Marx style musical numbers.
- Doug Sarnecky


Offline HomokHarcos

That is a cool little number.  Really does make me wonder how’d they fare at Paramount with Marx style musical numbers.
Paramount probably would have been a better creative fit for them. It was the best studio for comedies a the time, along with Hal Roach. MGM, on the other hand, didn't knew how to use comedians properly and seemed to always force their style on them.


Offline Big Chief Apumtagribonitz

Has anyone else noticed that the slapping/poking/bonking sound effects are Columbia effects?


Offline HomokHarcos

I wish Ted Healy and His Stooges made short films at somewhere other than MGM just to see how good they were with him. These 5 shorts are not very good compared to The Three Stooges at Columbia, which used to make me think the problem was partly Ted Healy. But seeing how MGM misused almost every other comedian, I have to think the problem was actually MGM, who in these shorts put in a bunch of stock musical scenes.


Offline metaldams

I wish Ted Healy and His Stooges made short films at somewhere other than MGM just to see how good they were with him. These 5 shorts are not very good compared to The Three Stooges at Columbia, which used to make me think the problem was partly Ted Healy. But seeing how MGM misused almost every other comedian, I have to think the problem was actually MGM, who in these shorts put in a bunch of stock musical scenes.

I agree 100% with this statement.  I’d still rather see the boys without Ted, but I’d say the boys with Ted at Hal Roach or Vitaphone would have had better results than what we actually got.
- Doug Sarnecky


Offline I. Cheatam

Has anyone else noticed that the slapping/poking/bonking sound effects are Columbia effects?

Those were actually added by the person that uploaded it to give it a Columbia feel.