The timing of this short to come right after Squareheads, with more or less the same fictional setting, as well as the same king (Vernon Dent), the same leading bad guy (Phil Van Zandt), and the exact same stage set, is peculiar. Actually, this is only the second in a series of three consecutive shorts that use that set, though in the third in the series, The Hot Scots, it represents a Scottish castle in the (then-) present day. It's as if the Stooges got stuck in a fictitious medieval castle and could only move from one story to another within that setting.
This is also the short in which the allusions to Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, which went no further than a rather flippant attitude toward decapitation in Squareheads, take the unambiguous form of the direct borrowing of material, namely when Old King Cole refers to "the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la!"
Someone correct me if I am mistaken, but I believe this is the only major role played by Vernon Dent in which he never displays a foul temper. Maybe all he needed to tame him was a Santa-Claus beard.
The business with the showgirl in the box and the wolf whistles of the men who follow her around is painfully juvenile--not amusingly juvenile, like much of the Stooges' humor, but just dumb and embarrassing.
On the other hand, the business that "Mergatroyd" (that seems to be the spelling, at least on this site) does after he has found a large pair of patterned men's underpants snagged on his saw—first sheepishly exclaiming, "Oh, sire!" and then, with a facial expression that I simply don't know how to describe, casting the shorts away—is outstanding.
