Topic: How well were the late 1950s shorts doing commercially?

[HomokHarcos]

The mid 1950s was when they started getting lower budget with all the Shemp shorts, which had me wondering how well the films were doing in the theaters (pre revival from TV exposure).

[metaldams]

I literally have no numbers to answer this or frankly - any era of shorts as far as their numbers.  I’m not sure if short subjects were deemed a success based on rentals and amount of theaters played versus ticket sales since they were never or rarely considered the main attraction, but I could be wrong.

My Dad remembers seeing Saturday morning shows where there would maybe be a cartoon, a Stooge short and perhaps a Hercules or Vincent Price film.  This was late 50’s/early 60’s.  Not sure if this was the set up a few years earlier when the Besser shorts were being made (bear in mind they stopped producing them at the end of 1957).

[Paul Pain]

I know that around 1950 Columbia started re-releasing shorts from the 1930s and 1940s so as to increase their circulation right about the time they more or less cut the shorts department down to nothing except the Stooges and Andy Clyde.  Typically with shorts, a theater would purchase the rights to show a given short and be sent a copy to use.  With your major shorts stars, like The Three Stooges, Leon Errol, etc., having those shorts on the night's card could be the difference in a good night and a bad one.

To answer the question, profits for shorts really depended on the theaters purchasing the rights to show it.  What happened over time was that the run time of the features grew to be so long that it became too burdensome on the crowd to show a short or two before the feature.  There were just a handful of series that were popular enough to make it worthwhile for studios like Columbia to keep churning out their most popular stars.

[HomokHarcos]

I wish I still had a copy of Moe’s autobiography, because he mentioned them being named the most most successful shirt subject series of the early 1950s, even giving a source.

[Umbrella Sam]

I still have my copy of Moe’s autobiography and I assume Homok that you are referring to the fact that the Stooges won the Laurel awards for top two-reel moneymakers for the years 1950-1954. As proud as I’m sure they were of this achievement, it should be noted that there really wasn’t much competition in that field by this point.

Fairly recently, I got through the Harry Langdon biography, Little Elf and was intrigued at one point where the authors mentioned that the Columbia front office eventually told Jules White to only focus on Three Stooges shorts, because those were the only shorts that they could still sell. So clearly they were still profitable to some degree, otherwise they wouldn’t have continued making them. But as far as exactly how commercially successful they were, that I would have no idea.

[Freddie Sanborn]

The Andy Clyde series was released into 1956, so they were still marketable as late as the mid-50’s. I sense that by then most exhibitors rented the Stooges to show at Saturday matinees. No adult who bought a ticket to see Anatomy of a Murder wanted to sit through Sappy Bullfighters beforehand.

[metaldams]

The Andy Clyde series was released into 1956, so they were still marketable as late as the mid-50’s. I sense that by then most exhibitors rented the Stooges to show at Saturday matinees. No adult who bought a ticket to see Anatomy of a Murder wanted to sit through Sappy Bullfighters beforehand.

You’re probably right, and that would line up with my Dad’s own childhood stories of just a few years later.

I do wonder during the Besser era, pre TV revival, if it was only the Besser shorts that were getting shown or if the old Curly shorts were also being shown to kids.