I'm not sure what this means, but remember that all available evidence shows that Harry Cohn LIKED the stooges, considered them good luck, and kept them on and working to some degree until the day he died. Consider the many thousands of actors over the years, at all the studios, who were dumped, blacklisted, unwillingly retired, etc. with no notice, no severance, no pension, nothing, during all those many years that the stooges were active. The stooges were coddled compared to most. Someone was watching over their asses all those years, through the illnesses, the deaths, the cast changes, and the ever- diminishing quality. No one else got that kind of slack, and let's face it, it's probable that that overseer was Harry Cohn. Remember that the stooges got canned on the day of Harry's funeral, which tells me that no one else at Columbia cared a rat's ass for them and indeed couldn't wait one more day to be rid of them. Yes, the Dead Shemps are atrocious, even fifty years after I first saw them I can hardly bring myself to watch them, and maybe business was business and they had to be patched together for distribution somehow, and Cohn certainly has the reputation of being one of the most vicious businessmen of all time, but they didn't have to renew with Besser. The whole thing could have ended there. Cohn could have ended it at any juncture from 1946 on, really, he had unassailable clout, but he didn't. He kept them on, even though their economic value to Columbia from, let's say, 1953 to 1957 was, I would guess, zero. He was still taking care of the team ( at least Moe and Larry, once Shemp was gone ) maybe because he still considered the stooges his talisman, maybe just to make his good luck charm a few more bucks. Agreed that nobody, not the studio nor the family, read Babe's nor Shemp's grave health situations correctly, certainly not by the light of our seventy-years-later medical knowledge, but aside from those two medical and business catastrophes, and always bearing in mind our current knowledge that, despite the decades-long rumors, the stooges actually received regular raises and were paid fairly, and despite production abortions like the Dead Shemps, Harry Cohn's Columbia treated the Three Stooges pretty well.
