2 Shemp era 3 Stooges shorts coming to blu-ray (in 3-D!)

Twilight Time is releasing the Vincent Price 3-D movie THE MAD MAGICIAN and two bonus features are the 3-D 3 Stooges shorts PARDON MY BACKFIRE and SPOOKS. Duck!

Mad Magician, The (3D Blu-ray) »

 

Shemp is cool.

 

Shemp is my 2nd favorite stooge. So...cool.

 

Not counting the Mill Creek release of some of the Columbia 1960s films along with a couple of appearances with Curly in the 1940s this is the first time the Stooges have been released on Blu ... and in HD. Perhaps this had been in the planning for awhile and why the 3D shorts have been missing on reissues of the vol. 7 short releases?

 

Not sure about the DVD, but I do know Sony had these two shorts and The Mad Magician available as 3-D downloads on the PS3 store for a long while. So it's older work that they've licensed to Twilight Time.

 

To clarify, the shorts are still on the shorts collection, just not in the 3D format....

 

"knives are quiet"

 

Still trying to get thru the Black Box DVD set. Can't wait to see the Shemp stuff.

 

A great big chimney pansy!



The Three Stooges 149 Pardon My Backfire 1953 Moe, Larry, Shemp »

 

I like Phone Booth Follies

 

Shemp was once a male model...not many people are aware of that.

 

Curly fan here

 

Wow, I did the 3D transfers on these back in the 1980s, when things were very primitive and analogy.

 

Way too expensive IMO.

 

The anaglyph 3D transfers available in the black DVD boxset, Vidiot? There were also anaglyph 3D film prints made back then as well...

Derek

 

This was so long ago, I think they were only released on Betamax and VHS. Carson talked about them during the brief "3D Broadcast" fad in the early 1980s.

 

I remember seeing them on TV. I think they were shown with THE MASK when I saw them. Good times. Any chance you worked with Dan Symmes on them?

 

I'm still waiting for them to finally release the Stooges' "Sappy Pappies" on home video!

 

The name rings a bell. He had a company in North Hollywood, something like "LA3D" or something like that. I know he was terrific to deal with. Bear in mind this was back in the day of analog composite video, so things were very, very primitive then. We literally used pieces of masking tape on the monitor to figure out how to line up the Left Eye/Right Eye images. The guy later said that everybody loved the 3D on Spooks, so I think we lucked out on that one.

Nowadays, with pin-registered film scanners and digital processing, you can really tweak this stuff to the Nth degree. Depending on how much money you want to throw at it, you can do some really, really sophisticated stuff in order to fix many 3D problems that were very challenging even 10-15 years ago.

 

I don't remember those ever being on Beta/VHS in 3-D. Though they did show up on a (cough) "DVD of imprecise origin" some years ago.

 

I saw the anaglyph version broadcast on the air. Much later I acquired a "special" DVD that had a field sequential version of both shorts. I assume they came from a Japanese VHD, but I'm not sure.

 

I can't remember if they were sold on home video or only aired for broadcast. It was about 35 years ago, so...

 

I was insanely excited about this and ordered the Blu-Ray immediately.

Unfortunately someone (I think on this forum) elsewhere said that the transfers these will come from are problematic. What I don't know is how problematic they are and if the 3D effects are ruined. These will surely never be retransferred at this point, so I hope they got it done well enough this time!

 

I think it looks pretty good, having watched the two Stooges shorts last night. The downloads I had from my PS3 had compression artifacts that these don't have. So the actual HD scans seem to be quite nice. Some of the 3-D could have used some alignment, but most shots were fine. Aside from having Greg Kintz and Bob Furmanek* work on them, I don't think they could look much better. I'm quite pleased.


* I consider the 3-D Film Archive to be kind of a Hoffman/Gray tag team of 3-D blu-ray transfers.

 

The reviews on the Home Theater Forum that I read said the two shorts and the feature looked great on Blu-ray.