In addition to his voice role in the film “Snow White,” Mel Blanc, the late legendary voice artist, famously known as “The Man of a Thousand Voices,” also lent his vocal talents to the work of the Three Stooges, giving life to a puppet named Quinto the Jester, the Stooges’ ventriloquist dummy in their 1961 movie, Snow White and the Three Stooges.
In addition to Blanc, during the filming of this movie, the Stooges were also accompanied by co-stars Edson Stroll, Patricia Medina, and Guy Rolfe.
A Band Of The Same Name
The Stooges’ legacy also remains today in the form of the iconic rock band, The Stooges. Formed in the ‘70s, though originally this popular Ann Arbor, Michigan-based band went by “The Psychedelic Stooges,” eventually, the rock group lead singer Iggy Pop, got the idea to name their band The Stooges after watching “The Three Stooges”: Moe, Larry, and Curly.
According to one interview published in Clash Magazine, Pop said the following about Ron Asheton, co-founder and guitarist of the band: “It was inevitable that anything creative that Ron did in his life was gonna come back to the Stooges, because he’d already spent probably seventeen thousand man hours watching The Three Stooges’ films when he was supposed to be doing something else since he was twelve.” Throughout the band’s career, this group of rock stars also went by “Iggy” and “The Stooges and Iggy Pop.”
No Female Fans?
Despite the comedy group’s historic popularity, which has seemed to always attract men to the show, it is a common notion that most women do not enjoy the work of “The Three Stooges.” Contrary to this popular belief, while there are plenty of female fans, some women still disregard the Stooges’ niche style of comedy as “silly”.
However, overall, the notion that women do not enjoy the comedy of the Stooges is a largely inaccurate generalization. The theory behind this idea is that most women tend not to favor physical or slapstick comedy. This phenomena is explained by one AMC writer: “Women respond to seeing someone they dislike suffering pain with empathy, and men with pleasure at another’s misfortune.”
Stooge Reboot
Though for years famed filmmakers Bobby and Peter Farrelly, most known for their work on the comedy “Dumb and Dumber”, first tried to replicate the Three Stooges’ in 2009—a reboot which would have involved actor Sean Penn, playing the role of Larry, Benicio del Toro as Moe, and Jim Carrey as Curly (a role which would lead Carrey to gain 40 pounds of extra weight for the part)—this attempt eventually fell apart.
Eventually, in 2012, the Farrelys were finally able to bring the Stooges back to life in “The Three Stooges: The Movie”, a film which was uniquely composed of three short, stand-along Stooge stories. The final movie starred Chris Diamantopolous as Moe, Sean Hayes as Larry, and Will Sasso as Curly. “It’s by far the riskiest project we’ve ever done, without question, but it is also the one closest to our hearts,” said Farelly brothers Peter and Bobby, in one statement released about their movie.
The Evil Master Manipulator Behind The Stooges’ Success
Though Harry Cohn, president and chief of production at Columbia Pictures was widely praised and greatly talented in terms of his abilities to produce high quality films, ultimately building Columbia Pictures into one of the largest known movie enterprises in Hollywood, he is also infamously known as a largely unlikeable, manipulative, greedy man. His disagreeable nature is reflective of one remark made by Cohn, who once remarked that running his studio was “better than being a pimp.” Along his road to success, he quickly earned a highly unfavorable reputation in the Hollywood. For those in the movie business, he was known as a man who was highly combative, and an overall generally unpleasant individual; one who took pleasure in terrorizing his workers. While widely known as one of the leading figures in the Stooges’ rise to fame, the successful Stooge trio was not immune to the wrath of Cohn.
As an actor employed under Cohn, Curly witnessed the cruelty of the chief of Columbia production firsthand. Even after suffering from multiple, debilitating strokes, Cohn completely disregarded the physical and emotional well-being of the actor, and still forced the weakened actor to continue working in his highly weakened state. In addition to his notoriously unrealistic expectations for both his actors and his employees, Cohn was also regarded as a “master manipulator,” and was known to take advantage of the Stooges finances on multiple occasions. Despite the Stooges’ great success, still Cohn kept the stars largely underpaid for the entirety of their career. Even when the Stooges’ short films experienced a television resurgence, generating millions in profits, still Cohn gave little of these profits to any one of the Stooge trio.