Something New Has Been Dug Up

Ted Healy Gives His Stooges The Customary Treatment

Missing Stooge Link Hello, Pop! (1933) Is On DVD

What goes more viral than a thought-lost movie turning up? Hello Pop! was found in a garden shed by an Australian collector who'd come between the 35mm print and oblivion most film faced when outback runs were finished. Word was that Hello Pop! had been lost in an MGM vault fire back in 1967 (along with London After Midnight, many others), but there's been suggestion that the negative was junked before that. It had never been shown on television or made available to rent. There probably weren't a handful of people who saw Hello, Pop! since 1933. Being that it features the Three Stooges at early stage, the short assumes greater interest than most any that ravage of time could give up. Lots would rather this surface than Magnificent Ambersons uncut, Stooge enthusiasm not having cooled as seems case with other comics. The five or so other MGM shorts w/Stooges have been TCM-shown and doled here and there on video. Most are low on laughs, but off the chart as curiosities, being best a reflection of misguided missiles Leo aimed at theatres as support for features more carefully thought out.

Ed Brophy Tries To Reason with "Children" That Are Larry, Curley, Moe

Dancing Drop-In From Another, and Unfinished, Film

How many drove hours or rode subways from a horizon to see Hello Pop! when it re-premiered at the Film Forum last year? And now there's Volume Three of Warner Archive's Classic Shorts From The Dream Factory to wrap rest of MGM Stooge subjects around this one resurrected from among rakes and weed eater. How to account for treasure kept in out-sheds? And yet that's where I came across 35mm during college-age search, old-timers storing nitrate alongside chickens laying, or corn in cribs (you wonder if it affected taste of the stuff when served). Hello Pop! is a little banged, but seems all there, amazing in itself for those eighty inclement years. Such rediscovery renders meaningless the question, Is Hello Pop! funny?. Fans will take what's there and levitate accordingly, as surely I would if that uncut Ambersons turned up.

My attraction to Hello Pop! is more Ted Healy than the Stooges. To these eyes, the man was a panic and all-time least people person of funny folk, not excluding W.C. Fields. Larry, Moe, Curly had been along to crab Ted's act, the three a definition of "stooge" as practiced by vaudeville. Healy held liquor badly and didn't pull slaps. I expect most relationships in the man's life went way of crack-up with the Stooges, but there's not sense he gave much of a damn. Healy reached apex as surly sidekick, the always-vinegar served with music and more mainstream comedy. Hello Pop! is easily confused (at least by me) with Hey, Pop!, a Roscoe Arbuckle Vitaphone comedy released but months before (were showmen and their patrons as puzzled?). Hello Pop! has impurities, not just those Healy-imposed, but music numbers scraped off floor that was The March Of Time, a Technicolor revue MGM had blown wads on and couldn't release for the thing being so incoherent. They'd write off waste by using what numbers were finished as "highlights" of otherwise frugal two-reelers like Hello Pop!. You can see a good chunk from The March Of Time by sit through the six shorts on a disc otherwise best recognized as altar upon which Ted Healy may be worshipped, but be warned, he doesn't like wise guys, and always leads with a slap.