NYUK, NYUK, NYUK
THREE STOOGES SHORTS ARE COLORIZED FOR A NEW AUDIENCE

By Steve Marinucci
Published Aug. 20, 2004, San Jose (CA) Mercury News

Remember the furor back in the '80s when film studios first added color to black-and-white movie classics, with the idea of heightening their appeal for a new generation?
Fans thought it was something akin to sacrilege for ''Casablanca,'' ''Yankee Doodle Dandy,'' some Shirley Temple films and many others to be altered by people who had nothing to do with their making.
Now comes a new offense -- the Three Stooges in color!
Go ahead, chuckle. But for fans, any tampering with the Stooges' comedy shorts sounds like a knucklehead idea.
After all, the Three Stooges were those gifted physical comedians who employed the silent-film style of visual comedy well into the ''talkies'' era.
Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard were active in films from their movie debut in 1933 in the Paramount short ''Hollywood on Parade'' until Curly suffered a stroke in 1947. They inspired belly laughs not only from a couple of generations of filmgoers but also several generations of TV viewers.
Shemp Howard (Moe and Curly's brother, who had worked with them in their vaudeville act) initially replaced Curly in 1947 in ''Hold That Lion,'' which featured a cameo by Curly and marked the only time the three Howard brothers appeared together on film. And then after Shemp's death in 1955, Joe De Rita and Joe Besser each played the third Stooge.
On Aug. 10, Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment released two new Stooges DVDs, each with four shorts that can be viewed in either black-and-white or color. Five of the eight shorts are new to DVD. Titled ''Goofs on the Loose'' and ''Stooged & Confused,'' each DVD has color added by West Wing Studios, using a process dubbed Chromacolor.
The ''Goofs on the Loose'' DVD features ''Men in Black'' (1934), ''The Sitter Downers'' (1937), ''Punch Drunks'' (1934) and ''Playing the Ponies'' (1937).
''Stooged & Confused'' offers ''Violent Is the Word for Curly'' (1935), ''No Census, No Feeling'' (1940), ''An Ache in Every Stake'' (1941) and ''You Nazty Spy'' (1940).
With an option Columbia calls Chromachoice, one can switch easily while viewing between color and black-and-white by using a button on the remote.
After releasing dozens of Stooges shorts on videotape, Columbia put out thefirst Stooges DVD, ''Curly Classics'' with six shorts, in 1998. Since then, it has released more than 15 additional discs containing both shorts and feature films. The shorts appear to have been transferred with little or no restoration, but some of the features look very clean.
As a Stooges fan since childhood, I was wary about the new DVDs. The Stooges in color? Hey, Moe! Hey, Larry! Get me outta here!
After watching them, my feelings are mixed. The DVD menus on the older discs, which used silly animation that the viewer couldn't interrupt, have been replaced by cleaner and more practical menus that allow a viewer to go right to the films.
The Chromacolor picture isn't as washed out as many color-added films, and it looks better on the later films than the earlier ones. The most recent, ''An Ache in Every Stake'' (1941), looks almost as if it had been filmed in color.
When watching in black-and-white, there's some noticeable improvement in sharpness and clarity, most visible on the newer films. Columbia says the films have been restored from the original negatives and remastered in high-definition.
Misgivings about the color aside, the films themselves, all featuring Curly, are very enjoyable. ''Men in Black'' depicts the Stooges as bumbling doctors in a hospital where the intercom incessantly pages ''Doctor Howard, Doctor Fine, Doctor Howard.'' This was the only Stooges film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short.
''Punch Drunks'' spotlights Curly as a boxer who loses his memory whenever he hears the song ''Pop Goes the Weasel.'' Part of the fun is seeing the extremes to which Larry will go to keep the song in Curly's head.
In ''Violent Is the Word for Curly'' the three impersonate professors and sing the charming song ''Swinging the Alphabet.''
''An Ache in Every Stake'' has the Stooges delivering ice on a stifling day, which leads to all sorts of complications.
In ''No Census, No Feeling,'' the boys play census takers. There's one hilarious exchange when Moe doesn't realize he's talking with Curly until he hears the familiar, ''Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.''
In ''The Sitter Downers,'' the Stooges attempt to build a house so they can get married.
In ''Playing the Ponies,'' they train a horse to race.
In ''You Nazty Spy,'' Moe does a hilarious parody of Hitler, one that rivals Charlie Chaplin's in ''The Great Dictator.'' (Moe reprises it in ''I'll Never Heil Again,'' 1941, which is not on these discs.)
Both new DVDs contain the same special features: a promotional trailer for Stooges discs and a short feature on the coloring process.
If these discs sell well, we're sure to see more in color. But too bad the number of shorts per DVD has shrunk from six on the pre-color sets to four. And surely Columbia has some rare footage of the Stooges lying around in a vault. It would be nice to use in additional special features.
Will I watch these discs again? Probably. But it's likely that I'll see the color versions just out of curiosity. When I want to really enjoy the films, I'll go for black-and-white. That's how they were meant to be seen, then and now.


CAPTION: PHOTO: COLUMBIA TRISTAR HOME ENTERTAINMENT
A scene from ''Men in Black'' on the ''Goofs on the Loose'' DVD, in the original and color versions.
PHOTO: COLUMBIA TRISTAR HOME ENTERTAINMENT
Moe Howard, left, Curly Howard and Larry Fine in one of their recently released shorts on DVD.

Starr gazing turns fuzzy

By Steve Marinucci
Published Aug. 11, 2004, San Jose (CA.) Mercury News

STARR-GAZING TURNS FUZZY

Residents of St. Augustine, Fla., were surprised Thursday to see a man identified as former Beatle Ringo Starr at a local hotel. Stories in the St. Augustine Daily Record, on Friday and Saturday said he played the piano, toured a museum and later sat in with a local group. Two stories appeared on St. Augustine.com, the paper's Internet arm, which has a picture of the man at www.staugustine.com/stories/080604/new2493536.shtml.
The man in the photo, wearing a black T-shirt with a Volkswagen Beetle on it, appears to have a different hairline and more of a paunch than past pictures of Starr. Other newspapers picked up the story from the Associated Press.
Problem is, it wasn't Ringo. Ringo's publicist, Elizabeth Freund in New York, confirmed that the former Beatle was in England last week.