April, 2007
A MUSEUM WORTH POKING AROUND
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Last weekend my wife and I traveled to the Philadelphia International Film Festival, where I had the pleasure of presenting a number of Disney-related programs along with Roy E. Disney, whom I also interviewed on stage. We had a great time and ate ourselves silly (as I tend to do in Philadelphia), but the extracurricular highlight of the weekend was a trip to The Stoogeum, out in the suburbs.
If you’re wondering, The Stoogeum is just what you think it might be: a three-story museum devoted to The Three Stooges. What you couldn’t possibly anticipate—I know I didn’t—is the enormity of the collection or the ingenuity with which it’s displayed. This is no fan shrine; it’s a dazzling array of artifacts relating to the trio, lovingly assembled by Gary Lassin, the longtime president of the Three Stooges Fan Club, who inherited it some years ago from Larry Fine’s brother, Moe Feinberg.
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Gary deliberately chose an out-of-the-way location so he wouldn’t be overrun with visitors—even the exterior is unassuming—but his museum is well worth the trip. He asked if I would refrain from photographing the “jewels” he has accumulated, so people will still be dazzled when they make the pilgrimage and see the incredibly rare posters, lobby cards, stills, comic books, merchandise, artwork, costumes, personal memorabilia (Joe Besser’s steamer trunk from his vaudeville days, Shemp Howard’s discharge papers from the Army), and more.
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The visitor is greeted by amazingly detailed life-sized replicas of Moe, Larry and Curly that are intended to convey what these entertainers looked like in person—and how tall (or short) they stood. From there it’s into one themed room and display after another. Plasma screens show Stooges shorts continuously, and sounds from a recently-minted slot machine and pinball game fill the air. There’s even a beautifully appointed theater with poster-lined walls where films are shown.
Gary consulted several professional museum designers before selecting the right person for the job, and then rode herd over them to make his dream come to life. (A wall of comic strips and newspaper panel cartoons breaks the unwritten museum rule of not displaying anything lower or higher than a certain point on the wall. Gary wanted to use every square inch, and the result is very effective. He also wanted the interior to reflect the black & white world that the Stooges inhabited; at first his designer protested, but then realized that the color of the items on display would prevent the rooms from looking gray and dull.) As he put it, “I wasn’t going to do this twice. It had to be right the first time.” It most certainly is.
Even my wife, who is no fan of the Stooges, was impressed with The Stoogeum. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. For more information, you can contact Gary Lassin at P.O. Box 747, Gwynedd Valley , PA 19437 or via e-mail.
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One of the shows at the Film Festival was called Disney Rarities, and it’s a rare occasion indeed to see 35mm prints of Alice and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons from the 1920s on a theater screen. It never fails to amaze me how even the most primitive shorts still play for an audience, their simple gags and primitive special effects working their charms just as they did eighty years ago.
As you may know, the Disney company has only recently won back the rights to Oswald from Universal. I’m happy to report that I will be hosting a DVD of restored prints with newly-commissioned music scores set for release in December as part of the Walt Disney Treasures series.
Yes, the Treasures series has come back from the dead. We’ll have three new releases this year: Oswald, The Chronological Donald Duck Vol. 4, and a brand-new Disneyland set featuring a feature-length documentary about the origins of the park. We’re still planning all the extra features and interviews, but I can promise you that there will be lots of goodies.
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If there’s one thing that bugs me it’s what I call “press-release journalism,” whereby a reporter swallows verbatim whatever an interview subject has to sell, without any independent knowledge or research. The latest example of this appears in a spate of articles about the highly-touted Real-D process, which has been used most recently for the Disney animated release Meet the Robinsons.
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I expect the people involved with this process to toot their own horn, but the reporters who have tried to put the current trend into context are perpetuating myths about 3-D movies of the 1950s.
In the Los Angeles Times, Joseph Menn wrote, "Today's 3-D is nothing like the gimmicky days of cheesy monster flicks watched through green-and-red glasses. Advances include polarized glasses in only one shade that ensure each eye sees only the image intended for it."
A more recent story circulated by the Associated Press talks about industry-wide enthusiasm for 3-D and states, “Today's 3-D technology is far more advanced than that used in the 1950s, the heyday of gimmicky 3-D films. Previous 3-D systems projected two images on the movie screen, one for each eye. That required the use of red and blue lenses or even glasses with mechanized shutters that opened and closed quickly to separate the images.”
Jeff Joseph, the aficionado behind two World 3-D Festivals at Hollywood ’s Egyptian Theater, has tried to correct these mistakes, to no avail. As he wrote to reporter Menn, “Somehow, the "gimmicky days of cheesy monster flicks watched through green-and-red glasses" has become a journalistic trope; it is completely false.”
As anyone who attended the 3-D Festival last year can tell you, we all watched an incredible array of shorts and features with Polaroid glasses, and for a small fee were able to upgrade from cardboard to comfortable plastic. No shutters were involved.
What’s more, those films—shown with dual projectors on a highly reflective silver screen—produced three-dimensional effects that can stand up to anything the “new, improved” system has to offer. Even in a cheap two-reeler like The Three Stooges’ Spooks, a hypodermic needle held up to the camera seems to be extending right into the auditorium, almost within arm’s reach!
Red-and-green glasses were used when 3-D films had a brief resurgence in the 1970s and Universal reissued The Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space in single-strip prints. They were also used for the 3-D comic books that had a spurt of popularity in the 1950s.
But apparently no one wants to hear that. Myth has become fact, and new is always better, especially in Hollywood .
Incidentally, if you want to become involved in saving 3-D films of the past, and helping audiences to discover them, check out the nonprofit 3-D Film Preservation Fund at the website.
