Spooks! Totally Explained

Everything about Spooks totally explained

Spooks! is the 148th short subject starring American slapstick comedy team the Three Stooges. The trio made a total of 190 shorts for Columbia Pictures between 1934 and 1959.

Plot

The Stooges are private detectives that are hired to track down a kidnapped girl name Bea Bopper (Norma Randall). They decide to trace Bopper back to where she was last seen, which leads them to mad scientist Dr. Jeckyl (Philip Van Zandt) and his assistant, Mr. Hyde (Tom Kennedy). There is also a gorilla kept imprisoned in the house for experimental purposes. The Stooges arrive to rescue the kidnapped girl disguised as door-to door pie salesmen.
At one point, the Stooges encounter a bat with the "hidious, monsterous face" of Shemp on one close up shot (but the bat's face is normal on all other shots).

Production

Spooks! was the first of two shorts made by Columbia with the Stooges in 3-D, after the 3-D craze of 1953 began with Bwana Devil. It originally premiered on May 20, 1953 with the Columbia western Fort Ti (also in 3-D).
The Stooges' next short in the series, Pardon My Backfire was their next and final attempt at stereoscopic photography.

Technical notes

Both the Columbia 3-D Edmund O'Brien thriller Man in the Dark and Spooks! were originally sepia toned in order to allow for more light to pass through the Polaroid filters necessary for the dual-strip 3-D projection method of that time. The process didn't work as expected and the idea was dropped after these two productions. Spooks! is also the first short in the series filmed for flat widescreen. Although some films of this period were composed for the Academy aspect ratio and released in widescreen during the confusion, Spooks! was made on short enough notice that the full film is composed for a ratio of 1.75:1, Columbia's house aspect ratio at the time. Further shorts from then on were composed at 1.85:1.

Further Information

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