In 1969, the Three Stooges didn't have many offers to do any stooging so their manager Norman Maurer came up with an idea. Norman was a former comic book artist (at one point, the partner of Joe Kubert) who'd married Moe's daughter and become a successful producer and writer of both live-action movies and animation, some of which featured the Stooges. He was also a very clever man with a good head for business. I worked with him years later on the Richie Rich cartoon show and I always thought there was a little of Richie in Norman.
At the time, he had some connections in the TV syndication market and an idea on how to put Larry, Moe and Curly Joe into a new series even though they were getting too old to do much of their traditional physical comedy. Moe Howard was 72, Larry Fine was 67 and Joe DeRita was a mere 60 but in poor health. Still, all three still liked the idea of performing and really liked the idea of travelling, especially if someone else was going to pay for it.
This led Norman to envision a series he called Kooks Tour, which would be a kind of funny travelogue. Each week, the Stooges — ostensibly retired — could travel somewhere and get into as much mischief as they could handle but a big star of the show would be the scenery. There were, Norman knew, tourist bureaus that would contribute to the budget of such a program in order to bring it to their corner of the world and he worked a deal with the folks who made and sold Chryslers to kick in for some product placement.
Still, that budget would have to be pretty low. They would do it with 16mm cameras and a large part of it would be travel footage with Stooge narration, and with Norman's whole family working on it, both in front of and behind the cameras. In the clip below, one of the two male campers is Norman and the other is his son Jeff, who writes TV under the name Jeffrey Scott. (Hi, Jeff! Lunch soon?) The woman who encounters Curly Joe is Lois Goleman, Norman Maurer's administrative assistant. Joan Howard Maurer, Norman's wife and Moe's daughter (and a terrific lady I haven't seen in too many years) was credited for Costumes. Norman wrote and directed and also wound up stunt-doubling for various Stooges in some shots.
They all travelled to Wyoming and Idaho to shoot an hour special that Norman thought he could use to sell a half-hour weekly series…and the idea might have worked but Larry took ill. Before filming was completed, he suffered a stroke that ended his performing career and therefore the Three Stooges as we knew them. There was later a brief attempt to replace him in the act with longtime Stooge supporting player Emil Sitka but it went nowhere. Larry and then Moe passed in '75 and Joe left us in '93.
Maurer gave up on Kooks Tour as a series but edited the completed footage as well as he could. He recouped some of the investment by releasing it into the home movie marketplace and later when home video came along, it had a brief life there, billed as the Three Stooges' final film. I find something oddly pleasant about it. I guess I like the idea that those three nitwits really did retire and spend their last years travelling together and being less violent buddies who still got into trouble. Here's about ten minutes of it…
