Steve Billnitzer suggests I share this with you. Through next Friday (4/19), the Fry's Electronics shops seem to be selling the 20-DVD Three Stooges: The Ultimate Collection for $34.99. That's in their stores only, not online. Steve got the info from this ad so you might want to verify before you scurry on over, just in case they don't have them in the one near you.
Think of it: You can get all 190 of the Stooges' Columbia shorts (plus selected Shemp, Joe Besser and Joe DeRita solo shorts) for thirty-five smackers. Leaving aside the solo films, that's like 18 and a half cents per short. That's four cents per poke-in-the-eyes, six cents per "Nyuk nyuk nyuk," nine cents for every piece of pottery broken over someone's head, a dime per crippling physical injury to Larry and exactly $5.83 per moment of human dignity.
For those of you who don't know Fry's, it's a chain of 34 stores in nine states that sell an odd array of low-priced electronics items amidst usually-odder decor. They carry some but not all of the major brands and then supplement them with cheap non-major brands. The ones I've been in all always have that "going out of business" feel like they hauled everything they had out of the warehouse and stuck it on the shelves, not always in the most logical arrangement, for the public to pick through. If you can find what you want there, you usually can't find it anywhere else for less. That is, assuming you don't get one of those items that looks like it was sold, returned, put up for sale again, sold, returned and put up for sale again.
I really like Fry's but I've never been able to figure out what, if anything, was on the mind of their interior decorator…and sometimes you need to go on a scavenger hunt there. Like, you go in to buy a cheap external hard drive and you find the display of cheap external hard drives in the cheap external hard drive section and you select a cheap external hard drive. But later, wandering the aisles, you also find another display of even cheaper external hard drives over in the section with the kitchen appliances, right between the cheap panini presses and the cheap hand blenders. For some reason, I like that. I also like the fact that, at least in every Fry's I've ever visited (maybe four of them), they have all this wonderful high-tech equipment and then the person who checks you out and takes your money is working with a cash register that's one step above an abacus.
The more I think about it, the more I think it's the perfect place to buy Three Stooges DVDs. Moe himself may even be there to wait on you.