Today's Video Link

In a recent post here, I mentioned Norman Maurer, a fascinating gent I had the honor of working with. Norman was a very fine comic book artist who among other work, wrote and drew the Three Stooges comic books for St. John's, a small but important publisher. He later went on to become a TV and movie producer…and most but not all of what he produced featured The Three Stooges. He also managed the trio and that connection makes a little more sense when you know that in 1947, he married Moe's daughter Joan.

Norman was responsible for the Stooges' later works. In 1960, he produced a TV pilot called Three Stooges Scrapbook which was a half-hour of them stooging around in both live-action material and an animated sequence. The pilot never sold but in '65, he exec-produced a syndicated show, The New Three Stooges which featured the Old Three Stooges. Well, "Curly" Joe DeRita was kinda new, having joined the troupe in late 1958 but Moe and Larry sure weren't new.

The 1965 series consisted of animated Stooge cartoons, wrapped-around by live-action intros and outros. The animation was done by Cambria Studios whereas the animated cartoon in Three Stooges Scrapbook was produced by a company called TV Spots. We'll get to them.

Three Stooges Scrapbook is one of those films that Stooges fans long to see. I have no idea if it's possible to view the entire show anywhere but the cartoon segment and its live-action intro and outro have surfaced…and no, I'm not going to embed it so you can watch it here. I'm instead posting this link to where you can watch it on YouTube.

It was put there by a YouTuber named Curly's Grandson who is apparently Curly's Grandson. Since he apparently spent good money to preserve and transfer the film, I want to give him every possible chance to monetize its presence on YouTube…ergo, a link but no embed here.

TV Spots was an animation studio that mainly did commercials. It was founded by Bob Wickersham, who among his many credits directed the first Fox & Crow cartoons for Columbia and also wrote and drew comic books — of the Fox and Crow for DC and some other creations for other companies. At some point, he was squeezed out of the company he started but before TV Spots closed down in (I think) the late sixties, it was involved in a number of TV shows you may have heard of including Crusader Rabbit, King Leonardo, Calvin and the Colonel and some occasional sub-contracting work for Jay Ward.

If you go watch the Stooges cartoon, you'll see Moe Howard, Larry Fine and "Curly" Joe DeRita intro it and provide their voices for the animation. I'm pretty sure the announcer in the cartoon was Don Lamond and all the other voices were done by Mel Blanc. The credits at the end are for the entire half-hour show.