[.ca] The Three Stooges: Disorder in the Court/Malice in the ... (ISBN 6305417059)

poor quality made up by rarities:
Buy this if you are interested in Ted Healy's productions from really early Stooge days. If not, skip it. The quality (audio and video) of the DVD is shabby...hence, the low price. There are only 4 of 12 shorts really worth owning, available on other, higher quality products.

The Three Stooges.The Early Years.:
This DVD is great value for the price.Even more worthwhile if your interested in film history. Four of these shorts are well known classics featuring either Curly or Shemp Howard as the third Stooge. Some of the other shorts on this disc feature members of the Three Stooges in solo film before they came together as a team. A couple feature the full Stooges line-up with Ted Healy. I find the Ted Healy stuff very poor quality,but interesting if you are interested in seeing how their early vaudeville performance would have been like on stage.

Terrific value; great material:
What a DVD! This has three hours of extremely rare, hard to find material. And its not filler, like some of the other Three Stooges collections out there; this is all content, baby. The best part about this collection is that it has many of the hard-to-find shorts with Ted Healy. The only problem is that no effort was made to clean up the video or the sound, and the original prints from which this DVD was made seem to have been in poor shape in places. A new release, with the latest in digital remastering, will be most welcome.

If only there were more stuff like this...:
Yes, the picture quality needs work, but this is the earliest stuff the Stooges did. In fact, a lot of it is pre-Stooge work! There are several totally random musical numbers in the non-Stooge shorts. It's particularly interesting to see Shemp work on his own and wonder what his career would have been like without the Stooges; he certainly is a good actor, probably the best out of all the Stooges. And over 3 hours for around $?!? The world needs more bargains like this.

A history of the Three Stooges:
This disc contains four classic Stooges shorts -- "Brideless Groom," "Disorder in the Court," "Sing a Song of Six Pants" and "Malice in the Palace" (all of which are in the public domain) -- and 8 others that were done before the Columbia era and feature either one Stooge or the Stooges with Ted Healy, who they worked with in their early days. The Columbia shorts are great, especially "Disorder," a classic Curly short (the other three are Shemp). Those who aren't familiar with their early work will find some interesting stuff here, including several routines that popped up later in the Columbia shorts. The quality on all is as good as can be expected. But be aware that, since most of these aren't the classic Columbia shorts, the Stooges, as seen here, are in slightly different form from the familiar versions that came later. Still, from a historical standpoint, this disc is invaluable, as several of these shorts aren't available in complete form on DVD elsewhere, to my knowledge. Other than the fact that "Nertsery Rhymes" is b/w instead of color (as it was originally released), this disc is recommended for Stooges fans who are interested in the team's history and their early work. Another nice thing: It's over 3 1/2 hours long, so it's a nice value for the price.