THE THREE STOOGES IN ORBIT (1962)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological*

I quite liked HAVE ROCKET WILL TRAVEL-- the initial feature-film for the Movie-Stooges-- Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe-- in that I thought it captured the inspired lunacy of some of the Classic shorts. But even though ORBIT was directed by Edward Byrnes, a veteran of several Stooge-shorts, the Norman Maurer script deep-sixes the concept's potential.

Despite an imaginative opening in which viewers see various grotesque images suggested for Martian forms, there aren't nearly enough Martians in the story to keep the story percolating, and when anything else takes the foreground, the movie just spins its wheels.

In this one, Larry, Moe and Curly Joe are TV actors who hope to sell themselves to a producer as hosts for a kid's show, in which they would introduce cartoons a la other kids' hosts of the time. Their struggles are complicated when they're tossed out of their apartment, so that they must find lodgings. This leads them to take a job at the estate of daffy inventor Professor Danforth (Emil Sitka).

Danforth is working on several inventions, but the main one is an all-purpose military vehicle combining aspects of tank, helicopter and submarine. He somehow knows that "men from Mars" are spying on him, though he doesn't know that his own butler is a Martian disguised as an Earthman. In their normal forms, the Martians wear capes and bodysuits and possess immense Frankensteinian skulls. Somehow the Martians learned of Danforth's invention and wanted to know if it could thwart their plans to conquer Earth.

Unfortunately, this promising farce-notion gets diluted by a subplot about the aforementioned kids's show. The Stooges need some new gimmick to impress the producer, and Danforth puts his plans for anti-Martian defense on hold while he concocts an animation dingus for the performers; a thingie that more or less works like rotoscoping, which had been around since the Fleischer Studios. Ostensibly this subplot was included so that Maurer could recycle footage he had used to pitch an unsold pilot, which was all about the Stooges hosting cartoons.

But even if this subordinate plot had been cut, the script doesn't know how to build comic suspense about the Martian threat. On the first night that the Stooges spend the night at Danforth's estate, the butler tries to kill the professor's assistants. Curly Joe trains a rifle on the Martian masquerader, but the butler disintegrates the weapon. Yet a few scenes later, the Stooges-- all of whom saw the rifle go "poof" -- act like Danforth is nuts for believing in Martians.

There are also some long, time-wasting scenes in which the Stooges create various kinds of chaos as they test the all-purpose vehicle to impress the army brass, and some shorter time-wasting scenes in which the professor's daughter is romanced by a young army soldier (Edson Stoll, playing a leading-man role like the one in the previous Stoogefilm SNOW WHITE AND THE THREE STOOGES). The two Franken-skulled Martians Ogg and Zogg infiltrate the estate and are given orders by their superiors to destroy Earth instead of paving the way for conquest. Here alone does the action pick up, as the Martian spies steal the all-purpose vehicle, planning to start destroying Earth's cultural centers first. (The film's best joke comes at this point.) However, the hapless goofs manage to get aboard the vehicle and manage to foil the invaders' plans. One might think they'd be feted by the whole planet for this deed, but the dopes are apparently content to succeed at their goal as kiddie-show hosts.

The Martian agents Ogg and Zogg steal every scene they're in, and it's a shame that the film wasn't built entirely around them.