24 hours of Laurel & Hardy!

Updated on January 11, 2011 By Ken Begg 14 Comments

Even better, their shorts, which are really their strongest stuff. TCM kicks off a full 24 hours of The Boys tonight at 7:00 (CST). You could do REALLY worse than to set your recorder to grab as much of this stuff as possible; most of it is NOT available on DVD in this country. And as with the Little Rascals shorts last week, if you have any kids handy, have them sit down and take a look. Otherwise they might grow up thinking Dain Cook is the height of comedy.

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  • The Rev.

    “Dane” Cook, although I can’t blame you for deigning to bother to spell it correctly.

    The first special of his I saw, years ago, I thought he was pretty funny, and felt that way for a couple of years. It seems like he bought his own hype and just decided he could say whatever and it’d be hilarious, about which he was very sadly mistaken.

    I’ll have to look ahead and see which of these involves a piano being moved up a ridiculous outdoor flight of stairs. I don’t know the name of it, but I know we had a tape of L&H bits we got my late grandfather; I remember really laughing a lot at it.

  • Rock Baker

    The Music Box is the title of the short, the first L&H film to get the Oscar. (Interestingly, it is also a revamped version of an earlier short called Hat’s Off, in which the boys try to move a washing machine up the same flight of steps. The Music Box was filmed about ten years later, and the area had been drastically developed in that short time. Sadly, Hat’s Off remains a lost film.)

  • KeithB

    The VeggieTale parody, translated to the Three Stooges is pretty good, too.

  • That’s “The Music Box.” It’s the only L&H short to win an Oscar. In an odd slip of TCM’s usually impeccable programmers, tonight they are showing ‘Tit for Tat’ and “Them There Hills” out of order (and not even back to back); the former is the sequel to the latter. Even so, they are both terrific and well worth a look.

  • Oops, Rock also identified it. By the way, that staircase is also that Curley, an iceman, attempts to deliver a block of ice up in An Ache in Every Stake. The gag is that the ice melts down to a cube by the time he gets to the top.

  • Marsden

    Who the hell is Dane Cook?

    I wish I saw this yesterday. D’oh!

  • The fact that you are able to ask that question proves you are a lucky man. In sum, if Ryan Reynolds had choosen to become a very obnoxious standup comedian, that would be Dane Cook.

  • The Rev.

    I had looked ahead and noted “The Music Box” and DVRd it, along with a few that sounded good, that were on after I went to bed (I watched a few that night). Looking forward to watching them this weekend.

  • Let us know what you think. Man, I loves me the Laurel and Hardy. Probably even more than the Marx Brothers, and that’s saying something.

  • @Rock
    If you think the Music Box stairs were built up then, look at it today.
    http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_m6SQn5XIlNQ/SGanJJgw5lI/AAAAAAAAA7w/C_30v5BwcOw/s1600-h/1.jpg
    Its almost unrecognizable.

  • The Rev.

    Ken: I liked the ones I watched, so I’m sure the ones on standby will also be well-received. Thanks!

    Outside of the afore-mentioned tape I’d really not seen any L&H before now. I did get to see a lot of the Stooges growing up, as my mom was one of those uncommon women who really liked them.

  • I will say, the line-up offered some rare missteps by a TCM programmer. I realize you can’t really complain about 24 straight hours of shorts; that’s just fabulous, and I hope TCM does more of it once Hal Roach month is over. (Or at least blocks of shorts, if not full days of them). However, I question the first short shown to kick things being L&H’s last short. Maybe it’s just rare or something, or a find, and so they wanted to give it pride of place. Unsurprisingly, though, their last short wasn’t that great. It wasn’t horrible like the last Stooge shorts, but it was lame.

    The other problem was the fact that the only two shorts that were connected, Them Thar Hills and Tit for Tat, were shown out of order and even separated by another short. Both are great shorts, among The Boys’ best. However, especially given that there is actual reference in the sequel short Tit for Tat to the earlier Hills, why show the second one first? Very strange.

  • The Rev.

    Slight correction: my mom IS one of those women, not was. Sorry mom! (Like she’d ever read this.)

  • Rock Baker

    Wow! Those steps are almost hidden now! If you can find photos, check out how it looked when Hat’s Off was filmed. The was a hillside and some steps and that was about all!