When Moe Ruled the World

Man, the 1940’s were fun. Toys were so cool. Not as cool as the 50’s with the metal robots and tin stuff, but still, they were close. TV wasn’t quite there but it was coming. If you thought Milton Berle in a dress was funny, or if you jerked off to hairy guys in gowns, then TV was for you. Sure, there was some bad stuff going on, like racism and shit, and yeah, there was a war raging, but so what? It was way across the ocean. It had nothing to do with you. Unless you were on one of those ships at Pearl Harbor. But you’re not likely to complain to me now, are you?

Yeah, life was good. And why not? You were a MOVIE EXECUTIVE! Nowadays the average movie exec has less job security than the kid selling the popcorn at the theater that shows your films, but back then it was a pretty good job. Back then there were “starlets” on “casting couches” giving “blow jobs” to guys who would make them “stars” before they tossed them out on their “asses.” It was a good life.

Sometimes fate just can’t keep her bitchy hands off things. Imagine this. A low level studio flunky is sitting in a screening room. What’s he watching? The Three Stooges in Ow! You Bit My Nuts or something like that. The Stooges weren’t too sophisticated.

The flunky is sitting there and he’s not happy. His wife is working in a munitions factory for the war effort, his daughter listens to jazz, his son has polio, his assistant was just interred in a camp for being Asian, gas is nearly 12 cents a gallon, and he has whole host of 1940’s maladies that we today, in the highly enlightened year of 2008, just laugh at.

But he has a bigger problem. He’s afraid of losing his job. The studio boss is getting ready to give his job his nephew, who couldn’t get into the army because he was 4F (due to the fact that, upon receiving his draft notice, he punctured his eardrum with a knitting needle) and unless he comes up with a great flick he’s out on his ass.

So he’s sitting there, absently scratching his balls, watching Moe bonk Larry in the nuts while Curly cuts his foot off with a jigsaw. The guy looks down and spots a newspaper. The headline says something like WAR IN EUROPE- WHEN WILL THOSE GUYS SHUT THE FUCK UP? and he sees a picture of Hitler standing near a Panzer tank, dwarfed by two nearly average sized men. Eh.

He looks at the screen- Moe has his head caught in a vice.

He looks at the paper- Hitler.

Screen- Moe.

Paper- Hitler.

Screen.

Paper.

And he gets it.

Moe looks just like Hitler. EUREK-FREAKING-A!

And that’s going to save his career- he knows it! The Three Stooges in You Nazty Spy! The Three Stooges in They Stooge to Conquer. The Three Stooges in The Final Solution. (A one man Broadway show, Moe Howard is Hitler- Live is planned but ultimately scrapped.) This is the idea!

So Moe puts some paint on his face, Curly dresses up like Mussolini, and Larry, the most Jewish of all the Stooges, plays Tojo. How could it fail? How? You’ve got Moe shouting crap in fake German, Larry squinting like a racist fiend, and Curly splitting his pants. Hitler gives Mussolini the two eyed poke, Tojo breaks his violin (hey, it was Larry’s trademark) and fixes it with chopsticks, and the American GI Joes beat the shit out of the Stooges. What more could an all-American audience want? (Tits. But they won’t get that in a Stooges short.)

Moe as Hitler was a natural. He was a hit. He made Hitler funny and cool. Thousands of posters featuring Hitler were designed, ceramic Mussolini coffee cups were ordered, Hitler dolls were produced, and then somebody remembered that this wasn’t Berlin and stopped the whole shebang.

Life was good for the movie guy. He was a success and his job was secure for life, until he was hit by a car while filming a Republic serial on a back lot and he died of massive internal injuries and hemorrhaging. (If you watch chapter 5 of Captain Crappola and his Teen-Age Wise Guys you see, about 12 minutes in and just barely in the shot, the executive feebly shaking and convulsing until the scene cuts to Captain Crappola’s arch-nemesis, The Wiley Wong, torturing a girl with nice knockers in a tight sweater with a fishing rod with some kind of glitter glued to it. (The budget was just that good.)

Moe and the Stooges went on to film about 75,000 more shorts before Larry retired to Mexico, where he died of several sexually transmitted diseases. Curly contracted diabetes and had to have his legs amputated. Moe made a fortune on the stock market but spent it all on crack.

Things went well for Hitler, at least for awhile.