With intense television exposure in the United States, the act regained momentum throughout the 1960s as popular kids' fare, until Larry's paralyzing stroke in the midst of filming a pilot for a Three Stooges TV series in January 1970.

[6] Shemp, fed up with Healy's abrasiveness, bad temper, and heavy drinking,[6] decided to quit the act and toured in his own comedy revue for several months.

Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn was able to use the Stooges as leverage, as the demand for their films was so great that he eventually refused to supply exhibitors with the trio's shorts unless they also agreed to book some of the studio's mediocre B movies.

[8] Columbia offered theater owners an entire program of two-reel comedies (15–25 titles annually) featuring such stars as Buster Keaton, Andy Clyde, Charley Chase, and Hugh Herbert, but the Stooge shorts were the most popular of all.

[6] The Stooges' release schedule was eight short subjects per year, filmed within a 40-week period; for the remaining 12 weeks, they were free to pursue other employment, time that was either spent with their families or touring the country with their live act.

Hoi Polloi (1935) adapted the premise of Pygmalion, with a stuffy professor making a bet that he can transform the uncultured trio into refined gentlemen; the plotline worked so well that it was reused twice, as Half-Wits Holiday (1947) and Pies and Guys (1958).

[8] In A Plumbing We Will Go (1940)—one of the team's quintessential comedies—the Stooges are cast as plumbers who nearly destroy a socialite's mansion, causing water to exit every appliance in the home, including an early television set.

The team, made up as Japanese soldiers for a photo shoot, is mistaken for genuine saboteurs by a Nazi ringleader (Vernon Dent, the Stooges' primary foil).

According to Okuda and Watz, entries such as Loco Boy Makes Good, What's the Matador?, Sock-a-Bye Baby (all 1942), I Can Hardly Wait and A Gem of a Jam (both 1943) are considered to be lesser-quality works than previous films.

[8] Three Smart Saps (1942), was an improvement, reworking a routine from Harold Lloyd's The Freshman (1925), in which Curly's loosely stitched suit begins to fall apart at the seams while he is on the dance floor.

During a five-month hiatus from August 1945 through January 1946, the trio committed themselves to making a feature film at Monogram, followed by two months of live appearances in New York City, with performances seven days a week.

Jules White's copy of the script contained the dialogue for this missing scene, and a production still of Curly does exist, appearing on both the film's original one-sheet and lobby card.

[4] Shemp appeared with the Stooges in 76 shorts and a low-budget Western comedy feature titled Gold Raiders (1951) in which the screen time was evenly divided with cowboy hero George O'Brien.

[16][17][18] The Stooges lost some of their charm and inherent appeal to children after Curly retired, but some excellent films were produced with Shemp, an accomplished solo comedian who often performed best when allowed to improvise on his own.

[15] From 1947 to 1952, Bernds hit a string of successes, including Fright Night (1947), The Hot Scots, Mummy's Dummies, Crime on Their Hands (all 1948), Three Arabian Nuts (1951), and Gents in a Jam (1952).

DVD Talk critic Stuart Galbraith IV commented that "the Stooges' shorts became increasingly mechanical...and frequently substituted violent sight gags for story and characterization.

[8] Three years after Curly's death, Shemp Howard died of a heart attack at age 60 on November 22, 1955, during a taxi ride home with a friend after attending a boxing match.

Besser had observed how one side of Larry Fine's face appeared "calloused",[23] so he had a clause in his contract specifically prohibiting him from being hit beyond an infrequent tap, though this restriction was later lifted.

Besser was a talented comic, and was quite popular as "Stinky" on The Abbott and Costello Show, but his whining mannerisms and resistance to slapstick punishment did not match the films' established format of continuous physical comedy.

[24] However, the success of television revivals for such names as Laurel and Hardy, Woody Woodpecker, Popeye, Tom and Jerry, and the Our Gang series in the late 1950s led Columbia to cash in again on the Stooges.

In late 1969, Howard, Fine, and DeRita began production on another half-hour pilot, this time for a syndicated 39-episode TV series titled Kook's Tour,[30] a combination travelogue-sitcom that had the "retired" Stooges traveling to various parts of the world with the episodes filmed on location.

The film would have been a departure from typical Stooge fare, with dark-edged humor and scenes of war violence, but insufficient funding prevented production from advancing beyond the script stage.

"[35] Although the Three Stooges' slapstick comedy was primarily arranged around basic plots dealing with mundane issues of daily life, a number of their shorts featured social commentary or satire.

The language used by the Three Stooges was more slang-laden than that of typical feature films of the period and deliberately affected a lower-class status with use of crude terms, ethnic mannerisms, and inside jokes.

was an inside joke which stood for Alte Kocker (an elderly person who is defecating), a Yiddish idiom that means an old man or woman of diminished capacity who can no longer do things they used to do.

A third "in-Yiddish" joke is in the episode Pardon My Scotch, when the liquor supplier prepares to consume the Stooges' volatile concoction, and they wish him well in a triad pattern saying "Over the river," "Skip the gutter," and concluding with "Ver geharget," a Yiddish expression meaning "get killed"[36] or "drop dead".

and I'll Never Heil Again, both released before United States' entry into World War II, despite an industry Production Code that advocated avoiding social and political issues and the negative portrayal of foreign countries.

The last time the Stooges were offered in traditional broadcast syndication was in 1999, when Columbia TriStar Television Distribution put together a new package of 130 half-hour episodes compiling the shorts into themed installments, with new interstitial material created by Evolution Media and voiced by Jeff Bennett (in a similar fashion to the Screen Gems Network, a syndicated block of classic television series also offered around the same time by CTTD with Evolution's involvement).

The trio released additional singles and LPs on the Golden, Peter Pan, and Coral labels, mixing comedy adventure albums and off-beat renditions of children's songs and stories.

Based on the Stooges earning money by doing odd jobs to prevent the foreclosure of an orphanage, it incorporated audio from the original films and was popular enough to be reissued for the Game Boy Advance in 2002, and for PlayStation in 2004.