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"The Three Stooges Meet Hercules"

A Columbia Pictures Film. Released on January 26, 1962.

Budget: $480,000 and a run time of 89-minutes.

Shooting of the film ran from June 6, 1961 to June 22, 1961 for thirteen days.

Synopsis: In present day Ithaca, New York, Moe, Larry, and Curly Joe join their friend Schuyler Davis & his girlfriend Diane Quigley on a time travel journey to the distant past on Schuyler's time machine.

The group ends up in ancient Greece where they encounter the evil King Odius and his strongman Hercules who is not the noble hero presented in literature.

Norman Maurer who co-wrote the movie with Elwood Ullman, was the son-in-law of Moe Howard and married to Moe's daughter Joan.

Moe was very fond of this Stooges' movie. He especially enjoyed the scenes aboard the slave galley. He felt that the special effects team did a great job with the scenes on the slave vessel.

The movie was enough of a box office hit for Columbia Pictures to offer The Three Stooges' production company, Normandy, a three-picture deal.

Norman Maurer was a writer and artist for The Three Stooges comic books prior to branching off into writing and directing The Three Stooges films "The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze" (1963), and "The Outlaws is Coming" (1965).

While shooting a scene where the Stooges climb on board a chariot, Joe DeRita accidentally fell on Larry Fine knocking Larry unconscious.

Joe DiRita did not like getting slapped by Moe for scenes and would use a stunt double whenever possible.
The director of the film felt that DeRita could be a bit of a prima donna regarding the roughhousing that the Stooges traditionally perform.

Samson Burke who played Hercules could also be timid at times shooting action scenes.

Burke would move to Hawaii years later. There, he was Tom Selleck's stand-in & stunt double for the "Magnum, P. I." TV series.

Quinn Redeker who played the time machine inventor Schuyler, would be nominated by the Academy Awards in 1979 for his story for "The Deer Hunter."

Moe's wife, Helen Schonberger, was a cousin to Erik Weisz who went by the stage name of Harry Houdini.

If you're fan of both time travel and history as I am, you'll like this misadventure with Moe, Larry, and Curly Joe.

At the time, the Hercules movies starring Steve Reeves, and the prolific sand-and-sandal beefcake movies from overseas were quite popular with audiences.

Just like this Stooge's film, those foreign films were being produced cheaply as well as quickly.

Samson Burke even resembled Steve Reeves image of Hercules.

This movie has to be one of the only ones depicting Hercules as a louse instead of the heroic figure he usually appears as in films.

It's astonishing that these entertaining Stooge's movies were turned out on two week shooting schedules!

Normally a film has a three month filming schedule.

We're left to wonder just how much better these Stooges movies could have been if the studio allowed them to have longer pre-production time, shooting time, and post-production time.

Perhaps such a schedule like that would have allowed some stop~motion animation scenes as our faux-Hercules takes on some of the scary mythological creatures from the Twelve Labors of Hercules from the Greek tales?

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When the time machine is switched on there are a number of sound effects for it.

One is the alarm signal used on "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." whenever UNCLE headquarters was under attack.