Earlier this month, it was reported that Sony Pictures was developing a new Men in Black movie. When it’s eventually released, the film will be the fifth entry in the series, but it’ll be the sixth film overall to bear the Men in Black title. That’s because back in 1934, the Three Stooges released their own Men in Black movie through Columbia Pictures (which is also now owned by Sony). The title is where the similarities between the Stooges version and the Will Smith version end. Still, the interesting thing about a Stooges flick sharing a title with such an influential modern franchise is that the Stooges movie was highly influential in its own right, and all things considered, it might be the most influential film the trio ever made.
The 18-minute short, whose title parodies the 1934 Clark Gable film Men in White, features the Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Curly Howard) as bumbling doctors running amok in a hospital. “Calling Doctor Howard, Doctor Fine, Doctor Howard” repeatedly blares from the loudspeaker as the trio rushes around from room to room to check on the patients they’ve been assigned to. During their first day on the job, they assault a fellow doctor, accidentally take a patient’s medicine themselves, and leave their tools inside a man after performing surgery on him. They finally get sick of being paged all the time and smash the loudspeaker into a million pieces.
Men in Black would be the only Three Stooges film to be nominated for an Oscar. The members of the Academy weren’t the only ones to remember it, however. The “Doctor Howard, Doctor Fine, Doctor Howard” line in particular has been referenced quite a few times over the years. The Joker quotes it in the 2009 video game Batman: Arkham Asylum, and it’s even referred to in a workprint of the 2002 horror movie Halloween: Resurrection. Perhaps most notably, a reference to the line can be heard at the beginning of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s 1985 music video for “Like a Surgeon”:
One of the biggest things the Stooges movie can take responsibility for, though, is the 1976 KISS song “Calling Dr. Love.” In the liner notes for a 2001 KISS box set, Gene Simmons revealed that a viewing of Men in Black inspired the track. “One day I was watching the Three Stooges, and something jumped out at me,” Simmons wrote. “It was a passage where they had snuck into a hospital, donned surgical equipment, and made believe they were doctors. And they kept running back and forth from room to room with a public announcement system saying, ‘Calling Doctor Howard, calling Doctor Fine, calling Doctor Howard.’ And then I thought of rewriting the chorus idea into ‘Calling Dr. Love,’ who has a peculiar way of injecting his patients.”
Check out the original Men in Black in its entirety below.
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