It isn’t likely that the Three Stooges will go down in history for being noteworthy inventors, but there are a great many things that the classic comedy trio could reasonably claim to have done before anybody else. Pairing cartoonish sound effects with scenes of extreme violence? Probably a Three Stooges original. Jamming a climbing spike into someone’s eye without killing them in the process? Surely there aren’t any prior examples of this waiting to be rediscovered by film historians.
The Stooges also hold the distinction of being the first to parody Adolf Hitler on film, and it was while doing so that they seemingly foretold the invention of an iconic novelty toy that many of us have owned at some point in our lives. In the 1940 film You Nazty Spy!, Moe (as Moe Hailstone, a Hitler-like dictator) becomes the inept ruler of the Kingdom of Moronika, bringing along with him Larry and Curly, who serve as stand-ins for Joseph Goebbels and Benito Mussolini, respectively. Midway through the 18-minute short, the Stooges are visited by a spy named Mattie Herring, who proceeds to look into their futures with the help of a magic ball that bears a striking resemblance to an 8-ball. Take a look for yourself:
A decade later, a product called the Magic 8 Ball hit the market. If you’ve somehow managed to never come across one of these, it’s basically a plastic ball filled with liquid that’s made up to look like the 8 ball from a billiard game. Visible through a small window on the side of the ball is a 20-sided polygon containing a variety of different “predictions.” In a nutshell, users are supposed to ask the ball a yes or no question while the window is face down, then flip it over to reveal an answer, which can be anything from “Without a doubt” to “Don’t count on it.”
The origins of the Magic 8 Ball can be traced back to a tube-shaped fortune-telling toy created by Alfred Carter during World War II. Based on a “spirit writing” device his mother used while working as a clairvoyant, the liquid-filled toy housed two floating dice, with “responses” printed on each side. It served the same purpose as the Magic 8 Ball and was marketed as the “Syco-Seer” and the “Syco-Slate” in the mid-1940s. Carter died in 1948, and his brother-in-law, Abe Bookman, reworked the concept, shaping the product into a crystal ball.
This is where things get a little fuzzy. Bookman’s new design caught the attention of the Brunswick Billiards company in Chicago, which commissioned him to make the toy look like an 8-ball as a publicity stunt. Who exactly came up with the idea and where it came from could very well be lost to history. However, the fact that the company picked the same exact ball the Stooges used as a fortune-telling device in their earlier film seems like quite a coincidence in hindsight. If they’d gone with a 7 ball or even a 9 ball, maybe we could assume there was no outside influence, but based on the information available at the moment, we have no choice but to give some credit to the Stooges on this one—or, at the very least, Clyde Bruckman and Felix Adler, who wrote the movie for the team back in 1940.
Check out You Nazty Spy! in its entirety below.
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