'' is a
Three Stooges short released in
1953 . It was the first Three Stooges
Short Subject filmed and released in
3-D .
Larry, Moe and Shemp are private detectives that are hired to track down a girl that has been kidnapped. They decide to trace the girl back to where she was last seen, which leads them to a mad scientist (Phil Van Zandt) and his assistant (Tom Kennedy) who are keeping her a prisoner. There is also a gorilla kept imprisoned in the house for experimental purposes. The Stooges arrive to rescue the kidnapped girl disguised as door to door pie salesmen.
''Spooks!'' was the first of two shorts made by Columbia with the Stooges in 3-D, after the 3-D craze of 1953 began with ''
Bwana Devil ''. It originally premiered on May 20, 1953 with the Columbia western ''
Fort Ti '', also in 3-D.
The Stooges' next short in the series, ''
Pardon My Backfire '' was their next and final attempt at stereoscopic photography.
Both the Columbia 3-D Edmund O'Brien thriller ''
Man In The Dark '' and ''Spooks!'' were originally
Sepia Toned in order to allow for more light to pass through the Polaroid filters necessary for the dual-strip 3-D projection method of that time. The process did not work as expected and the idea was dropped after these two productions.
''Spooks!'' is also the first short in the series filmed for flat widescreen. Although some films of this period were composed for the
Academy Aspect Ratio and released in widescreen during the confusion, ''Spooks!'' was made on short enough notice that the full film is composed for a ratio of 1.75:1, Columbia's house aspect ratio at the time. Further shorts from then on were composed at 1.85:1.
