Interesting. I’d never known there was ever a connection between Curly and Orville Knapp’s band. Knapp died in a plane crash in 1936. His sister, Evalyn Knapp, was a leading-lady in a lot of early-mid-1930s b-films.
The Stooges shouldn’t have been surprised or caught off-guard when Columbia ended their short-subject department. All other studios had pretty much axed theirs long before. The writing had been on the wall for many years. I’ve sometimes gotten the notion that the Stooges were actually a little oblivious to how they’d become such a popular staple for the kiddie-matinee audience at the cinemas in the post-war years. Quotes always seem to indicate they still somehow thought they were playing to the same old-time 1920s/30s vaudeville-going ‘adult’ crowd. Which time had passed by. They were even trying some kind of Vegas show/revue in the late-50s (which apparently was a big flop). Seemed to finally wake up, when reruns of the shorts got monster ratings with the kid set, and they started making feature-films specifically geared for them, in 1959-65.
I’m a huge Stooges fan, but the stuff they did after the thirties and forties was pretty bad. No, Shemp was not Curly, but Shemp was pretty funny as well. Sometimes acts have to realize when it’s time to quit. Maybe some of the Stooges needed the money, but virtually all their routines from the fifties on were dreck.