Sing a Song of Six Pants (1947)
Moe, Larry, and Shemp run the debt-ridden Pip Boys tailor shop and pin their hopes on a cash reward posted for a wanted bank robber. When the crook and his gang duck inside to hide, the tailors bumble their way into the capture, helped along by a runaway pressing machine and a bottle of knockout drops.
A brisk entry from the Shemp Howard years of the act, Sing a Song of Six Pants slipped into the public domain when Columbia let its copyright lapse, which is why it turns up on countless budget Three Stooges compilations and streaming reels. Its tailor-shop climax was later reworked, with recycled footage, into the 1953 remake Rip, Sew and Stitch.
Background
Sing a Song of Six Pants, released October 30, 1947, is the 102nd Three Stooges short Columbia Pictures put out, directed by Jules White from a script by Felix Adler. Moe, Larry, and Shemp run the debt-ridden Pip Boys tailor shop, threatened with repossession by the Skin and Flint Finance Corporation, when they learn of a reward for capturing bank robber Terry “Slippery Fingered” Hargan. Hargan hides out in their shop and leaves behind a suit with a safe combination sewn into it; the Stooges miss out on the official reward but stumble onto Hargan’s stolen money anyway, enough to clear their debts.
What to watch for
The title plays on the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” a typical Stooges pun, and the tailor-shop setting gives Jules White room for the act’s usual mechanical slapstick, including a runaway pressing machine. Columbia reused the short’s footage six years later for the 1953 remake Rip, Sew and Stitch, a common practice as the series aged and budgets tightened. Like three other Columbia Stooges shorts, it fell into the public domain after Columbia did not renew its copyright in 1964, which is why it now circulates freely on budget compilations.
