Production Information
Title: Vagabond Loafers
Studio: Columbia
Short Number: 118
Release Date: October 06, 1949
Running Time: 15:8
“We gotta get a longer jeep.”
(Shemp)
Vagabond Loafers Short Take
The Stooges are “Day and Night Plumbers,” hired by the Norfleets to fix the plumbing in their basement while a society party is going on their mansion. The boys wreck the house with their idea of plumbing: flooding the bathroom and cross-connecting the water and electrical pipes. Mr. and Mrs. Allen, two of the party guests, steal the Norfleet’s expensive Van Brocklin painting behind everyone’s back. When the Norfleets discover the theft, the Allens try to make their getaway and pin the blame on our boys.
Cast & Crew
| Directed by | Edward Bernds |
|---|---|
| Produced by | Hugh McCollum |
| Written by | Elwood Ullman |
| Starring | Moe Howard Larry Fine Shemp Howard Emil Sitka Symona Boniface Kenneth MacDonald Christine McIntyre Dudley Dickerson Herbert Evans |
| Cinematography | Vincent J. Farrar |
| Edited by | Henry DeMond |
Production Notes
Vagabond Loafers was filmed January 25–28, 1949; the film title parodies the romantic expression “vagabond lovers.”
Vagabond Loafers is a remake of 1940’s A Plumbing We Will Go, and would itself be remade in 1956 as Scheming Schemers. Shemp was teamed with comedian El Brendel for the non-Stooge film Pick a Peck of Plumbers (1944), which in itself was a remake of Sidney and Murray’s Plumbing for Gold (1934).
Vagabond Loafers marked the final appearances of two prolific Stooge supporting actors: Symona Boniface and Dudley Dickerson. Dickerson reprises his role as the startled cook from A Plumbing We Will Go using a mixture of stock footage from that short and new material, something of a rarity in later patchwork Stooges shorts. However, their faces would be seen in several more Stooge films when footage featuring the actors was recycled for future productions.
This was the first Stooges short to start with a modified opening title card, which now had “Columbia Pictures Corporation Presents” at the top and a new logo for the Stooges (with one “o” on a different level from the other). This opening title card would remain in effect on all but the two 3-D films (Spooks! and Pardon My Backfire) the Stooges would make through the last short featuring footage of Shemp (Commotion on the Ocean) in 1956.
