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Flying Saucer Daffy

Entry updated 9 September 2022. Tagged: Film.

Short US film (1958). Columbia Pictures. Directed by Jules White. Written by Jack White (screenplay) and Warren Wilson (story). Cast includes Joe Besser, Gail Bonney, Diana Darrin, Larry Fine, Moe Howard Bek Nelson, and Emil Sitka. Seventeen minutes. Black and white.

After Joe (Besser) accidentally photographs a paper plate tossed into the sky, the other members of the Three Stooges, Moe (Howard) and Larry (Fine), take credit for the photograph and are given a $10,000 prize for providing the first authentic photograph of a flying saucer (see UFOs). After it is discovered that the photograph is fraudulent, however, Moe and Larry are arrested and thrown in jail. Then, while on a camping trip, Joe encounters two female Aliens arriving from the planet Zircon who allow him to photograph their flying saucer and give him goodbye kisses. Soon, he is being heralded for this genuine achievement while the frustrated Moe and Larry remain imprisoned.

Although they were regularly quarrelsome, the Three Stooges typically functioned as a team; here, Moe and Larry are unusually pitted against an ultimately victorious Joe, one reason why Flying Saucer Daffy has been criticized by longtime fans. To the extent that it is interesting at all, the film represents yet another illustration of the common film convention that alien planets will be inhabited by beautiful women anxious for male companionship, and it bespeaks an emerging and fervent desire for evidence confirming the existence of alien life. Writer Wilson's other credits include episodes of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (1954), and the film's brief image of a flying saucer was borrowed from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). Planets named Zircon were also referenced in the children's television series Sesame Street (1969-current) and the film Aliens in the Attic (2009). [GW]

see also: Three Stooges Films.

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