The Three Stooges — Adventures!

Released in 1939, We Want Our Mummy is one of the Stooges’ most beloved adventure shorts. The setup: a museum hires Moe, Larry, and Curly to locate the missing mummy of King Rootentootin and bring it back from Egypt. What could go wrong? Everything. In sequence.

The boys encounter real mummies, trigger every trap in the tomb, argue over every clue, panic at entirely predictable moments — and still, somehow, come back with the goods. No one is entirely sure how. The Stooges are never quite sure either.

The Stooges are not great at following instructions. They misread clues, contradict each other, and walk into every room as if it might be their last. In a tomb full of traps, it usually nearly is. What they have instead of competence is persistence: they keep going. And in this episode — as in nearly every adventure they ever took on — that turns out to be enough.

The first time a student navigates an unfamiliar website looking for something specific, they look exactly like Curly in a tomb. They misread the first clue. They scroll past the answer twice. They click something unexpected, panic, and hit the back button three times in a row. Then they find it.

Stop 1 of Hunt #1 asks students to find the Movie Clips section using the navbar. This is, objectively, a simple task. There is always a student who looks for the Movies link in the footer, or types it in the address bar, or asks if the navbar has a search box. This is not failure. This is the learning. The student who found it by accident understands the navbar better than the one who found it immediately and never had to think about it.

Stop 9 — right-click a heading, open Inspect, read the HTML underneath — is genuinely intimidating to a student who has never opened DevTools. Curly would be intimidated too. He would also, eventually, get there. Because he always does. The lesson is not “be confident.” The lesson is: keep going when confused.

They made a lot of these. Adventure and mystery shorts were a staple of the Stooges’ Columbia run. Mummies, haunted houses, spies, treasure maps, foreign agents — the studio discovered early that putting three panicking men in high-stakes situations was reliably funny, and they returned to the formula throughout their 190-short catalog.

The tomb-trap gag was a specialty. Few comedy acts in film history extracted more mileage from a room full of triggered mechanisms and hidden doors. The Stooges had an almost musical sense of how to chain pratfalls: each one triggering the next, escalating until the chaos felt inevitable in retrospect. Watch for the moment something goes wrong and notice it was already going wrong on the other side of the frame.

Curly was the engine. In the adventure shorts especially, Jerome “Curly” Howard’s improvisational energy was irreplaceable. His reactions to unexpected events — the freezing up, the floor-spinning, the involuntary “Woo woo woo!” — were largely unscripted. Director Jules White frequently kept the camera rolling past the planned end of a gag just to see what Curly would do. The best moments in the adventure shorts were often accidents that made the final cut because nothing scripted was funnier.

They outlasted their era. By the late 1950s the original theatrical run was over. Then Columbia licensed the shorts to television, and a new generation discovered the Stooges. The adventure shorts translated perfectly to the small screen. By 1960 the boys were bigger stars than they had ever been during the original run — on a medium that did not exist when the films were made. A lesson in the long tail of content, if ever there was one.