Have Rocket, Will Travel

HAVE ROCKET WILL TRAVEL was, according to Wikipedia, the first Three Stooges film

to be released after their popularity surged in the late fifties. It was followed by The Three Stooges in Orbit. I watched this during a marathon on TCM, the one celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. The thing is, the Stooges end up on Venus in this one, not on the moon :? . That's the Stooges for you - they can't even get that right; it was supposed to be on the moon! I realized I did see this as a kid when that giant tarantula appeared, zapping the fleeing Stooges with a beam of fire. (This all looked like footage lifted from the film TARANTULA (1955) but I was told later that it's original footage).

The Venus landscape is identical to the desert landscape of Earth which we see in the early scenes, so there's not much attempt at visualizing an alien terrain - maybe this is on purpose. The Stooges then make the acquaintance of a talking pony, er, unicorn and get captured by a cube-like robot with 4 mechanical arms, which shrinks them and then creates robotic duplicates of the three. Too many Stooges for my taste! What's weird is that the much later Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), which parodied/copied old-style fifties sci-fi movies about trips to Venus or the moon, seems to have lifted much of its scenes from this comedy. In other words, the Stooges beat that movie to it by almost 3 decades!