Sock-a-Bye Baby

Sock-a-Bye Baby (1942)

Oh, Baby! It's a scream!

The stooges mistakenly kidnap a baby they find on their doorstep. When the cops and the baby's mother come looking for the baby, the boys panic and flee into the country with the cops (one of them is the baby's father) pursuing them by motorcycle. It all ends happily with the baby reunited with its parents and the stooges running off disguised as bushes.

Date of release
1942-11-13
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (12)
Runtime
18m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Jules White

Casting

Interesting facts

Sock-a-Bye Baby is a 1942 short subject directed by Jules White starring American slapstick comedy team The Three Stooges. It is the 66th entry in the series released by Columbia Pictures starring the comedians, who released 190 shorts for the studio between 1934 and 1959.

Production notes

Filming for Sock-a-Bye Baby commenced between April 28 and May 1, 1942. The film title is a parody of the lullaby "Rock-a-bye Baby," a motif influenced by the similarly named Popeye cartoon Sock-a-Bye, Baby (1934) produced by Fleischer Studios, a precedent dating back eight years. Footage was reused in the 1960 compilation feature film Stop! Look! and Laugh!

Sock-a-Bye Baby deviates from conventional comedic tropes with its inclusion of explicit racial humor, a rarity within the Stooges' repertoire. Specifically, a scene involving Curly singing a song with derogatory references to Japanese individuals reflects the prevailing jingoistic sentiments prevalent in the media during World War II, a period characterized by heightened nationalistic fervor and xenophobic attitudes.

Sock-a-Bye Baby also features a memorable musical interlude wherein Curly, engaged in the preparation of Jimmy's meal, serenades the audience with an a cappella rendition of a whimsical song, envisioning himself as a Brazilian coffee bean: "I was a boy in Brazil and I grew on a tree. / When they shook the tree then I fell down. / Then they put me in a bag / and they fastened on a tag / and they shipped me off to New York town."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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