The 1930's comedy team of Wheeler & Woolsey

Anyone here familiar with the comedies of Wheeler & Woolsey? I may have made a topic about it before but I could not find it. For a time they were as popular and sometimes moreso than Laurel & Hardy and the Marx Brothers yet their memory in time has faded due to the early death of Woolsey, the studios lack of knowledge of how to handle Wheeler, the censor's hatred of them, RKO's demise, Warner's purchase of other film libraries including all but one of theirs, so much that their importance may fall further down the line, the crummy condition of the early RKO film's preservation, etc....

Anyways there is petition to get this on DVD from Warner's and it can be found here:

www.petitiononline.com/cuckoos/petition.html

Some of their films are in the public domain:

Half-Shot at Sunrise a WW! dark comedy plus Hok Line & Sinker and Dixiana. Their best films, should you ever have to chance to see them are Diplomaniacs, Cockeyed Cavaliers, Hips Hips Hooray, Peach-o-Reno, and Cracked Nuts and these are on par if not superior to the best of the Marx Brothers and their worse films are no worse and in my mind superior to therworst of the Marx Brothers, which are not so bad themselves. You can find examples of this anarchistic comedy duo on youtube but mostly music numbers.

There are a few clips of them up on Youtube:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=nBBt-H8Oux8
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yrhcj5xci6A
http://youtube.com/watch?v=111lpdKde7I
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5m4wmUzNP4o

Pretty funny, but nowhere near the Marx brothers, if the clips above are a representative sample.

Diplomaniacs is an anarchistic masterpiece and that is some good clips there but it needs to be seen as a whole with the missing bits for full effect.

The Stolen Jewels/Slippery Pearls was a cameo field charity short with Wheeler & Woolsey, Laurel & Hardy, Buster Keaton, Edward G Robinson, Norma Shearer, Dorothy Lee, Joan Crawford, Eddie Kane, The Littlee Rascals (Stymie, Farina, Chubby, Mary Anne, Weezer), Hedda Hopper, Joan Crawford, Irene Dunn, Gary Cooper, Polly Moran, Charley rogers, Loretta Young, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Barbara Stanwyck, Fay Wray and others and while an interesting and fun fluffy piece, it is not exactly the best representation of anyone involved.

I liked Hold 'Em Jail but I think there are better examples of their work, however they do have a great supporting cast with Edgar Kennedy and Edna May Oliver. others that appear in their films include Dorothy Lee, Thelma Todd, Hugh Herbert and Betty Grable.

Warner owns 20 of their 21 films, well three of the 20 are pd but Warner could make better versions. They have expressed interest in releasing them but the films are not in the best condition, aside from King Kong, the Astaire and Rogers films and maybe a handful of others, the RKO library is in pretty bad shape and Warner's concerns may be more geared toward Warner then MGM films. Wheeler & Woolsey are a very important comedy team and they need some respect and it should be treated as a rediscovery. It irks me that they do not have stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame while the Ritz brothers do. I love the Ritz Brothers but W&W are at a higher level and Hollywood and the studios have shunned them so completely yet from what I have read Bert Wheeler was loved by many stars including Bob Hope, Sinatra, Lucille Ball, Groucho, Stan Laurel they were all friends. Before their pairing, Charlie Chaplin was impressed with Wheeler's Chaplin impersonation and Harold Lloyd tried to sign him up for starring films but Ziegfeld messed that up due to a pesky contract that Wheeler almost ignored.