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  • 2020-12-21 (xsd:date)
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  • Did The Three Stooges Perform During First Super Bowl Halftime Show? (en)
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  • Football fans have grown accustomed to some of the biggest musicians in the world stepping up to the stage for the halftime show of the Super Bowl. In recent years, football's biggest game has featured superstars such as Jennifer Lopez, Justin Timberlake, and Lady Gaga. But back in 1967, when the Green Bay Packers took on the Kansas City Chiefs during Super Bowl I, the halftime show looked a little different. At that event, fans were treated to the spectacle of 300 pigeons, performances from the University of Arizona and Grambling State University marching bands, and a flying demonstration from the Bell Air Rocket Men. According to comedian Larry Fine's autobiography Stroke of Luck, fans also witnessed a legendary performance from The Three Stooges. Fine writes in his book that The Three Stooges killed it with their renditions of Niagara Falls and Ah-Ha! Ma-Ha! before the show went a little off the rails when he saw a fan flirting with his wife Mabel in the stands. According to Fine, he was fined $42.50 after he was filmed flipping the bird at the stands. Here's an excerpt from Stroke of Luck as recounted by San Diego Reader: This anecdote, like much of Fine's book, put the emphasis on humor over facts. We found several old newspaper articles about the first Super Bowl halftime show, but none of them mentioned anything about Larry Fine or The Three Stooges. We also searched through archival photographs from the Associated Press, Life Magazine, and Getty Images, but couldn't find any that featured The Three Stooges at the first Super Bowl. Here's how the halftime festivities were described in an article published in the The Daily Record-Gazette a few days before football's big game: Mon, Jan 9, 1967 – 7 · The Daily Record-Gazette (Banning, California) · Newspapers.com We also searched the archives for any mention of Fine's getting fined $42.50 for flipping the bird at a fan during Super Bowl I, but again came up empty-handed. We also found no mention of The Three Stooges in any of the modern accounts of the NFL's first Super Bowl that we examined. In addition to there being no record of a Three Stooges performance, we found a few other reasons to be skeptical of Fine's story. For one, Fred Friendly, the CBS executive who reportedly called up Fine to offer him the Super Bowl gig, left CBS in 1966, the year before the first Super Bowl. Friendly was also the president of CBS News, not the network's sports division, and it also seems strange that a network president and not, say, a booking agent, would have called Fine to talk about the Super Bowl. Fine's book Stroke of Luck has also been described as riddled with errors. Fine wrote the book with the help of author James Carone in 1970 after suffering debilitating stroke that ended his acting career. The book was self-published and didn't have a proper editor. While it certainly contains a number of humorous anecdotes, it isn't exactly a historical record. Steve Cox, the author of the Larry Fine biography One Fine Stooge, said that Stroke of Luck was a disastrous little book and that he didn't take everything [Carone] said as fact: While Fine did write in his autobiography that The Three Stooges performed at the first Super Bowl, this doesn't appear to be the case. It's possible that Fine was remembering a different halftime performance — although, likely not at the Super Bowl. We found no record of The Three Stooges performing at the Super Bowl in '68, '69, or '70; and by '71, Fine was no longer able to perform — or it's possible that he simply made up the story for a laugh. Regardless, The Three Stooges did not perform at Super Bowl I. (en)
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