For those of you who have trained yourselves to filter out the more  horrifying things in the world of entertainment, it might come as a shock that  there is currently a Three Stooges movie in theaters that had a budget  of several million dollars. By all accounts, it’s not doing so great, to the  point where even the commercials that have been airing over the past few weeks  have acknowledged that people aren’t exactly flocking to the theaters. And I  think I’ve figured out why: For some reason, they chose to make a movie with  regular Stooges gags about eye-poking and head injury rather than reviving the 1977 Hanna Barbera cartoon about that time the Three Stooges were  robot super-heroes who tried to make out with a giant gorilla.

It really happened, it was called “The Robonic Stooges,” and we have  provided a video that will absolutely mystify you after the cut.

The show ran for one season in 1977 and  1978, but it was originally planned as part of another show, The  Skatebirds. This particular flop actually sounds both ridiculous  and awesome, as it was a cartoon show that attempted to capitalize on the  popularity of The Banana Splitsby bookending the show with the  live-action adventures of dudes roller skating around in fur suits as a  woodpecker, a pelican and a penguin:

Unfortunately, they had the misfortune to exist in an era just before the  half-pipe was discovered by the legendary Won Ton “Animal” Chin, so they weren’t  quite able to capture the hearts and minds of America’s youth. And when the show  was canceled, someone made the decision to hand over a full half hour to The  Robonic Stooges.

It’s worth noting that Curly’s voice is provided by  the inimitable Frank Welker, better known as the voice of Fred  Jones in Scooby Doo, who had perfected the impression as the voice of  Jabberjaw. And considering that The Robonic Stooges is considered one  of the weirder and more obscure shows in the H-B canon even when you stack it up  against the story of a talking shark who played drums in a rock band and solved  mysteries, you can get an idea of how bizarre it actually was.

Like many  H-B shows The Robonic Stooges has ties to comics, having been created  by Norman Maurer, the son-in-law of Moe (yes that Moe) Howard who had a  prolific career in comics, animation and film and even managed the Stooges for  awhile. Maurer illustrated several Three Stooges comics, including a  series about a young band of the hooligans called The Little Stooges.  Some of these comics have even been collected by Papercutz to coincide with the  new film’s release.

As you can see from the video above, the Stoogebots  seem to work on the same principals that would become more popular a few years  later in Inspector Gadget, but taken to a far more horrifying extreme.  Seriously, when their extended necks shoot up out of the pile of tomatoes, it  looks more like heads on pikes than anything else, and the implications of Curly  opening up his stomach and drenching his cape in whatever foul liquid lies  within is just… just… I’m pretty close to straight up barfing everywhere  over here, you guys.

Either way, with the popularity of super-hero films  raging away at the box office, I’m pretty sure that this take on the franchise  would’ve gotten more people into theaters. Hell, it couldn’t have gotten fewer of ‘em.