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This is one of the better High Curly Period shorts. It begins with the Boys hawking racing forms for 15 or 25 cents. That compares to the $5.50 cost of a racing form today. Taking the 25-cent price, that’s a 2,100% increase. It compares to the rise in the price of gold from 1942 to today ($35 to $672). That’s a 1,820% increase.

(Who said you couldn’t learn something from the Stooges?)

The cops chase the Stooges, who take refuge behind a billboard with a woman and her daughter, who have been “dispossessed.” Nowadays, a lot of people are suffering the same treatment.

Funniest scene: Curly wrestles a tuba.

Curlyism: He sees the tuba and says, “Oh! A Bazookey!”

Moe insult: “Go on! I’ll mash you like a potato.”

As a lifelong journalist, this includes one of my favorite gags. The Boys get into a horse race for free when Moe and Lary flash “Press” buttons. Curly picks up the rear and flashes a “Pull” button, then mugs for the camera.

They buy a talking horse, foreshadowing “Francis” and “Mister Ed” — and for that matter, “My Mother the Car.” (But let’s forget about “Hoofs and Goofs.”)

The horse is named “Seabasket — the Wonder Horse.” To which Moe retorts, “Looks to me like a fugitive from a glue factory.” When Ed and I were kids watching this, we didn’t know that the name was a play on Seabiscuit, the great race horse of the late 1930s, about which a 2003 movie was made.

The short ends with Seabasket having a colt. We never find out what happened to the woman and her daughter. Maybe the mom went to work in a defense plant. Or maybe Columbia ran out of film stock from wartime shortages.

Rating: 4 Nyuks, mainly for Curly’s antics.