Our Daily Trailer: ABBOTT AND COSTELLO GO TO MARS (1953)

Spoiler: No, they don't.

As we reflect on this week's Curiosity Rover landing on Mars, I'm sure we all wondered if we could have sent anything else to the Red Planet. If we continue to shit the bed here on Earth, Mars might well serve as a place of safekeeping for artifacts of our history, our culture, or maybe just comedians who are past their prime. One film dared to imagine just such an event!

Though they didn't descend into drug use, madness or anything quite so lurid as some of their peers, Abbott and Costello did eventually fall out of fashion (allegedly due to overexposure, and the pair's reluctance to try out new material), and by 1953 their heyday was over. Abbott And Costello Go To Mars, made two years before they were dropped by Universal, finds the bumbling pair accidentally launching a space ship, Far-Out Space Nuts-style, and landing in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Naturally these two WASP-y nitwits assume they're on Mars, and hilarity attempts to ensue. Eventually two thugs shanghai the pair and take the spaceship to Venus, which is of course ruled by hot women.

Their final film was three years later, and the pair retreated to the safety of performing their classic routines on television before splitting up.

That's a downer, huh? Let's end on an uplifting note: The film was also the feature debut of a young Harry Shearer!