Rupert of Hee Haw

Yes, I cannot but agree with the other reviewer. This is quite astonishingly unfunny and Laurel must have worked quite hard to so effectively expunge all traces of humour from it.

However, Rupert of Hentzau is not "a version of The Prisoner of Zenda" but, in both literary and cinematic terms, the sequel to it and, as far as the books are concerned, an entirely worthy sequel too. Sadly there seems never to have been a decent film version of the second novel although one was promised after the 1937 film of The Prisoner of Zenda (the best and the most faithful, version with Ronald Colman and Douglas Fairbanks Junior) but, alas, was never made.

The parody is however right to bill itself as "the sequel" (to "the Prisoner of Zebra") in that it is not based on The Prisoner of Zenda, very creditably filmed by Metro in 1922 (director Rex Ingram), but, insofar as it is based on anything at all, on the sequel which appears to have been rather dismally filmed by Selznick in 1923 (lost film?). This film evidently laid stress on the king's fondness for alcohol (not a significant element in the book) which helped to render the story ridiculous but also made it in a sense topical (this was at the height of prohibition). Harry Edwards/Harry Langdon's Soldier Man (1926) is in part a (better) parody of the same film.