First off, a bit about this movie: it's weird. It's weird, and goofy, and seems like someone pulled two kids' movies out of a hat and mixed them up together. There's about ten dry, sad minutes on Mars, where the kids never laugh and the nearly-dead oracle proclaims "We need a Santa Claus on Mars." So, naturally, the King of Mars decides to come to Earth and kidnap Santa.
And they do it too, and kidnap two all-American Earth kids in the bargain. Along the way, the kids encounter an unconvincing polar bear, and the Martians' cardboard-box robot. Santa turns the robot into a giant toy with unexplained magic, but once the Martians use their freezey-guns on a few elves and Mrs. Claus, Santa goes along with them.
On the trip back to Mars, the evil Martian underling tries to eject Santa and the kids into space, only for Santa to escape using his chimney skills. The Earth kids meet the depressed Martian kids, who have to eat pills for dinner and learn all their lessons in a sleep-pyramid... I think. Santa cheers up the Martian kids, and recruits the film's annoying comic relief to be the Martian Santa.
This is a truly strange movie, in the way that no studio-released film could be -- nothing in this film was focus-grouped or done by committee, and in a weird way I respect that kind of integrity. On the other hand, it's pretty bad, so there's that. This isn't even the weirdest Christmas movie made. We'll be looking at that in the next Christmas MST3K...
This is from the third season of MST3K, by which point the show was going full-bore, and this episode just cracks along. The joke/minute ratio is really high, and most of them land well. (I also feel like the percentage of then-topical jokes which haven't survived the ensuing decades are fewer than usual.) If you'd care to read annotations for all the jokes, please feel free to do so here. I feel like the host segments, as usual, are hit-or-miss; my favorite one is Tom's soulful take on A Child's Christmas in Wales which quickly descends into screaming worry about Santa exploding in the vaccuum of space.
This is the only MST3K film which has been redone by both Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic. I've seen the CT version (once, a while ago) but not the Rifftrax version. Maybe next Christmas, instead of this MST version I've seen so often, I'll watch those two back-to-back. While the film proper is public domain, this episode is currently out-of-print, so the buy link below is a little pricey. But, for that price, you also get Manos: Hands of Fate, so it's all relative. OR, a quick websearch will just take you to the full video online, and you can watch for free. Your choice.
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