MST3K #203: Jungle Goddess

It's Episode #203, with a Bela Lugosi serial and a racist, sexist story about white men in Africa.

It's a new season (for me, anyway), and the first chapter of a new serial. Bela plays a mad scientist who's invented a giant robot, an invisibility belt, and an exploding-spider/coma-inducer. Unlike the mad scientist in Mad Monster, he's unpatriotic and will gladly sell his inventions to America's enemies! (It's set in 1939, so I'm pretty sure that means ze Germans. Apparently the spies actually show up in later chapters, so I might know soon if I'm right.)

This serial reuses (to no particular effect) Franz Waxman's iconic, brilliant score from Bride of Frankenstein. Bela makes a great mad scientist, though he doesn't talk about his idea for "a rice of pipples" here.

Sidebar: I'm catching up on my podcasts, and just got around to hearing the Movie Sign With The Mads episode about Ed Wood. It's a discussion podcast, not a performance podcast, but I was still surprised I didn't get to hear Trace do his Bela impression. It's still good fun, though, and I love hearing Trace and Frank (and Carolina! Hi, Carolina!) chew over the great and not-so-great movies.

 

Then, our feature presentation. It's a pretty offensive thing, with Filipino and Mexican actors playing African natives (I guess I should just be glad they didn't black up for their scenes, but that's small comfort). When a Danish heiress crashes into the jungle, she's worshipped as a goddess by the "primitive, childlike" (her words) natives, and she spends at least six years there, befriending the only other woman and being waited on hand and foot. Everything about the representation of the natives is pretty awful, and that makes the whole movie terrible. Sure, it's a similar type of representation as parts of the original King Kong (one bit actor from that plays a bit part here), but the natives appear in nearly this whole movie. That really rubs in just how little Hollywood cared to learn about Africa. Joel and the bots don't particularly call the movie out on this, either, which seems like a bad choice. There are plenty of ways to be funny at the movie's expense about this. (I also get a bad taste in my mouth when Gypsy shows up with a bone in her... flashlight.) The movie is also pretty sexist, and the boy's club that was the MST writer's room at the time doesn't particularly call that out either.

The two white men in the film are Superman and Dick Tracy, though only George Reeves' character is really a hero; Ralph Byrd is a murderous chiseler, ready to abandon his partner at the first chance. (I love the run of jokes about him murdering monkeys and coconuts, etc.) It's a welcome relief when he gets a spear to the back, though I wish Reeve didn't shoot the native who dispatched him. (But then, white men always stick up for each other, even if they were literally fighting each other to the death 30 seconds earlier.)

"Whoa, huge slam on Lucy out of nowhere!"

I enjoy the use of unrelated stock footage of wildlife, and the "binocular" device used to slot it into the film. It wasn't until I saw the host segment making fun of the use of camera gobos that I realized I wasn't watching this episode for the first time. (For those of you keeping track at home, this is only the second episode from my binge that I've seen before, and this might be the first episode I saw as a young person.) This is a perfect reversal of the lecture-type host segments from Season One. It starts out like a lecture, but quickly becomes a breakneck series of jokes.

And, hey, it's TV's Frank! He's arrived, even if Dr. Forrester isn't experimenting on him yet. And Kevin's here too! It's only their third episode, but they already inhabit their roles perfectly. (Plus, I get to hear multi-tracked Kevin sing in the final host sketch.)

This is my second episode in a row to reference (deep breath): The Wisconsin Dells, Dune, Sabu, Adolphe Menjou, GI Joe, Gary Crosby, and even the urban legend of The Hook. It also has two Python references in five minutes, and I got references to Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Muppets to delight my soul.

Bonus feature alert: DVD viewers get a short history of Turkey Day, and an intro Joel did for a recent Turkey Day marathon. Also, before I watched this, I dialed up the first five minutes of #201, just to see the milk-carton farewell to Larry and Frank's introduction.

A reference I had to look up: "Where's Ted Bessell?"
A joke that didn't age well: “Have a drink." "We haven’t got time.” "We don’t fly Northwest."
My favorite joke: "I'd stake my life on it." "That's already in the kitty, Bob."
Overall, I rate this: 7/10. The riffs are on point, and the sketches are nearly at their peak. It'd probably go up to 8/10 if they called the movie out on its racism and sexism.

Up next, #205, Rocket Attack USA (and the second chapter of Phantom Creeps).

MST3K #113: The Black Scorpion

It's #113: The Black Scorpion, with giant clay bugs.

Our movie this time is a 1957 monster movie, with better-than-average scope (thanks to the expansive use of location shoots) and effects (thanks to King Kong genius Willis O'Brien). In fact, apart from its shoddy script, it's not a terrible film.

An Mexican earthquake opens up a new volcano, freeing plenty of subterranean prehistoric giant scorpions, who attack cows and people and trains indiscriminately. The brave scientists venture down into the scorpions' cave, discovering a lot of other giant bug species (like in Kong, and a lot of the designs are either similar or identical to the ones from Skull Island). There's a lukewarm romance plot and ranching and an annoying kid and silly plot complications, to pad out the running time. But, like I said, the film overall is halfway decent.

Well, okay, some of the effects aren't perfect either. But our in-theater friends keep the experience fun and fast-moving. The riffing is thick on the ground, diverse and sharp. (Sadly, the host segments are still not quite as good -- I like the idea of Crow and Tom trying to understand Joel's humanity, but Gypsy turning into a scorpion behind them is less funny to me. Later, the idea of Tom and Crow doing a puppet show of Joel is funny, but it just turns into a lecture about film history.)

There are a lot of repeated jokes in this one. For the second episode in a row, the gang references: M*A*S*H, "Serpentine!", Manuel Noriega, Nick the ...Wonderful Life bartender, Jacques Cousteau, and a "motorman's helper." Only the last is the same identical joke, but with the quantity here, there are bound to be some reuses. Joel also calls back his minigolf obsession from #102, and there's a long run of golf jokes. (Oddly, there's no Python joke.)

This is, sadly, our farewell to Josh. While I prefer TV's Frank to Larry Erhardt (naturally), Josh's Tom is so wonderful. Josh was a fantastic writer and a hilarious performer. One of my favorite things about Cinematic Titanic was that it helped remind us about the greatness of Josh. His farewell here is beyond understated -- the show didn't realize yet that we could get attached to its stars, so Larry just waves goodbye and walks off.

Bonus feature alert: for the first time in my binge, I get one of those great Shout! Factory documentaries about the making of the original film. It's a nice historical overview of the effects and production, and I love having that type of info about the raw material. Also, the traditional Shout! Factory animated menu is done all in stop-motion, and it's great. Stop-motion Tom and Crow, plus an adorable felted scorpion? I'm in.

A joke I had to look up: "Look over there. It says Arne Saknussemm."
A joke that didn't age well: "Wow, Dan Witkowski really puts on a halftime show. When do the Elvis impersonators come out?"
My favorite joke from this show: (as Jacques Cousteau) "Lower and lower we go, past ze matte paintings."

Odds I'll watch this one again: 7/10. It's a perfect encapsulation of season one.
Overall, I rate this one 6/10. The host segments still aren't perfect, but otherwise this is great.

Coming up next, it's #203, Jungle Goddess.

MST3K #112: Untamed Youth

It's Episode #112, with Mamie Van Doren singing rock songs and taking down an evil corrruption scheme!

In our movie this week, Mamie and her sister are arrested for vagrancy and hitchhiking, and sentenced to 30 days labor picking cotton. It's got a lot of teensploitation tropes, and a handful of womens' prison tropes (eg, the cat fight which leads to mutual respect), and like nine songs in 80 minutes (one by Eddie Cochran!). The food is awful (it's actually dog food), the labor is literally deadly, and the judge was in cahoots with the cotton-farmer. 

Sidebar: This one's kinda long, and doesn't have much to do with wisecracking robots, so feel free to jump down below. Sixty years after this film, our for-profit prisons are at least as bad as this movie would suggest, with way too many people jailed way too long for way too flimsy reasons. And it's only gonna get worse. I decided I wasn't going to talk about this in this post, I really wasn't. Until the evil cotton farmer was named "Tropp." 

Sure, he's evil, he harasses the help, and he puts profit above everything else in life. Sure, he makes secret deals to enrich himself, no matter who gets hurt. Sure, he's a duplicitous sociopath who has no respect for women. But Russ Tropp only hurts the people in his town, not the whole damn planet.

And, since it's a Hollywood movie from the 1950s, there aren't many nonwhite people around for Tropp to oppress. How do you make a movie about cotton picking, Warner Brothers, and cast zero African-Americans? (There's one character who's textually Latina, but she's pretty incidental.)

The movie tries to be honest about the realities of life, leading to a scene where Joel has to say "Gee, I'm sorry we even made fun of this movie." But it's just so obviously fakey, like most of the studio teen movies of the time, that I can't take it very seriously. 

And the movie's concept of female empowerment isn't great: the female judge has easily been suckered into the scheme by emotional manipulation. Her overdue enlightenment leads her to do the right thing, but the movie doesn't bother to differentiate how much of that is from her hurt feelings over the betrayal.

The cartoony corruption in this movie is solved easily, and it's hard to believe that about real life. It's hard to hear naive characters say things like "I don't think Mr. Tropp's that kind" without feeling dark about our future.

Right. So, the movie is okay, I guess, as far as teensploitation potboilers of the 50's go. It's got some good songs, thanks to Eddie Cochran (whom I adore!) and the whitebread rock stylings of Les Baxter, early in his film career. (He also scored two of the Corman Poe films I saw a few years ago, though I know him best from his contributions to the exotica music scene.)

It's nice to see Joel and the bots deal with a different type of film. This was their first movie without any horror or sci-fi elements, and I'm sure they questioned if MST3K could work with something like this. (I keep forgetting to pull out my dogeared copy of TACEG to check these things.) The fact it does is testament to the dexterity of movie riffing as an artform, and more specifically to the strengths of the show's format. (I'm also happy to see Gypsy show up in the theater, even if I don't think her run of jokes is particularly strong.) (And speaking of firsts, here's the first reference to Jeff Dunham, long before America loved him for his xenophobic nonsense.)

And how do they deal with the film?  While the host sketches aren't particularly great, the riffing is pretty sharp. The jokes are reaching that rarefied breadth and scope I love most about the show, with plenty that made me laugh out loud. Sure, there are a lot of easy ones about The Wizard of Oz and Andy Griffith, but there's also callouts for Tom Waits and Tobe Hooper and Squeaky Fromme. It's a heady stew, and a lot of us who grew up on the show got a certain percentage of our cultural education from those jokes.

This is my second show in a row to reference Disneyland, Boss Hogg, and Fawlty Towers (instead of Monty Python). They also make a reference back to SPACOM, from my previous movie.

Bonus feature alert: The DVD has an intro from Joel, and an interview about his one-man show, "Riffing Myself." There's also an interview with Mamie, and she's still energetic and active.

A joke I had to look up: "It's Vic Tayback!"
A joke that didn't age well: "Wait, so you’re my grandma, my sister, my mom ... did you marry Bill Wyman?"
My favorite joke: "Hey, it's Blonde Lemon Jefferson."

Odds I'll rewatch this: 4/10. The worst thing about this episode is how I feel about our country right now. I'm pretty sure that my lessened enjoyment of a silly puppet show isn't important, either, so let's move on and someday I'll laugh at this again.
Overall, I rate this one 6/10. The host sketches go nowhere, and I can't wait for better Gypsy material (no pun intended, sorry), but otherwise, it's pretty good.

Up next, we bid farewell to Josh (and Larry), in #113: The Black Scorpion.

MST3K #109: Project Moonbase

It's #109, with twice the Cody, and eight times the sexism!

When Joel and the bots find out they have two chapters with Cody this week, they... react badly, and I don't blame them. He's wearing thin on me, and I only have to watch each one once. And I skipped more than half!

I do like Joel's props in this short, where he holds up Batman-style words like "Biff" and "Pow," during the obligatory fistfight. (For a civilization with advanced radar guns, the moonmen sure do suffer a lot of fistfights.)

And during the second title sequence, they're so sick of writing credit gags they come up with a theme song for Cody, sung vaguely toward the tune of the underscore. This became a MST staple, and the first one is good right off the bat.

(Did I mention how much I love to hear Tom sing?)

And speaking of firsts, this also hears our first mention of "Slowly I turned..."

I'm so glad this is my last taste of Cody for now. (Until, that is, Shout! Factory decides to put out a bonus disc with the complete Commando Cody adventures. No reason not to, since the films are public domain.)

On the other hand, Cody is just dull and silly, and he doesn't make my skin crawl. The movie this week, though, wow. It's supposedly based on a story by Robert Heinlein, back before he thought even a little bit about women and sexism (even his later, more nuanced things aren't particularly great on that front).

I feel all icky after this one, watching a supposedly-professional woman cower at danger (she's a colonel for god's sake!). We also have to see her commanding officer threaten to spank her. Then she's married off to some meathead so America's morals won't be threatened by two grown adults shacking up on the moon. It's all so demeaning, and even the final twist (the president is -- get this! -- a WOMAN!!!!) is more a tasteless joke than forward-thinking futurism.

Let's try to move on. The so-called plot of this one is that dirty commies are trying to destroy America's space station, so they kidnap a scientist, and replace him with a double. The intrigue feels paper-thin, and the plot falls prey almost immediately to that old gag where the spy doesn't care about his "local" baseball team. (In this case, it's the 1970 Brooklyn Dodgers - "Oh, this is the future when they sold the Dodgers back to Brooklyn.")

The movie wants to be a serious, hard-science film. But it spends too much time on silly spy plots and cliche romance, and doesn't even bother to pretend that the models demonstrated early in the film aren't being used for the miniature shots a few minutes later.

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Alan Hale Jr. (who died just four days before it aired), who would show up in two later episodes, Angels' Revenge and The Giant Spider Invasion. (I'm not watching either of them this year, but Spider Invasion is the grimiest, ickiest film I'd ever seen on MST until this one.)

Bonus feature alert: There's a nice interview with Jeff Stonehouse, who was the show's DP for 3 seasons and a movie. I'm not sure why that bonus is on this disk (in fact, this box was all Joel eps, and Jeff wasn't there during Joel's years), but it's a nice brief memory of his time on the show. He was there during the great lighting-change in season 7 or so (when all of a sudden, lighting got a lot more important, and a lot more colorful). I've seen and heard a lot of interviews with the cast and crew before, but I don't remember hearing from Jeff before, and it's nice to add his voice to the history.

A reference I just don't get (write in if you know it): "This thing's full of candy! Watch what I can do with it."
A joke that didn't age well: "I see a thousand points of light."
A joke I had to look up: "Ooh, radishes." (Apparently they cause gas, which I did NOT know. Lots of flatulence jokes in this one.)
My favorite bit is the run of model jokes: "Space station," "Or, frisbee."

Odds I'll watch this again: 1/10. I feel bad as a male, a sci-fi fan, and a human being having to watch this one.
Overall, I rate this 3/10. The riffing is pretty fast and solid, but there are oh so many episodes without the ick factor.

Up next is #112, Untamed Youth.

MST3K #108: The Slime People

Next up, it's #108. After another adventure with pumpkin boy, there are some slimy underground monsters in LA. (Insert cheap shot about, say, Hollywood agents here.)

Commando Cody is still fighting with those dang ol' moon men. This time, the hired earth goons drop an atomic bomb from a tiny single-engine plane. ("The Cessna Skyhawk is usually your best choice for bombardiering missions.") Cody has to run down the goons in some hills and... I'm bored with Cody. I'm just kind of surprised Joel and the fellas (at least in the episodes I've heard) didn't even MENTION "Hot Rod Lincoln." There are enough car chases to inspire it, and they hadn't banned obvious ("state park") jokes quite yet.

Our main picture doesn't make too much sense. We start in the aftermath of some kinda fogpocalypse, though we don't know what happened until our jowly hero finds a convenient TV news compilation (luckily, he's a sportscaster so he's incredibly skilled at using the equipment). The scientist who picks him up from the airport reminds us that there is much we don't know about science, so slime people are just as believable as any other durnfool thing the producers could've come up with.

Sidebar:  Just last week, I was talking about Stephen King's "The Mist" with my friends. As in that story, our plucky survivors hole up in a butcher shop, making a quick excursion out into the low-vis surroundings and nearly getting killed. The Slime People have also built a giant fog-dome over LA, and I can't help but be reminded of Under The Dome. Even all the way through to the struggle to destroy the machine producing the fog-dome, I kept wondering if Stephen King had ever seen this one. (Apparently I'm not alone.)

Did I mention there's a lot of fog in this movie? I skipped to a random part near the end to take this screenshot. Not only is it hard to like this film, it's impossible even to see it. ("Boy, I bet that'd be scary if we could make out what it was.")

Some stray observations: I'll see the newsreel reporter again in The Giant Mantis from Season 8.
I like Joel's midpoint thoughts on the virtue (or at least, honesty) of making a bad movie, and this time I like Tom's followup metajoke about MST.
Who's doing that Pee Wee Herman voice? Is it Josh maybe?
This is the second episode in a row where I've heard "You'll believe a man can fly," or in this instance, "You'll believe a Marine can drive a car." (This is also two in a row where Joel calls Tom "Crow," though it was deliberate this time.)
I like this early run of jokes, the first time (in my binge at least) they clearly wrote multiples for the same setup: "Right in the kidney beans." "Right in the creamed corn." "Right in the liver and onions." "Right in the Salisbury steak."

Bonus feature note: the DVD has a shortish interview with the film's ingenue, Judee Morton, about her memories of the cheapass production and her costars.
Two timely jokes that, as of last year, were relevant again: "Zsa Zsa is guilty." and "Must be that new Hi-C Ecto-Cooler."
My favorite joke: "Yeah, you can usually find a blonde hair in a field of wheat." "At night." "In a fog."

Odds I'll watch this one again: 6/10. The show is so well-oiled by this point that the only thing clearly placing this in season one is Josh as Larry and Tom. (No slight intended, Josh! I love your Tom in so many ways.)
Overall, I rate this one 6/10. The monsters are goofy, and the jokes are diverse and largely funny. They haven't quite reached the dizzying heights of absurdism and obscurity I fell in love with, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

Up next is #109, Project Moonbase, also featuring my final bout with Commando Cody.

MST3K #103: Mad Monster

Our next episode is #103. It begins with Chapter Two of Commando Cody, as Tom learns another lesson about serials: "If they had shown him diving out of the way LAST time, I wouldn't have spent the week worrying about him." The short isn't nearly as bad as the movie this time -- the special effects of the cave melting are really pretty decent.

Yeah, so this movie is a slower, boring-er ripoff of Universal's The Wolf Man. It's got a lower budget and a much more generic script. One of the few things I liked about the film is Glenn Strange. He plays the human version of the titular monster like that other Lon Chaney character, the one from Of Mice and Men.

Sidebar: Two years later, Strange would play Frankenstein's monster against Chaney's Wolfman in House of Frankenstein. They played those characters twice more together -- I can't help but wonder if they ever discussed this one. Probably not.

If the movie sounds like something you might watch without Joel and the bots, well, it's in the public domain, and you can do so here. (Same for Commando Cody.)

The riffing is still really loose -- at one point, Joel calls Tom "Crow." This is the second episode to ever offer RAM chips for movie criticism (and the first in my binge). But the biggest first (and hopefully a last) is Joel's mad experiment with switching bot heads.

This is the second episode in a row to have jokes referencing: The Michelin Man, "peas and carrots," Airplane!, and Kellogg's Frosted Miniwheats. I know that's a long list, but I'm glad they didn't fall into a rut. Speaking of, this is the first of my four episodes to not reference Monty Python.

Coming up next, #108, The Slime People!

A joke I had to look up: "Even our name says Merry Christmas!" (Honorable mention to the Smothers Brothers' winery.)
A joke that didn't age well: "You could learn a lot from a dummy."
My favorite joke: It's cliched, but I love Tom romancing the blender. Josh's Tom is already so perfect and fully-formed. ("Nobody drinks from my gal!") Tom even sings for the first time in this one, and I imagine in coming weeks I'll talk some more about how much I love it when Tom sings.

Odds I'll watch this one again: 5/10. I'll almost always watch any episode a second time.
Overall, I rate this one: 5/10. The movie is kinda slow (I had to nap halfway through), but some of the performances are so big that it's goofy fun. And, like with Time of the Apes or Pod People, I love seeing blatant genre ripoffs get the MST treatment.

MST3K #102: The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy

In my MST3K binge this year, #102 is the first episode I've seen before. In fact, I taped it off Comedy Central waaaaay back in the day. (Not from The Comedy Channel, mind you -- I have a vague recollection that at the time, the season one shows weren't rerun at the request of Best Brains, and CC's decision to reair the rare early shows was met with some skepticism from the fandom, possibly because of CC's tonedeaf promos.) It's got a lot of great early jokes, like Joel explaining serials to the bots ("Why would someone go see part of a movie?") and some reused stuff from KTMA host segments. Let's dig in.

After Joel reuses an invention exchange from the first episode (and a staple of his standup act, and also a real thing apparently), it's time for the first-ever MST'd short. Commando Cody fights Radar Men from the Moon, or something. This also sees our first example of "New Petitions Against Tax." This is the second episode in a row where I've heard a joke about Jackie Gleason's face on the moon, and also "Jane, stop this crazy thing!"

The feature film is only about a third of a movie, really. It's nearly all talky framing scenes with flashbacks from the first two movies in its series, and the titular fight takes about two minutes. It's kind of a dull slog, honestly. I know this is at least the third time I've seen this episode, but my brain simply won't retain this film. (Maybe it's a self-protective mechanism.)

A few stray observations: This episode has a few jokes the crew apologized for later, where they messed with the film's audio. Joel covers a singer's mouth, and the sound is muffled. They also dubbed in the sound of micturation.

Why on earth would the mummy fear a cross? Unless he died in the last decade of the Aztec era, he would have no conception of the symbol. It's almost like the filmmakers cared for historical accuracy as little as they cared for effective storytelling.

I'm a little tired of Jerry Lewis impressions (maybe because I can't imagine a better one than Paul Rugg on Animaniacs), but I adore the time Trace spent doing Dean Martin here.

The other reused host segment idea is the demon dogs from K02, who have an expanded role in this show (giving us our second and third urine jokes in 90 minutes). One dog even shows up in the theater, becoming the first of many guests to appear in silhouette form. (If you want your own demon dog, there are plenty of the toys Joel used as the basis available.)

Bonus alert: The DVD includes a bonus feature of some short host segments from KTMA, including a short scene with Beeper, Tom Servo's ill-fated predecessor.

Coming up next, #103: The Mad Monster!

A joke that didn't age particularly well: "The evil judge Robert Bork." (I can't imagine it being phrased that way later, especially not in the new season.)
My favorite joke in this episode: "This is the city. Mexico. My name’s Friday. I carry a badge. I don’t need no stinking badge."
The odds I'll watch this one again: 2/10. It's not bad, but I haven't seen half of season one even once.
Overall, I rate this one 5/10. Sure, it's early, but the show is nearly fully-formed at this point. The worst part about this episode is the dullness of the movie.

MST3K K02: Revenge of the Mysterons From Mars

Like Invaders From The Deep, this is a compilation of 4 TV episodes edited into a feature. And like that one, this movie didn't try to disguise its episodic nature. Neither film has much in the way of dramatic structure, and they didn't even bother to cut out reused model shots. Also, the formulaic procedural elements of each episode repeat themselves throughout -- Tom points out that we have at least five "dramatic" countdowns in this 90-minute film.

This movie feels more serious and grown-up to me than Invaders From The Deep, with a lot more attention to the actual science of planetary motion and geography. I guess that credit goes to the writer, Tony Barwick, for putting some research into his scripts. (For example, we learn a little about Phobos, one of Mars' moons, including its orbital period.) The unseen Mysterons are a community on Mars, and in a flashback we see their first interaction with Earthlings -- as usual, the trigger-happy humans assume the Martian settlement is a threat, and blow it up almost immediately, causing a war that went on for 32 episodes, two film compilations, and even an aughties reboot. And that's an interesting, serious contemporary idea, though it's mostly ignored in this collection of episodes.

The puppets are also more realistically sculpted, though their motion is a lot less fluid. We'll call that a draw. (Plus, there are a few puppets of color included. A small step forward from last movie's WASPS.)

MST3K has always had a special relationship with Thanksgiving, and that started right here. Every single host segment hinges on the holiday (I especially love the one where Joel and all the bots make hand turkeys). Only one other episode would set itself at Thanksgiving officially (Season Seven's Night of the Blood Beast), though most of us have had a marathon on the last 26 Turkey Days, official or no.

There are a lot of other firsts in this episode. Tom shows up in a speaking role, and they put food in his head twice! Crow's first good joke in this episode is MST's earliest Python reference. ("It's only a model.") The riffing speed also picked up a lot, and it's nice to have all three of our main characters in the theater, all making jokes and interacting with each other.

The show is still pretty rough -- someone in the theater is still wearing their digital wristwatch, which we can hear beep three times (around six minutes, around 45 minutes, and around 1:12). Not exactly professional TV behavior, but they had no idea thousands of people would be watching this in the next century. (Was it Trace? We didn't hear that in the first episode, and he didn't get to work on that one. Of course, that's pretty circumstantial.) As with the previous episode, this was lost until earlier this year, and Joel has some thoughts he'd like to share.

My favorite joke in this episode is Tom's love for the repeated countdowns.
A joke I had to look up: "Looks like Carol Merrill."
A joke that didn't age well: "Dr. Breck, the shampoo genius." (Breck shampoo has been exclusively available at Dollar Tree stores for the last decade.)

Odds I'll watch this one again: 1/10. The movie is less silly than K01, but that actually makes the show less fun overall.
I rate this episode: 2/10. The joke speed picked up, though the quality isn't what we came to expect later on.

You can't buy this episode outright, though Kickstarter supporters should be able to watch it on vhx.tv. If you're late to the whole thing but still want to join in, you can spend $40 and get the two lost KTMA eps here.

MST3K K01: Invaders from the Deep

A few prefatory remarks: I'm really really really excited that there will be new episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 any month now. I bought a crapload more DVDs from Shout Factory during their Thanksgiving sale, so I'll be watching all those DVDs up there, plus a select few additional episodes, while I count the minutes till new episodes. I haven't seen around half of these episodes before, and few of them in the last decade, so this should be a lot of fun. I've got 36 shows to watch, and plan to get through at least two a week. I hope to finish before the new season is available, though that's a piecrust promise if I ever made one.

My first episode was recently unearthed, and it's the first full-length MST3K ever, Invaders from the Deep.

The movie is four episodes of a Supermarionation TV show from 1964, cut together into a package film. The show was lost until just a few months ago, and Joel Hodgson was pleased to present it as a gift for his Kickstarter backers.

As the first real episode, this is rough. Like, rougher than you think. Whole minutes go by with just silence from Joel. I spent the first half hour counting comments, and got less than thirty. (I also counted ones that made me laugh, and only came up with six, though I feel like the laugh ratio increased later in the episode.)

I do love the original door sequence, which somehow I've never seen before. As far as production value, that one part seems to age better than anything else in this season. And the whole thing just feels right. Sure, it's early, but the aesthetic of the finished show is there, like early garage demos from your favorite band.

Joel's in the theater by himself for a long time. Finally, Crow (voiced by Josh!) shows up, and makes a few level-one robot jokes, though I did really enjoy his comment about Beernuts.

For the most part, I spent most of my time laughing at the movie, rather than Joel and Crow, since the movie is so obviously laughable. The puppets are technically impressive (for marionettes), but so unexpressive. And since they're so unexpressive, it's hilarious to hear the voice actors emote so highly. For no good reason, the sidekick's near-Gabby-Hayes voice made me laugh every time.

The plot of the movie is this: several nonhuman, undersea civilizations attack humanity. Each time, the WASPs (so appropriate) must fight to survive. The third time, they actively destroy an entire city, presumably murdering thousands of squareheads like that blue fella there. Some heroes.

I'm not sure how I feel about the full-on metajoke at the end of the episode, where Crow proposes his own puppethood and the nonexistence of the Satellite of Love. At the time, it was wildly ambitious for a local cowtown movie-host to do a joke like that, but I didn't think it was particularly funny. Maybe it's just too on-the-nose: the best thing about MST is that everything usually comes from an odd slant.

Joel has posted his extensive notes on the episode online, so if you MUST read more about it, feel free.

My favorite joke from this episode is as follows: The puppets are in a tight spot, and have had sweat applied to their foreheads to show it. Joel: "Are they sweating, or is that sap?"
A joke that hasn't exactly aged well: Crow's now-oblique Dukakis reference.
A joke I had to look up: "Isn't that Memphis Furniture?"

Odds I'll watch this one again: 1/10. It's so rough and so early, but I could conceivably do a whole series binge sometime in the next 50 years.
Overall, I rate this episode 3/10. There aren't enough jokes (and the ones there don't reach the complexity and quality of later years), but the movie is so loopy and a perfect target. (In his reminiscences above, Joel says they had a chance to remake this one later at Comedy Central, but decided against it, since it's too hard to slot in a lot of riffs. Too bad,)

You can't buy this episode outright, though Kickstarter supporters should be able to watch it on vhx.tv. If you're late to the whole thing but still want to join in, you can spend $40 and get the two lost KTMA eps here.