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.