mst3knitathon

[mst3knitathon]

The next two knitting/crochet projects I have planned each have hard deadlines, but I really want to finish this blanket before I start anything else so that I can get the pattern up for sale on Ravelry, so we're back to the original purpose of this media project: keeping me company during marathon knitting. Attempting to watch the fan-voted 100 best Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes from bottom to top has gotten me all the way up to:

59. Episode 318 Star Force: Fugitive Alien II

Summary: This is another movie that was made out of a TV show, in this case a Japanese show called Star Wolf (based on an American scifi novel trilogy of the same title) that was cut, dubbed, and distributed by American producer/distributer Sandy Frank (also responsible for the 60s English Gamera films we've already seen.) When adapting a TV show for film, Frank and team would attempt to cut the relevant scenes across several episodes together into one story, but the cohesiveness of their end results was often - limited at best.

We won't get to Fugitive Alien (one) until number 30 on the list, but luckily this one starts with a voice-overed recap of the first movie: Ken is an alien super-soldier known as a Star Wolf who defected when ordered to shoot child, watched a friend die in the ensuing conflict, discovered he is actually an Earthling raised by Star Wolves, joined the crew of an Earth ship, was pursued for recapture by his fellow Star Wolf former girlfriend Rita, and watched her die in his arms. Most of this movie is devoted to a plot about different aliens building a planet-destroying bomb, and our heroes trying to stop them with the collusion of a captured alien colonel. This part almost makes sense, but while every second of this-is-going-on-for-comically-too-long explosions are left in, enough was cut that things like the alien colonel's relationship to the human crew, who knows that Ken is a Star Wolf and to whom that is still as secret, and even the short-term goals of the mission just kind of change from scene to scene without any explanation. Then the last 15 minutes try to cram in the mostly unrelated final plot arc of the series (you can tell there's a time jump because Ken has different hair) where Ken defeats the Star Wolves' leader and decides to leave his human friends behind and attempt to reform the planetary society that the Star Wolves are from. I'm tempted to infer that this would have been better if they'd made it a trilogy and focused this movie on the bomb plot and Ken bonding with the crew and gave the final story arc its own movie, but given the distributors' tendency to leave in every second of action - whether or not we know what the characters are doing and why - at the expense of exposition and character moments, it might not have helped.

MST3K lore or notable moments: Many! The badness of this movie causes Tom Servo's head to explode in the theater, and Joel and Crow have to perform robot resuscitation to bring him back. Then there's a delightful medley of a running gag from the riff, singing along to the soundtrack. (Most of these seem to be callbacks to the first movie, so we'll appreciate it more after watching that one!)

I'd also like to call attention to the opening sketch, where Joel reveals that the bots have a weekly debate about the ontological nature of puppets, which is interesting in the context of "the bots usually don't know that they're puppets unless they are making fourth-wall breaking meta references" that we see throughout the series.

What do I think about its place on the list? The two Fugitive Alien movies are some of the ones that were featured in the Minnesota local television KTMA season 0 and re-riffed later on Comedy Central. I remembered these two being confusing and boring, but I think I was remembering the KTMA versions of the episode. This time around it was not as bad as I remembered, and it was certainly memorable, but in certain parts I think I was enjoying how much the riffers were enjoying making fun of the movie more than I was enjoying the riff or movie itself, if that makes any sense? I'm tempted to move it down slightly, but I think all the notable moments nudge it back up. (Also, I suspect I'd have a much higher opinion of this episode if I were watching these in order as they aired and could fully enjoy all the callbacks to Fugitive Alien instead of having to wait 30 more episodes to get to that one.)

This movie also begs the question - is the original Japanese Star Wolf series actually good? There's some production value (the costumes, for example), and I think the acting looks like it's probably pretty good when it's not being dubbed. And even devoid of most of their context, some of the scenes are genuinely affecting: when the alien colonel who has bonded with our ragtag band encounters a young patriotic soldier from his own army and begins having second thoughts about betraying his planet, it made me wish I actually got to see his character arc in full! On the other hand, there's also some very bad production value (the make-up on the blue aliens looks terrible) and after being cut down for the Sandy Frank edit and then cut again to fit the MST3K format, there's still so much filler left in this movie that it makes me suspect that the show itself was mostly filler to begin with. Anyone familiar enough with 20th century Japanese sci-fi television to weigh in?

Join us Friday for: Number 58 Episode 1012 Squirm

[mst3knitathon]

I'm back from vacation, so time to finally finish this blanket by proceeding with MST3Knitathon, my attempt to finish all my knitting projects while watching the fan-voted top 100 episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in reverse order from bottom to top. Today's episode:

60. Episode 604 Zombie Nightmare

Content warnings: attempted sexual assault in film; inaccurate and insensitive portrayals of voodoo in film and sketches

Summary: While walking home from a community baseball game that he led, an unusually large man intervenes in the attempted rape of a young Haitian woman - and after winning the fight, is stabbed in the back by the fleeing assailants while he checks on the victim. His wife and young son helplessly watch him die.

Years later, his son Tony has grown to be just like his father: large, strong, loving baseball, and protecting the neighborhood by stopping robberies in his local convenience store. But none of that saves him from being killed in a hit-and-run by a gang of reckless driving teens. At the request of his grieving mother, the victim of the attempted rape - who has now become a voodoo priestess - raises Tony as a zombie to avenge himself on his killers. A tired Adam West turns in a barely-there performance as the corrupt police chief who covers up the murders of teenagers with baseball bats as drug related suicides out of sheer lazy disinclination to have to hunt for a serial killer. But in a third act twist, he turns out to be one of the would-be rapists from long ago, and when his co-assailant (and the teen driver's father) also turns up murdered, he tracks his former victim to the graveyard from which she raises the zombie and plans to kill both her and the eager young police officer who's been trying to actually solve the crime to cover his tracks. Unable to raise the zombie again because he has killed the last teen from the car (note: played by Tia Carrere) and his revenge is complete, the voodoo priestess performs a chant that will raise her as a zombie, and when Adam West shoots her, her zombified form drags him through a portal to hell as the horrified rookie cop looks on.

MST3K lore or notable moments: Because of this episode, Adam West hosted the Turkey Day '94 marathon where it premiered, making him something of a friend of the show. Hi, Adam West!

What do I think about its place on the list? OK, so the riff is very good, and body-builder/actor Jon Mikl Thor who plays Tony the zombie was also the front man of a heavy metal band and he designed the soundtrack, so if you're into 80s metal, the soundtrack is apparently very good. One of my favorite podcasts, It's Just A Show, about Mystery Science Theater 3000 (recommended!) has a high level of appreciation for this episode. But unfortunately, I just don't see it. I think it might be that I'm the wrong age. I was born right in the mid-80s, which makes me just a little too young to feel nostalgia for the time period (I don't remember it well enough), but just barely old enough that the 80s don't have that fun period flavor of cultural moments from before I was born. So I tend to find bad 80s movies pretty charmless by default unless they're doing something else that's endearing (see my thoughts on Robot Holocaust), and this particular film is just giving me nothing. Even the presence of Adam West doesn't help as, knowing how great he can be, watching him turn in a performance as bad and boring as everyone else in this movie is just kind of a bummer. (Adam from It's Just A Show linked above theorized that there was a period after the sixties Batman was canceled but before it found new appreciation with the rerun audiences when everyone was so scared of invoking it that Adam West was being directed to hold back so much that he wasn't allowed to give anything to his parts, which it certainly looks like could be happening here.) Zombie Nightmare is certainly a perfectly acceptable good episode of MST3K, but I don't see anything particularly special about it that should put it in the top 75, much less the first episode of the top 60. From the 80s (decade) this came, and to the 80s (on the list) it should return!

Join us Wednesday for: Number 59 Episode 318 Star Force: Fugitive Alien II

[mst3knitathon]

MST3Knitathon, knitting while watching every episode of the fan-voted 100 best episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 continues with

61. Episode 408 Hercules Unchained

Content warning: insensitively feigned deafness in the film EDIT: omg, and dubious consent because of the whole forgetfulness water thing, I can't believe I didn't warn for that at first! The implication is that Hercules is acting of his own will with the information that he has, but that he would NOT be sleeping with other women if he remembered that he was married or that he was on a quest, and the evil Queen lady knows and is intentionally taking advantage of this. I don't think I would have overlooked this so easily if the genders were reversed, so this is a reminder to check my assumptions.

Summary: After completing the Quest for the Golden Fleece in the first movie, Steve Reeves’s Hercules comes home to Thebes with his new wife Iole and a very young Ulysses (Odysseus, if you’re Greek) who’s going to stay with them for a bit to “learn maturity.” But Hercules and family find themselves dropped into the brewing crisis of the Seven Against Thebes: while Hercules was gone, wise but troubled King Oedipus abdicated the throne so his ambitious sons could share it by taking turns ruling in one year stints. But now the first year is up and Brother 1 won’t yield the throne, so Brother 2 has raised an army with their warlike neighbors to take it by force. To prevent civil war, Hercules threatens the princes into getting along - but as he travels to take the treaty from one to the other, he accidentally drinks from a spring with the waters of forgetfulness, and is captured by a wicked queen who lives to seduce men for her pleasure and kill them when she tires of them. Clever Ulysses pretends to be Hercules’s deaf servant so that he can spy in the queen’s palace unsuspected. But can he restore Hercules’s memory in time to prevent civil war in Thebes?

Well obviously not, or else we wouldn’t get a huge battle scene where Hercules single-handedly destroys siege engines. But luckily, wise Creon takes the throne after the princes slay each other in battle. Ulysses writes a letter to Penelope as Hercules and Iole gaze into the sunset and pray for future kindness from the gods.

MST3K lore or notable moments: We learn that the bots get an annual wash and wax, and in a rare pre-movie guest appearance, “actor Steve Reeves” (really Mike Nelson in a muscle suit) visits Deep 13 as part of his new career as an exterminator.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? I don’t have much to say about this one - I just really like it! Like the Gameras, the Godzillas, and the “Russo-Finnish” films, Steve Reeves’s Hercules movies are a little bit classics in their own right in addition to being deeply cheesy. I like that these ones are at least loosely based on Greek myths (unlike some other “Hercules” movies MST3K covers), and have enough production value to deliver on some of the spectacle they promise. (Though it is mostly spectacle - it’s interesting how these movies use the time period as an excuse to have attractive people run around seducing each other with magic forgetfulness water in *very* skimpy outfits.) And the episode around it takes full advantage - I’m trying to decide if my favorite part is GPC bashing her mouth into harp strings to “play the lyre” like Iole in the movie, or Joel eating of “the Hot Dish of Happiness” and going on a long ramble about how much he loves living in Minnesota.

I’m about to go on vacation, so we’ll be on hiatus for at least a week.

[mst3knitathon]

I just forgot to write this up for Monday. Oh well, better late than never.

MST3Knitathon, my attempt to watch all episodes of the fan-voted top 100 list from the original run of Mystery Science Theater 3000 while knitting continues with:

62. Episode 913 Quest of the Delta Knights

Content Warning: There's a riff that uses the m-slur for a little person (usual disclaimer that I won't always catch one-off riffs) and the film is oddly frank and not particularly bothered about a teenager being sold into sexual slavery in a brothel, especially for an obvious children's movie??? It's weird.

Summary: The Delta Knights are an ancient order devoted to wisdom and justice. The evil Lord Vultare and his boss(?) lady known as the Mannerjay are determined to stamp them out by attacking villages and traveling parties at random on the off-chance that they might be killing Delta Knights in hiding. Shockingly, this has not worked. But when a young boy is injured in one of these raids and captured and sold as a slave, the beggar who buys him at a discount is a Delta Knight in disguise who recognizes the boy as a prophesied Chosen One who will find the lost cave of Archimedes' hidden teachings and bring wisdom to the world. The boy, along with fellow secret Delta Knight Leonardo da Vinci, locates the cave, but decides that its entrance must be destroyed because humanity is not yet ready for the knowledge contained within. (Leonardo borrows some of the ideas, though.)

MST3K lore or notable moments: So many in this one! Most importantly: there is a Mad in the theater! Pearl decides that Mike just isn't feeling enough pain from these bad movies, so she decides to swap places with him for the first film segment to see where her experiment is going wrong. We get to see Mary Jo Pehl riff the movie as she will do post-MST3K for Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax! Meanwhile, Mike has a male-bonding poker game with Brain Guy and Professor Bobo. In the final segment, Pearl reappears in the theater with a contractor to assess whether "pain" might be leaking out of the edges of the room. Additionally, we have two character appearances. Leonardo da Vinci swings by on the hexfield viewscreen to talk about his new life as an Italian-American in Brooklyn, and the Delta Knights show up at Castle Forrester, having booked it before Pearl's residence for their annual Pancake Breakfast. The Pancake Breakfast scene contains the most people on screen in a non-film segment prior to the Netflix era, and is full of crew members and their friends and family. Neat! Oh, and they reprise a version of the all-Tom Servo chorus sketch from The Starfighters with him presenting a mixed-gender madrigal choir, but it's not as strong a bit as it was the first time.

What do I think about its place on the list? I don't think I've previously seen this episode before, and it's adorable! (Almost) everything about it is just - cute! The movie is meant to be a children's comedy where the scenes with the child main character are sincere and heartfelt but all the adults, from villains to heroes, are comedic caricatures. This does not work (the comedy is not funny, the emotional scenes are too clumsy to be effective, and the way the movie tries to combine them just feels confused) but it gives the production a veneer of earnestness that's endearing as long as the riffers are keeping us entertained when the movie isn't. It's further delightful that this movie was actually filmed with the participation of a Renaissance Faire (Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Black Point, Novato, California), with several scenes filmed on the fair grounds and most of the extras being Fair workers who supplied their own costumes, which creates an immediately recognizable blend of detailed and meticulous but also time-period blended and fantasy influenced costumery. (They even leave the sign up at Ye Olde Pewter Mug Stand, it's great). And the sketches are really cute too, with the bots immediately imprinting on Pearl because she gave them a lint-covered mint from the bottom of her purse, Mike's nice male-bonding moments with Bobo and Brain Guy, and the sweet enthusiasm of the Delta Knights who are so please to have earned enough money with this year's Pancake Breakfast Fundraiser that they can hold next year's Pancake Breakfast Fundraiser, which is apparently all they do anymore. Adorable!

(I will give one nit-pick, and it's that the riffers devote a lot of time to making fun of Leonardo introducing himself as being "from a small town called Vinci" and that's - historically accurate. It's maybe the *only* historically accurate detail in the movie. da Vinci is not part of Leonardo's actual name: it's just Italian for "from Vinci" and indicates that he doesn't have a family name because he was an illegitimate child whose father never claimed him. And a one-off joke about how that sounds silly would have been fine, but that kind of makes it annoying when they won't stop harping on it.)

Anyway, I'm glad this project prompted me to finally watch this episode and I'm perfectly happy with it being #62.

Tune in Wednesday for: Number 61 Episode 408 Hercules Unchained

[mst3knitathon]

MST3Knitathon, my attempt to watch all the episodes on the fan-voted top 100 list of the best of Mystery Science Theater 3000 from bottom to top while knitting reaches number 63:

63. Episode 621 The Beast of Yucca Flats

Content Warning: The film contains some implied off-screen necrophilia

Summary: We start out with not one, but two short films! In the first, Money Talks!, a high schooler contemplates his last fifty-cent piece as he wishes he had $2 to take a girl to the school dance. The silhouette of Benjamin Franklin manifests from the coin and teaches him how to make and keep a budget, and, impressed by his new financial responsibility, the boy's father gives him the extra money for the dance.

The next is Progress Island U.S.A., a film made by the Puerto Rico Economic Development Administration to convince Americans to visit, move to, or open new business headquarters in modern and convenient Puerto Rico. It has a memorable Latin jazz score.

In the film proper, a defecting scientist is bringing secret information to a meeting with the leadership of America's nuclear program at the Yucca Flat testing ground when KGB assassins chase him into the testing area and he is exposed to radiation from an exploding bomb, which mutates him into an unthinking monster. The film plays out in a series of disjointed images that confusingly follow the titular beast strangling passing motorists, two highway patrolmen seeking to find and kill the monster, two little boys who get lost playing in the scrubland and are menaced, and the boys’ anxious father, who is shot? (shot at?) by the patrolmen several times as he searches the desert for his children. Often, this “action” occurs in the background while the camera frame centers a bush, or some bare rocks. They couldn’t afford on-set sound equipment, so dialogue is sparse and all occurs either offscreen or while characters’ faces are not visible to the camera. To compensate, there’s an explanatory narration that’s written in beat poetry sentence fragments and often has little to do with what’s happening on screen. Also, someone had trouble working the light meter and a number of scenes were filmed too dark.

MST3K lore or notable moments: The narrations of this movie makes it one of their most noteworthy films. Please enjoy the most infamous quote:

Flag on the moon. How did it get there? Secret data. Pictures of the moon. Secret data. Never before outside the Kremlin. Man’s first rocket to the moon

(Thank you to http://horror101withdrac.blogspot.com/2018/11/beast-yucca-flats-script-review.html?m=1 for the transcript)

Listen for Flag on the moon callbacks in other episodes.

Also notable: In a parody of the 1992 Republic National Convention, the Mads declare Mike and the bots to be part of the counter-culture, and introduce Proposition Deep13 to destroy them by sending them The Beast of Yucca Flats. The bots endorse Mike as their candidate to survive the movie, and at the end, Mike thanks fan letter writers as if they are campaign volunteers and Dr. Forrester makes a concession speech.

What do I think about its place on the list? This is another milestone in our watch order: the first of the, “so bad it’s surreal” movie that we get to watch. I haven’t actually seen any avant- garde films because it doesn’t sound like it’d really be my thing, but my understanding is that some of them involve showing the viewer a disjointed series of images with no narrative connection and challenging them to construct their own meaning from the feelings and impressions the images provoke. Today, we learn that a bad movie can be so bad at conveying information on the screen that it produces the same result by accident. “Surreal,” “hallucinogenic,” “a fever-dream,” “Dada-esque” are just a few of the words I’ve seen used to describe this movie and others like it. This is also our first really strong contender for worst movie featured on MST3K (though you have to put The Starfighters in there as well), and aside from the famous one that’s everybody’s favorite in these overlapping categories, it’s probably my favorite one. So I’m pretty bummed that it’s the lowest one on the top 100 list, especially since it comes with two great shorts and the fun little political campaign bit. Scanning the list really quickly, of course Monster A-Go-Go (number 40) is also a great episode, but if you’re only putting one accidental surrealist fever dream movie episode* in the top 50, how did that one make it in above The Beast of Yucca Flats? I am disappointed in the MST3K fan voters of 2016.

*besides the obvious one

Tune in Friday for: Number 62 Episode 913 Quest of the Delta Knights

[mst3knitathon]

I folded so much laundry today that I might actually get my queue back. Anyway, here's MST3Knitathon, my attempt to knit (or sometimes chore) my way through all 100 of the top voted episodes of (the original run of) Mystery Science Theater 3000 from number 100 to number 1. Today we've reached:

64. Episode 912 The Screaming Skull

Content Warning: The film contains an infantalizing portrayal of a mentally challenged person, that Mike and the bots unfortunately make worse by joking about how creepy he seems in the movie.

Summary: We begin with a short film, Gumby in Robot Rumpus. Gumby's chore-doing robots malfunction and start destroying the house, needing to be shut down or dismantled. Our own bots react as if they're seeing hardcore body horror.

The film proper starts out with an announcement that funerals will be paid for for anyone who dies of fright during the movie, and I went, "legendary gimmicky horror filmmaker William Castle??????" But alas, no, it is someone copying his shtick. But in going to the MST3K fan wiki to learn this, I further found out that the director convinced the lead actress to be in this movie by telling her it was a remake of Hitchcock's Rebecca, which makes sense as the lead actress is noticeably a bit better than the rest of the cast, and the film is clearly calling back to Rebecca in themes and atmosphere even if the actual plot winds up differently: A young bride and her husband move in to the empty estate he inherited from his first wife. The young bride has previously been in a sanitarium due to her reaction to her parents' death by drowning, treated for suicidal ideation and auditory hallucinations as the product of survivor's guilt. After she learns that her husband's late wife is presumed to have died from a bad fall but was found in the water in the ornamental pool, she begins "hallucinating" that the dead woman is haunting her. But are her bizarre experiences really caused by the strange, non-specifically impaired gardener seeking revenge for his former mistress's death? No, her new husband is trying to make her seem unstable so he can make it look like a suicide when he murders her for her money. Luckily, the first wife's real ghost manifests to torment him to death before he can succeed.

MST3K lore or notable moments: I've set the precedent that it's notable any time the silhouettes look different in the theater, so I'll mention that, due to a practical joke from Pearl, Mike and the bots can be seen wearing animal costume pieces during the first film segment.

Edit: New MST3Klore provided by @punchdrunkklovesickk

this episode was also the final one to air on sci-fi after they cancelled the show i think? and i believe the credits have a special thanks to the then-leaving president of sci-fi channel (not bonnie. his name is escaping me rn) for renewing the show for its then-final season

Thank you!

What do I think about its place on the list? Now that we're in the low 60s, we're approaching the point where I'm going to have to start complaining about good or even great episodes being featured this high up simply because they lack whatever spark separates the fantastic and well-executed from the truly iconic all-time greats. We're not quite there yet, though, and this is another one that's just fun throughout, with a great short, a riff that keeps the episode clipping along through the many dull parts of this more-atmospheric-than-suspenseful film, a movie that isn't too painful, and at least one really inspired sketch, the one where the bots react in traumatized horror to the silly claymation robot carnage in the Gumby short. It deserves a spot next to The Magic Sword. No change.

Tune in Wednesday for: Number 63 Episode 621 The Beast of Yucca Flats

[mst3knitathon]

I've actually been working on designing a pattern for MST3Knitathon, knitting while watching my way through a fan-voted top 100 list from bottom to top, and as of this episode, it's starting to come along really well! I'm hoping to sell the pattern on Ravelry when finished, so I'm glad to have Mystery Science Theater to keep me company while frogging and pattern-testing:

65. Episode 411 The Magic Sword

Summary: Estelle Winwood, who played Samantha's Aunt Enchantra on Bewitched, is a 400+ year old sorceress who adopted an orphaned human Prince George and is raising him into a warrior to take revenge on the evil sorcerer Lodac, played by Sherlock Holmes himself Basil Rathbone, for killing her brother. Young George is being a creep using a magic pool to spy on the princess of a neighboring kingdom when he sees her being abducted by the very same Lodac, who apparently loves feeding princesses to his dragon! The sorceress insists that he's too young to fight Lodak, but she does show him all the cool stuff she plans to send with him when the time is right, including a magic sword that does both sword and nonsword stuff, like open locks with a touch, and 7 enchanted knights from all over Europe. George uses the sword to temporarily lock his mom in the cellar and sets off with the gear and the knights without permission, but the princess's dad makes them take along a knight from his own court who later turns out to be in cahoots with Lodak in a scheme to marry the princess. The Knights of the Terribly Feigned Accents fall like swatted flies to the Seven Curses of Lodak, who realizes that Estelle Winwood's magic is protecting George. He taunts her through magic mirror about having weak magic until she rashly attempts a spell to boost his power, gets it wrong, and winds up removing his magic and he is captured. Lodak betrays and kills his lackey, the sorceress remembers the correct words and gives George his magic back. As George slays the dragon (see what the movie is doing there? George and the -), Estelle Winwood turns into a panther and eats Lodak. Hooray!

(There's a touching coda where the sorceress brings the seven dead knights back to life with a magic ring she stole from Lodak, which would be really narratively satisfying if we'd gotten to know the knights as anything other than canon fodder. I think the bad accents were supposed to grant them individuality. This did not work.)

MST3K Lore or Notable Moments: Crow sings a song in which he transfers an existing crush on Kim Catrell to Estelle Winwood instead. I don't remember whether this becomes a recurring character element for him or not, but I wanted Crow's impeccable taste in older women recorded for posterity.

What do I think about its place on the list? Some movies would make great MST3K episodes no matter when they appeared in the series run. Others feel like missed opportunities that might have worked better with the humor dynamics of an earlier or later season's collection of riffers; and some I think could not have turned out as well as they did if they'd been featured at any other time. At least in my opinion, Joel and the bots would not have handled The Starfighters well enough for it to be remembered as it is as an incredible riff on a nothing-burger movie. But if Mike had been the one to take a crack at The Magic Sword, especially in the SciFi era with the dynamic he developed with Kevin and Bill, the harsher style of mocking might have crushed such an adorably goofy movie into something unmemorable.* Whereas Joel and the bots, with their willingness to "play along" with the movies where warranted, skillfully amplify the charms of this silly little fairy tale that's trying to show you magical special effects far more than it's trying to have a plot. Earlier or later and something would have been lost, but in the middle of the seasons 3-5 Joel hosting sweet spot, this movie becomes something special. There's enough even better episodes that I can't argue that it belongs in the top 50, but getting to watch it definitely improved my mood. Middle-sixties feels very fair. (Also, more movies should end with Estelle Winwood turning into a panther and eating a bad man. That's what I'm going to pretend happened to Mitchell when we get up to the fan-voted third best MST3K episode.)

*I know Mike, Kevin, and Bill did some lovely work with equally goofy "Russo-Finnish" films that we're going to get to later, but for some reason I picture them tackling this particular one with too many complaints about Estelle Winwood's appearance and bitterness about the often odd pacing.

Tune in Monday for: Number 64 Episode 912 The Screaming Skull

[mst3knitathon]

More MST3Knitathon, knitting while watching my way through a fan-voted top 100 list from bottom to top:

66. Episode 803 The Mole People

Summary: Stay with me. Thousands of years ago, Noah's (and Gilgamesh's) flood, which has been confirmed by archaeologists as a proven historical event*, drove a group of ancient Sumerians to a snow-capped volcanic peak that extended above the waters, where they built a city. Some time after that, an earthquake caused a cave-in that sank the entire city (except for the temple to the goddess Ishtar) into a volcanic cavern beneath the mountain. Enough Sumerians survived to discover and enslave the cavern-dwelling Mole People, and force them to cultivate underground mushrooms that they both eat themselves and feed to their surviving goats - and there they live to this day, having evolved albino skin and huge light-seeking pupils, and periodically culling their population to numbers that can survive the all-mushroom-and-goat-cheese diet by sacrificing the excess to Ishtar.

*this is not true

In the present-day 1950s, a resumption in volcanic activity unearths a tablet that lets the world's smuggest archaeologist and his colleagues know about the mysterious temple on the high mountain, and knocks them down a shaft to the sunken city when they try to investigate. Using a flashlight to impersonate messengers of the goddess Ishtar, they bumble around interfering with the oppression of the Mole People, befriending a marked "dark one" genetic throwback whose production of small amounts of melanin makes her look like a blonde white lady instead of an albino Sumerian, and failing to ask any questions about the living remnant of the ancient culture they supposedly study. Until, in the midst of a Mole People revolution, the suspicious priest finally proves them mortal and throws them into the fires of Ishtar - which turns out to just be a shaft leading to the outside world, where sunlight fatally burns the cavedwellers. So if they hadn't pretended to be gods, they could have gotten out immediately when the king initially wanted to sacrifice them.

Then in an absolutely infuriating new addition to the script, one last earthquake both destroys the last of the underground civilization and kills the recently escaped "marked" woman with a falling pillar, because even though she looks white, since she's descended from Sumerians, her surviving to marry the smug archaeologist would have technically been an inter-racial marriage and studio interference wouldn't allow that. Flames, on the side of my face.

MST3K lore or notable moments: We have a bit of lore and two notable celebrity cameos, one each for the film and the episode. Lore: this is the earliest season 8 episode on the list, and season 8 started with a 500 year time skip after the last episode of season 7 (we'll watch it at number 17 on the list) that Crow apparently spent most of by himself on the ship. As a result, he's gone a bit mentally weird and has forgotten Mike (this is how they explain why Crow sounds different, Trace Beaulieu has left the show and Crow is now voiced by Bill Corbett). In this episode, inspired by the film Crow does some archaeology on his own past self and finally remembers both his 500 years of isolation and Mike. Celebrity cameo number one is the introduction of the film by real-life English professor Dr. Frank Baxter, who was an educational television personality in the 50s, and gives us a charming lecture about the hollow earth theories of history and encourages us to think about what those fables mean about how their proponents envisioned the world. Impressions of him saying, "Down, down, down," would become a regular call-back on the show. The episode's celebrity cameo is former Minnesota Viking football player Robert Smith, who appears briefly in an unspeaking role as the hunk that the Apes gift to Lawgiver Pearl in recognition of the Lawgiver Daze festival. EDIT: Oh, also Mike and the bots discover ancient Sumerians living beneath the floorboards on the Satellite of Love. Forgot that part before.

What do I think about it's place on the list? This episode's movie brushes up against the limits of cultural relativism vs foreign activism, as the archaeologists use their supposed divine right to interfere in Sumerian society in ways that are unquestionably good (preventing slaves from being whipped or killed), but also have unintended consequences, as escaped Mole Person slaves means that the Sumerians must practice more human sacrifice to bring their population numbers down to what can be sustained by the food the reduced number of Mole People can produce. Obviously, one cannot step back and watch an enslaved creature be beaten to death, having the power to stop it, without interfering, but the ham-fisted and patronizing way that this interference plays out also reeks of colonialist narratives of cultural superiority. The way the movie brings up this complicated issue and then has no interest or ability to engage with it (they kill off a female character to avoid the slightest appearance of interracial marriage!) bothered me more this time, and I found myself having less fun watching it than I remembered. But, slightly too many jokes about how effeminate the "Sumerians" look notwithstanding, Mike and the bots do a good job with it and Profesor Baxter's introduction alone is worth the price of admission. So I'd say that rather than moving this episode down, this one solidifies my opinion that Operation Double 007 ought to move up.

Tune in Friday for: Number 65 Episode 411 The Magic Sword

[mst3knitathon]

I ran out of queue again, so today's entry for MST3Knitathon, knitting through the top 100 episodes of MST3K from top to bottom, will be posted late as soon as I finish writing it:

67. Episode 508 Operation Double 007

(Note: this one is listed in the Gizmoplex under the alternate title Operation Kid Brother, for what I assume are copyright reasons)

Content Warning: Some brown face as the protagonist disguises himself as a blind Arab man to sneak into a factory that mysteriously only employs blind people. Also, one of the villains is coded as an evil lesbian

Summary: We have another 1960s spy movie, this one the most blatant James Bond rip-off yet. Neil Connery, Sean Connery's real life brother, plays Dr. Connery: a lip-reading polyglot plastic surgeon, martial arts expert, competitive archer, and hypnotist who is dragged into a spy caper against his will when a secret criminal organization kidnaps one of his patients, who was also the fiance of his recently murdered former hypnotism student. The actual actress who played Moneypenny and the actual actor who played M want to recruit him for a mission with their coyly unnamed spy agency, believing that the kidnapped girl's dead fiance gave her secret information under hypnosis that Dr. Connery can retrieve by putting her in a similar state, and they have no problem giving him clearance because his coyly unnamed brother is their best agent. (Incidentally, I am not a lawyer at all, much less a British one, but I don't think that ordering a reluctant doctor to work with British Intelligence until further notice is something the Minister of Health should be able to do.) It's off to a low-rent Bond adventure, with a low-rent Bond song, bombastic musical theme,exotic locations, spy gagets, undercover shenanigans, fancy parties, Bond girls, wild costumes, and fight scenes, including a fun sequence when the bad guys have used secret tech to turn off all machines in the world and the good guys must fight them on horseback with bows and arrows. Fun! (But not very good.)

MST3K Lore or Notable Moments: 1) Joel and Dr. F both step back from the invention exchange, as Dr. F wants to cheer a recently depressed Frank up by letting him present his invention of leder-hose-en (laderhosen pants with an attached garden hose), and Joel lets Crow show off his attempt to improve the reputation of environmentally crucial vultures by making a vulture version of a dippy bird. 2) Torgo finally arrives at Deep 13 with the Mads drink order, having gone back to the pizza place for it in episode 424 at the end of last season (we will get there eventually)

What do I think about its place on the list? After a couple of duds, this episode is so much fun! The movie is a wild, colorful spectacle that would probably be fun to watch on its own (though you would be laughing at it, not with it, the entire time), the riff is so good that the nun jokes from the hospital abduction scene is one of the sequences used in advertisements for the various 24-hour MST3K streams, and I outright cackled in delight when Torgo showed up. Even though I'm looking ahead and the next two episodes are also both bangers, I'm tempted to move this one up on the list anyway. However, I've heard this episode and Danger, Death Ray! (voted at number 52) mentioned as the top contenders for their best spy caper episode, and since I have no memories of Danger, Death Ray! at all, I want to reserve judgement until I get to that one. If you have not seen this episode yet, though, definitely watch it - it's a treat!

Tune in Wednesday for: Number 66 Episode 803 The Mole People

[mst3knitathon]

Continuing with MST3Knitathon, knitting while watching my way through a fan-voted top 100 list from bottom to top:

68. Episode 515 The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman

Content Warning: This film is lazily offensive to a lot of people, especially women, but I think the seance scene where they keep getting interrupted by a spirit speaking fake "Chinese" deserves a particular forewarning.

Summary: We start with a short film, Cheating. John gets kicked off the student council after being caught copying his math test answers from his smarter friend Mary. The short treats this as seriously as the judgement at Nuremberg.

The film proper is a black-and-white "action comedy" about a secret society of women who may or may not be vampires* who follow their masked leader Batwoman to "fight crime," supposedly. They're meant to be protecting a newly invented "atomic hearing aide" listening device that can eavesdrop on any phone conversation from a criminal mastermind called the Ratfink who wants to steal it for his own purposes. But really, they just wander around getting captured by Ratfink's goons and being dosed with a mad scientist's happy pills that make them dance in bikinis until Batwoman finally saves the day in an unfunny comedy action scene.

*they tell a new recruit that they are vampires, but they now drink "the synthetic stuff" (yogurt smoothies) instead of blood. This is never mentioned again and they have no vampire abilities or powers

MST3K lore or notable moments: Continuing to test the boundaries of his imprisonment in the satellite, Mike decides to bring popcorn into the theater, and the bots comment on it. Also, there's a rare-for-the-Comedy-Central-era ongoing plot in the sketches, as Mike asks the bots to write their own essay about cheating in response to the short, Crow copies his from GPC, and they deal with the fallout.

What do I think about its place on the list? I am really loving this early-Mike-episode subplot of Mike testing the boundaries of what he can do as experiment subject. The short is the reason why I suspect this is here, being one of their great ones: both painfully earnest and ridiculously too serious in a way that's both endearing and very easy to make fun of. And all of the sketches are pretty entertaining. But the film itself is ... well. It commits the cardinal bad movie sin of being not just bad, but also difficult to follow, between the meandering way the simple plot is laid out and the bad miking that makes the dialogue hard to understand. Sometimes, confusion in a bad film can reach such a pitch that the movie becomes memorably surreal; but mostly, like this, it just makes me miss the good jokes as I ignore the riff trying to figure out what's going on, which is a bad time. Plus, between this and Angel's Revenge, I have learned something about myself: when MST3K riffs a bad movie that is really overt about only having women in it for sexist camera leering, I enjoy that we're all making fun of it together. When a bad movie pretends like its female characters are badass lady spies or action heroes, but just has them bumble around incompetently because they are really only there for sexist camera leering, I get too bummed out even to enjoy the riff.

Remember back in #94 on the list, I said Horrors of Spider Island should be a top 75 episode? That's my bottom line - that these two should switch. Horrors of Spider Island, 68th best MST3K episode; The Wild, Wild, World of Batwoman, number 94. (And probably, on reflection, Angel's Revenge off the top 100 list entirely)

What do you think, fellow MSTies? Would you make the same swap?

Fun Facts that didn't fit in my usual headings:

There's a bit towards the end when footage from the movie The Mole People is spliced into the film's cave scene, and the bots call attention to it even though The Mole People would not be riffed until season 8. They must have already been considering it. (It's on the best episodes list, though, so we'll be reviewing that one on Wednesday.)

One of the only fun things about the movie is Batwoman's wild outfit, and the MST3K wiki says that the actress designed it herself. Nice!

The MST3K wiki also says that the casting director hired the women playing Batwoman's henchgirls by showing up to a strip club that was being raided by the police and offering all the dancers jobs being in the movie while they waited for it to reopen. Glad they were getting work!

Tune in Monday for: Number 67 Episode 508 Operation Double 007

[mst3knitathon]

MST3Knitathon, knitting while watching my way through a fan-voted top 100 list from bottom to top:

69. Episode 517 The Beginning of the End

Content Warning: the riffed film contains an inaccurate depiction of a deaf character

Summary: The small town of Ludlow, Illinois has been destroyed overnight, with all the buildings demolished and all the people missing without any trace of bodies. The army thinks it's a new kind of Soviet bomb, but when an intrepid lady photo-journalist stumbles onto the mystery, her investigation traces the destruction back to a department of agriculture facility where scientists are using radiation to grow enormous crops. It turns out that Ludlow was actually eaten by giant grasshoppers that got into the radioactive food supply months ago and have been quietly growing to unnatural size in the forest. They've now formed a locust swarm that is eating its way through Illinois, overwhelming the army in several battles and proving impervious to standard insecticides. If the USDA entomologist played by Peter Graves can't find an effective way to kill the swarm, the military will have no choice but to drop an atom bomb on a grasshopper-infested Chicago.

MST3K lore or notable moments: 1) Mike calls the Mads. Still new to the satellite, Mike decides to call Deep 13 and complain about the movie, surprising the bots who have never done so before. Dr. F and Frank are having a lazy day at home doing traditionally feminine activities like enjoying clay face masks and fretting about diets vs sweets, and everyone's embarrassed to realize these private moments are being observed. 2) Crow writes a new script called Peter Graves at the University of Minnesota, which is just repeatedly about the fact that the actor Peter Graves attended the University of Minnesota. This is a bit of an in-joke about MST3K being filmed in Minneapolis, but it became one of their more notorious sketches.

What do I think about its place on the list? This is one of the MST3K episodes I've seen the most often because it was one of the few I owned on actually released DVD (rather than DVDs my uncle had of what he had taped off the TV). Actually, most of the people I've introduced to MST3K watched this as either their first or second episode, because I brought that DVD with me to college (back when everyone had a computer for schoolwork but streaming services were not a thing yet, and we used to gather around people's laptop screens to watch movies in the dorms). And I still love this one! It's one of Peter Graves's more charming 50s scientist hero roles, the lady reporter is capable and drives the plot along for the first half instead of just existing to be imperiled, the special effects are endearingly goofy, the riff is good (love the bits about the grasshoppers employing sophisticated military strategy against the army), and the sketches are really strong. Crow's Peter Graves script is especially memorable, but I also love the final sketch where they practice having grasshoppers attack other postcards just like they crawled on pictures of famous Chicago skyscrapers in the final battle. Maybe it's not quite a top 50 episode, but I certainly wouldn't put it any lower than this!

(FYI Peter Graves explaining that he's an entomologist working on the USDA radioactive plant experiments because the life cycles of plants and insects are so intertwined seemed like a hand-wave in earlier watches, but hits differently in the midst of the current bugpocalypse.)

[mst3knitathon]

MST3Knitathon, watching the top 100 episodes of Mystery Science Theater from bottom to top while knitting:

70. Episode 505 The Magic Voyage of Sinbad

Content Warning: The episode's film contains racist depictions of Indian people.

Summary: In the 1950s, the Soviet Union made a series of films to celebrate Russian and other incorporated territories' culture by turning stories from Slavic or Scandanavian myths and folklore into technicolor cinema extravaganzas. These were later cut and dubbed for American audiences. The original versions are apparently genuine film classics and it's arguably a display of ugly American ignorance to make fun of them. But I would argue the cut and dubbed versions are fair game, especially this one, in which the importers, in the midst of the Cold War, decided to try to hide the Russian origin by dubbing the titular hero Sadko, mythological hero with his own Russian opera, as Arabian Nights hero Sinbad the Sailor and just pretending that all the very Russian scenes are taking place in medieval Iraq.

"Sinbad" has returned from his first voyages around the world, but has nothing to show for it as he as given all his treasures away to the poor, save for his harp. He finds that while his home city prospers, the people are unhappy because all the wealth is being hoarded by rich merchants. "Sinbad" decides to bring happiness to the city by launching a new voyage to find and bring back the mythical Bluebird of Happiness, but he has no money to finance his trip. The Sea King's daughter hears him singing of his dream and helps him catch magical golden fish to fund his voyage. They have many adventures sailing around the world from Iceland to India to Egypt, but cannot find the bird. Finally, "Sinbad" realizes that he must build his own happiness in his own city, but he must honor the Sea King by playing his harp in his undersea court before he will be allowed to return home.

MST3K lore or notable moments: It's a rare episode where someone leaves the theater during the movie, as Crow is inspired by Sinbad and decides to go out the airlock in search of his own adventures. He cannot control his added thrusters and winds up crashing back into the theater during a later film segment. There's also a fun meta-joke in the last sketch as Joel makes a hand-puppet of the catfish from the undersea scene, and Tom and Crow can tell that it's not real - but being puppets who believe themselves to be real robots, they are unable to conceptualize what a puppet is and react like they're seeing a reality-breaking Lovecraftian horror.

What do I think about its place on the list? See, this is why I was so hard on Agent for H.A.R.M. last episode - it's on the list next to gems like this! Every one of the so-called "Russo-Finnish films" (though really only one that they covered was a Russian-Finnish collaboration; the rest, including this, are simply Russian) that MST3K does are absolute delights! Genuinely beautiful spectacles that - between the fairy-tale logic of the stories that read as bizarre to Americans unfamiliar with the original legends, and the sub-par dialogue introduced by the American dubs - are also goofy enough to be easy riffs. Like the Gameras, this one is ranked relatively low because others of its category are ranked higher, but I agree that this is the comparatively least fun of the "Russo-Finnish" films, and you can't put them all in the top fifty. An absolute blast of a watch, but I won't argue for a higher rank because I know that better in this category is coming.

[mst3knitathon]

MST3Knitathon, knitting (or folding laundry) while watching our way through a fan-voted top 100 list from bottom to top:

71. Episode 815 Agent for H.A.R.M

Summary: A Soviet scientist has defected with a sample of an alien fungus the Soviets found on a meteorite that can turn human bodies into goo. He wants to keep his work with it a secret from both the Americans and the Soviets until he develops an antidote, but with an evil Soviet scientist (and his oddly dressed minions) planning to use their sample to poison American crops, the world’s smuggest secret agent is sent out to his California beach house to convince him to work with the Americans before the Soviets manage to recapture him and his work. Also, the scientist has a twenty year old niece who wears a skimpy bikini for most of the movie.

MST3K lore or notable moments: Remember back in Episode 804 The Deadly Mantis (number 98 on the list), when Mike accidentally helps the apes blow up their planet by telling them which wrench will fix their bomb, and I mentioned that would be a running gag? This episode is the payoff, as a galactic court of superior beings summons Mike to be put on trial for the many planets he has blown up in the meantime. Pearl is named prosecutor and presents an inaccurate reenactment as evidence. Professor Bobo is counselor for the defense, but is too busy playing up folksy southern lawyer tropes to actually defend his client. The court finds Mike guilty, but sentences him to community service because they recognize that he’s just a dolt.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? After starting this section of the list really strong with Night of the Blood Beast, Hamlet, and Devil Doll, I’ve found these last two episodes kind of a let down. I don’t really think that Girls Town is a Top 75 MST3K episode, but I see what other people see in it enough to concede the point graciously. This episode is just … fine. Of all the spy movies they’ve done, this one might be the most mediocre. There’s not nearly enough action, and while there’s not more womanizing here than in the others, how very young the women this visibly middle-aged spy is fooling around with makes it seem skeevier. It’s a good riff (watch for the jokes about the signature outfits of the bad guys, especially the one who kind of looks like Prince) but it’s still a pretty forgettable movie.

I suspect this is actually up here because of Mike’s trial, but the only bit in there that really got me was when Bobo broke Brain Guy on the stand by catching him in a lie about making apple pie. That was a good bit.

Other than that, there’s not too much particular going for it. I don’t know if I’d knock it off the list entirely, but it should at least be in the bottom 10.

[mst3knitathon]

MST3Knitathon, watching the top 100 episodes of Mystery Science Theater from bottom to top while knitting:

72. Episode 601 Girls Town

Summary: Another new MST3K bad movie variety - this time a callow star-vehicle money grab from the old Hollywood studio system. Made by MGM!

Mamie Van Doren, a blonde bombshell being built up as a rival to Marilyn Monroe, stars as a juvenile delinquent who's accused of murder when her some-time boyfriend's body is found at the bottom of a cliff after he was seen chasing a screaming blonde girl into the bushes at a make-out point. She has an alibi (a lakeside party with the rival gang), but when the boyfriend's wealthy father demands an arrest, the terms of her existing probation for striking a teacher are altered to require detention at "Girls Town," a home for wayward girls run by Catholic nuns. There, she clashes with both the sisters and her fellow students, but nonetheless begins to learn from their patient and compassionate treatment.

Meanwhile Serafina, one of the other girls at the home has begun stalking a young singer played by Paul Anka, and in what is framed as a wise and understanding decision, the Mother Superior encourages him to start visiting the home and giving Serafina special attention to help her with her crippling need to be loved! This gets Paul Anka in the movie, but also has a predictably destabilizing effect on Serafina's mental health. Meanwhile meanwhile, the teenage witness to the crime, laughably played by a 34 year old Mel Torme, realizes that it was actually Mamie's younger sister that he saw, and he blackmails her into being his passenger for an illegal drag race. She's caught by police at the scene, and worried that she'll tell people he was involved and his dad will take away his hot rod, he gets his gang to abduct her and plans to send her to (presumably a brothel in) Mexico. Its up to Mamie, the other girls, the nuns, and Paul Anka to mount a rescue! (In the ongoing disaster that is Serafina's B-plot, she decides to fill her need to be loved with the love of Jesus and enter the novitiate, which is a terrible reason to enter religious life and also not going to help her with her issues.)

MST3K lore or notable moments: Dr. Forrester unveils the Umbilicus, a 370 mile tube that connects the Satellite of Love with Deep 13 on Earth so that items can be sent back and forth. It is also, apparently, the other end of GPC's body, though she'll get disconnected from it later. Mike and the bots use it to send Dr. F a pie in the face. Classic!

Also, Mamie Van Doren herself filmed host segments for Turkey Day '94, in which her episode was features, and I heard that she attended a few MST3K fan conventions back in the day as a friend of the show. Nice to see you, Mamie Van Doren!

What do I think about its place on the list? Boy, does this movie have the potential to be more fun than it is. I've only seen Mamie Van Doren in MST3K episodes, and while I can't say that she successfully elevates the terrible material, she's always good enough that I feel the waste of her not really getting the chance to perform with a decent script. Meanwhile, the included songs are dull, the "emotional" moments feel very rote and forced, and even the shenanigans of nuns doing things you don't expect nuns to do are not as silly as they should be. But all that makes for good riffing potential, and while I have more personal fondness for season one's Untamed Youth (the other Mamie Van Doren as a juvenile delinquent with a younger sister who is sentenced to a non-standard prison environment movie that has interludes of diegetic singing), I do recognize that this one is objectively the better episode. I don't think it's my favorite of the last few that we've watched, but it's still a fun episode and I loved how pleased with himself Dr. F was about the Umbilicus, and that it's finally another episode with TV's Frank! No real complaints about placement.

(P.S. If anyone knows of a good movie Mamie Van Doren has been in, please let me know!)

[mst3knitathon]

Back to MST3Knitathon, watching the top 100 episodes of Mystery Science Theater from bottom to top while knitting:

73. Episode 818 Devil Doll

Content warning: This film contains a scene of sexual assault using supernatural mind control (previously, I’ve been putting warnings for content in the sketches or riffs at the top of the post and warnings for content in the films being riffed at the end of the post, but from here on out I think I’ll put them all at the beginning.)

Summary: Despite having an act that’s more creepy than it is entertaining, hypnotist and ventriloquist The Great Varelli is somehow talking London by storm. To find out how Varelli’s dummy is able to walk in its own during the act, reporter Mark gets his rich girlfriend Marianne to invite Varelli to perform at a charity ball at her aunt’s country estate - but when Mark sneaks into Varelli’s room to examine the dummy, it appears completely normal. That night, Varelli (who had hypnotized Marianne earlier as part of his act) reveals continued control over her by compelling her to come to his room (see content warning above - Mike and the bots rightly disparage having to watch), and meanwhile Hugo the dummy moves on its own into Mark's room, where it speaks clues to Varelli's past. Thus guided, Mark discovers the horrible truth - that Hugo was once a living person whom Varelli murdered, and whose soul he transferred into the dummy.

Mark returns from his investigation to find that Marianne is now insisting that she loves Varelli and plans to marry him, but having just learned the depths of Varelli’s ability to control people, Mark obviously - takes this sudden change at complete face value and goes to a pub to drink about being dumped. WTF, Mark???

Meanwhile, Varelli reveals his plans to Hugo: once the marriage is finalized, he will kill Marianne and transfer her soul into a new female dummy, allowing him to get Marianne's money and to get rid of Hugo, who is now fighting his control on stage. Hugo attacks, and it surprisingly does not look too bad for a human-puppet fight scene. Then the film goes into negative and freezes for so long I thought the movie broke - and then Mark comes in to find that Hugo has seized control and transferred his soul into Varelli's body, while Varelli is trapped in the puppet. A fitting comeuppance for a horrible man.

MST3K lore or notable moments: the devil Pitch, a recurring guest visitor from episode 521, drops by to try to convince Crow to sell his soul. He also teaches Tom Servo soul transference, and Servo excitedly inhabits the body of a toaster strudel, which he stays in for the rest of the episode, including the movie segments

What do I think about it’s place on the list?

Things I like about the Roman times arc from season 8:

That everyone calls it “Roman times” out loud, including the Romans. I like a corny meta-joke

That they call Professor Bobo the Mad Goth. They never lampshade it, so it’s a nice subtle joke that the Romans looked at a sci-fi ape man and went, “big … hairy … must be one of those Visigoths we’ve heard so much about!”

Kevin Murphy just seems to be having a grand old time playing a jovial Roman patrician, and I get a nice jolt of vicarious enjoyment whenever he puts on his hearty voice to deliver a line. Fun!

Things I don’t love about the Roman times arc:

The conflict between Pearl (masquerading as the goddess Apearlo) and Flavia (the patrician’s wife who suspects her and Brain Guy of not being gods) plays out in these stereotypical cat-fight bits, which are not funny in their own right, but are also a *criminal* waste of one of the very few times that a show that has all male actors for most its run finally features two named female characters in significant recurring roles. Infuriating.

For some reason, in this era of the show they have an odd tendency to belabor a joke past the point of humor.

There’s not really any Pearl and Flavia sniping to sit through in this one, but it does take Pearl way too long to catch on about why the Romans are not interested in having a toga party, which I think is supposed to be part of the joke? But for me it's the thing that stops it from being funny. I had an interesting chat with @punchdrunkklovesickk about Pearl Forrester in the comments of a previous post that's been making me think about why I don't always connect with her in her Sci-Fi era characterization, and I think it's that the writers wobble a bit about whether/how much Pearl actually cares about being a mad scientist, and how much she's just irritated by all the nonsense that goes with it. Watching Pearl stubbornly go through the motions of running an experiment that she seems to find as much of a chore as Mike and the bots find having to actually watch the movies can be very funny at times. At others, I'm just bored by watching her be bored by being stuck in Ancient Rome. But Kevin Murphy saves the bit with how enthusiastic his line reads are about how the "pants party" is going to be great because pants are new and different from what they normally wear, and all the Satellite of Love sketches are great this episode. Especially liked seeing Toaster Strudel Tom in the theater!

As for the film itself, it's a new category in our "kinds of bad film that show up multiple times in MST3K" list: "Someone had a good idea for what would have been a really strong 45 minute Twilight Zone episode, but dragged it out into a dull full-length movie instead." We will likely be seeing that again.

Edit: Oops, I didn’t actually say what I thought about the number. Anticlimactically, I’m not going to argue with it.

[mst3knitathon]

MST3Knitathon, watching the top 100 episodes of Mystery Science Theater from bottom to top while knitting:

74. Episode 1009 Hamlet* (*not a typo)

Summary: Actually, for this one I have to do MST3K lore first.

MST3K lore or notable moments: The Satellite of Love crew picks the film! Mike defeats Pearl in a rigged game of three card monte and wins the right to choose the episode’s movie. He picks the best English drama of them all, Hamlet, but lets Pearl pick the adaptation. Rather than sending up Olivier or Branagh, she and Brain Guy locate a made-for-tv German version from the 1960s that’s been dubbed back into English, and is just as bad as their usual fare. Darn it!

Summary: Sing it with me if you know the words! Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, sees an apparition that appears to be the ghost of his father, the late king. The apparition accuses his own brother, Hamlet’s uncle and the current king, of having poisoned him to seize the throne and marry the widowed queen. Because this is a time period that fully believes in ghosts and revenge, but also in evil and trickster spirits who will do things like impersonate your dead father and tell you lies literally just to fuck with you, Hamlet’s sensible friend Horatio cautions him not to act until they can confirm the ghost’s story through non-supernatural means. Hamlet decides to pretend at madness to cover his investigation; but as he is torn between the pressure to act immediately if the ghost’s words are true, and the need to wait for confirmation, whether his erratic behavior is still an affectation of madness or a sign of real mental instability becomes harder to determine. And then everyone dies.

Mostly I agree that this particular rendition is bad enough to be worthy of a riff, but I did like the way they started each soliloquy as a voiceover narration of internal monologue and had it transition to speaking as Hamlet starts talking to himself. Way to take advantage of the format of filmed media!

Additional notable moments: In the final sketch, the bots make a Hamlet action figure with a pull string so long that getting to the end of it drives Mike off-screen into areas of the ship he’s never seen before, including a staircase and a squash court. Back in Castle Forrester, Fortinbras shows up to complain about being cut from so many productions of Hamlet, and Pearl poisons him for being annoying. A still off-screen Mike finally reaches the end of the pull-chord, and Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy plays over the end credits.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? This is famously a lot of fans’ least favorite episode, and even has a reputation for finalizing the show’s looming cancellation as so many people hated it so much. But I’ve always liked it! It’s refreshing to see them try something new in the final (cable) season, and watching them shift between playing with the bard’s language and mocking the dour adaptation is both fascinating and a lot of fun. To be fair to the haters, the riffers either have too much respect for the source material or are too worried about the audience getting lost trying to follow the archaic language to speak over any of the dialogue, so, arguably, the greatest strength of the SciFi channel episodes - how absolutely rapid-fire the riffing is - is lost for this one. But for me personally, that’s more of a feature than a bug. This plodding adaptation has enough significant pauses between the dialogue that they’re still able to make plenty of jokes, and having to pare down means that they’re picking their best riffs and making me laugh at least most of the time, which is not something I can say for all SciFi era episodes (see my review of Devil Fish). I’m really glad that this one eventually found its audience enough to be voted not just into the top 100, but into the top 75. Good job, MST3K fan voters of 2016.

[mst3knitathon]

MST3Knitathon, watching the top 100 episodes of Mystery Science Theater from bottom to top while knitting:

75. Episode 701 Night of the Blood Beast

Content warning: there’s a number of jokes about Wilbur the guardian angel reading as very queer-coded.

Summary: We start with the short, Once Upon a Honeymoon, which is one of the kookiest they’ve ever done. Wilbur, a hip but clumsy guardian angel is sent down to help Jeff and Mary, a couple who’s year-delayed honeymoon is in danger of getting cancelled when Jeff’s boss calls to demand that Jeff rewrite the melody to one of their big songs so the picky prima donna will sign the show contract. As Mary fights her outdated kitchen to make coffee for a stalled Jeff, Wilbur inspires her to go into a big musical fantasy number about redecorating her entire house with modern fashions, including a brightly colored telephone in each room to match the decor. Later, as Mary tries to dial Jeff’s boss to tell him the song isn’t working, Wilbur blesses the telephone and Jeff realizes that speeding up his existing melody to match the tempo of the rotary phone clicking will fix everything. The honeymoon is saved!

In the movie proper, it’s … an mpreg retread of It Conquered the World? An alien hitches a ride to Earth on a satellite, it stops all electrical power including self-contained systems like cars and wristwatches, scientists argue about whether it’s coming will help or hurt mankind, and at the end, the pro-alien scientist switches sides and causes its downfall. The “bullets won’t hurt it but fire does” is even the same. In this one, the satellite was manned and the astronaut implanted with something that exists first as foreign particles in his blood, then coalesces into shrimp-like aliens incubating in his body. The other NASA scientists immediately want to kill the creature that implanted him, but the infested astronaut has a psychic bond with the creature and insists that it means no harm and they should talk to it first. It speaks to them in the voice of an older doctor it killed earlier in the film, but when the astronaut hears its plan to save humanity by having the offspring bond with everyone, he realizes that it means to sacrifice human civilization to rebuild its own. The astronaut stabs himself to kill the space babies, and the other scientists kill the alien with fire. (The NASA scientists have wanted to kill it with fire for the whole movie, because that’s how they naturally react to first contact). ((The creature in this one is a charbroiled parrot thing.)) (((Only six people work at NASA)))((((This is also a Roger Corman film that came out the same year as the other one.))))

MST3K lore or notable moments: one of each! The short is one of their most notorious delightfully weird ones and deserves a watch on its own even if you don’t watch the whole episode. And this episode is I think the only? - one to premiere during a Turkey Day marathon. Every year, MST3K did and does a marathon during US Thanksgiving with recorded bumpers that, during the cable days usually, involved an ongoing plot about the characters celebrating Thanksgiving and/or reacting to the marathon. (Dr. F always seems to think that getting large numbers of people to watch his experiment during the marathon will result in him taking over the world somehow.) So this episode was filmed with two different sets of sketches - ones that continued the Turkey Day storyline, for initial broadcast, and ones about the movie, for reruns. In the Turkey Day sketches, Dr. Forrester’s mother, Pearl (introduced as a one-off guest character in season 6), has come to visit, but before ascending to second banana heaven, Frank had invited a bunch of guest characters from past episodes over to Thanksgiving, and Dr. F has to unexpectedly host. Pearl Forrester calls Crow “Art” and seems to know him, which will remain a running gag that is never explained. (Having now watched it, I think it’s somewhat ambiguous whether she does actually know Crow as someone named Art somehow, or whether she’s mistaken him for someone else and Crow is masterfully playing along.) In the end, Pearl helps Dr. F poison his irritating guests, but also announces her intent to stay with him indefinitely until he can get his life together. The regular sketches establish the dynamic between Pearl and Clayton as Pearl takes her place as one of the official Mads for the first time.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? It’s really a shame that Dr. and Mrs. F only got one season to run the experiment together, because Mary Jo Pehl is so note-perfect right from the get go as this toxic, overbearing, bingo-loving mother figure. When Pearl Forrester has to transition to main mad scientist in the SciFi seasons instead of playing off the dynamic with her son it’s, in my opinion, a bit more hit or miss. Both sets of sketches are very good and the episode is strong, but not quite strong enough for me not to mildly regret my decision to watch the episode twice with the different sketches instead of just watching the Turkey Day sketches as a compilation on YouTube. But a good top 75, especially with that amazing short.

Update: @punchdrunkklovesickk came in clutch in the replies with info about Pearl calling Crow "Art:"

ALSO!!! I CAN EXPLAIN THE THING PEARL DOES WITH CALLING CROW ART SOMETIMES! so basically! during an older joel era letter read (i believe it was jungle goddess?), joel and the bots do a send up of an older sitcom whose name i cant remember rn. this send up involved calling the bots by the actors on that old sitcom - crow gets introduced as "art crow." i cant name the next episode offhand (ik its a joel one) but there was a letter read from a kid who saw that end sketch, thought crow's name was art, and called him such in their fanmail. why best brains called back to this in later seasons idk

Thank you!!!