#mst3knitathon

[emilysidhe]

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 As Mary fights her outdated kitchen to make coffee for a stalled Jeff, Wilbur inspires her to go into a big musical fantasy number about redecorating her entire house with modern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!!!

[emilysidhe]

I have finished the blanket I have been using for the MST3K knitathon.

I forgot to get a picture of it blocked, so I’m going to have to awkwardly text my friend who’s already been given it as a wedding present asking for a photo.

It took me twelve episodes of MST3K from the point where I started marathoning (which was pretty far into the process, actually, main body was almost done at that point), and then I finished off with an audiobook the night before the wedding when it really became crunch time.

But I want to do a quick retrospective of the bottom ten before I write up reviews for the next two.

From now on, I think I will start scheduling recaps to post on Mondays, Wednesdays, and/or Fridays depending on how many episodes I get through in a week instead of just posting several in one day and then nothing until the next marathon.

Already cast on a scarf next, so we’ll see how far I get.

[emilysidhe]

MST3Knitathon:

83. Episode 111 Moon Zero Two

Summary: It’s the swinging sixties - on the moon! The credits play over a fun little cartoon (with an equally fun song) in which a tiny US astronaut and a tiny Soviet cosmonaut fight over who gets to plant their flag, but get so distracted that they miss the international community showing up with their own space programs and have to sheepishly petition to join the international moon base (managed by the UN) as just two among many members. Wouldn’t it be nice if that’s how the space race had ended!

In the movie proper, American pilot Bill Kemp used to be an explorer and was the first pilot on Mars, but he quit working for the big companies when they stopped expanding because he refuses to be be a passenger pilot. Now he’s an independent contractor doing mostly space salvage with his Soviet(? - they never say, but I think that’s the accent he’s doing) engineer partner. A young woman from Earth tries to hire him to take her to her brother’s mining claim on the far side of the moon because her brother failed to meet her at the port as planned, but Kemp convinces her to wait at Moon City for the next miners’ convoy to arrive in case the he’s just been delayed. Meanwhile, an eccentric billionaire hires him to do an illegal job: intentionally crash a valuable asteroid into the far side of the moon so that it can be mined without the expense of getting the equipment to and from deep space. Despite misgivings, Kemp takes the job and when he returns, two convoys have come and gone without the young woman’s brother. He takes her to find out what happened, only to find the brother murdered so someone could jump his claim - possibly because an asteroid made of pure sapphire is about to land on it. Can they survive the billionaire’s goons long enough to get justice? Or will this Moon Heist spell Moon Death for our Moon Heroes?

MST3K lore or notable moments: I don’t remember them doing any other movies that start with a fun cartoon? Anyway, here it is:

Also, this episode was re-riffed in 2020 as part of a social distanced riff along live show.

What do I think about its place on the list? Back in season 1, they used to do a bit where Joel would ask the bots to name a good thing and a bad thing about the day’s movie, rewarding them with a ram chip. Crow’s good thing and bad thing are both, “It was groovy.” which really tells you all you need to know about this movie. It’s another one that’s borderline too good for this series - not a classic, but colorful and fun. The costumes in particular look like a precursor to The Fifth Element. But the movie’s a bit too invested in imagining how late 60’s/early 70’s cool living on the moon is going to be, lingering a bit too long over any scene where the actors are pretending to be in zero gravity just because the movie thinks being in zero gravity would be cool. Like Crow said, groovy. In terms of the episode, this is a strong riff for season one (I especially like the bit where the bots affect to believe that the film’s surprising score means that a jazz combo is trapped somewhere in the movie and being imperiled by the gunfire and explosions), and the sketch about putting on a play of the actual moon landing was very cute. Definitely a top 100 episode, but not so much so that I’d argue for higher placement.

[emilysidhe]

I did watch one more last night for mst3knitathon:

95. Episode 819 Invasion of the Neptune Men

Content warning: I usually save this to the end, if one applies, but I’m front-loading it this time. In its original run, MST3K was a 90s show made by a group of mostly-white, mostly men who had to come up with 90 minutes worth of funny things to say every single week about movies that weren’t always giving them much to work with. So there’s a certain amount of jokes that aged poorly or that are in very poor taste that you unfortunately have to expect going in and that I’ll usually let pass without comment. Unfortunately, the early 2000s was a peak in insult or outrage comedy, so the number and offensiveness of insensitive jokes actually went up in the later years of MST3K as they approached that era. This episode, and its higher ranked predecessor Prince of Space, contain an unpleasant amount of jokes about how much Japan supposedly sucks, and it’s better to know that going in.

Summary: This is a movie that was stitched together from several episodes of a Japanese sci-fi television series, and dubbed for an American audience. I thought about it, and decided not to look up any information about the original Japanese serial because being somewhat confused about the lore seems to be part of the experience of watching the dubbed American movie version. My impression from both this and the earlier Prince of Space (ranked all the way up at number 15 on this list) is that it did multi-episode arcs like the classic run of Doctor Who, and they would then be cut down to movie length for the American release, hopefully preserving all the important scenes.

The movie follows a space hero who is living on Earth under a mild-mannered human identity ala Clark Kent, but who secretly possesses a bunch of high-tech space technology that he uses in his superhero guise to protect Earth from space invaders. In Prince of Space, his human persona was a humble boot-black who had adopted two orphaned human children and had to keep coming up with reasons for them to be babysat by their neighbors, the local scientist and his family, so that he could go off to do his superheroics without any the wiser. In Invasion of the Neptune Men, he’s progressed to lab assistant to the local scientist and role model to the neighborhood boys, and it’s unclear if the boy he adopted is in that group and the American edit is now cutting around it, or if the serial had moved on from that plot line by this point. (His hero name is also now being translated as “space chief” instead of “prince of space.”)

The kids have used a telescope to track a satellite launched by their own local scientists, and they think they see it land nearby! But when they run to the field it seemed to set down in, they find a Neptunian spacecraft bent on invasion. “Space Chief” shows up to save them, but the children are not believed when they tell the adults. Until the aliens show their superior technology by taking over Earth’s power systems to make trains and clocks run backwards. Luckily, the local scientist has invented some sort of electron shield that can protect all cities from everything! So the Neptunians try to destroy it and - at this point my knitting got complicated and I kind of lost the plot? But there was a lot of stock footage of explosions that seemed to go on for a *very* long time, and judging by the jokes I could hear, the riffers also couldn’t tell what was supposed to be blowing up, so it might not have been the knitting’s fault.

MST3K lore and notable moments: This episode marks a return of Professor Bobo, who had been absent during the Ancient Rome storyline so that Kevin Murphy could play a jovial patrician. There’s also a sketch where the bots affect to be spiritually broken by the badness of the movie and are cheered by a visit from Krankor, the villain from Prince of Space whose watchable goofiness they have a new appreciation for. (Visits by past characters are always notable)

What do I think about its placement on the list? The riffs that are not offensive are pretty strong, this serial has a cool aesthetic and lots of pleasant goofiness, and I love the sketch where the bots start to stage a tribute to kabuki theater only to be sidetracked by humorous confusion when Mike asserts that he prefers Noh theater. (I am always a sucker for a Who’s on First? routine). Still, the offensive riffs and monotonous confusion of the second half drop it down a lot in the rankings. I have no disagreement with this number.

[emilysidhe]

MST3Knitathon (actually finished a scarf during this - need new project now)

82: Episode 101 The Crawling Eye

Summary: In the Swiss Alps, two young men in early 20th century mountaineering outfits (you’ll know it when you see them) call down to an unseen companion on the ledge below, connected to them by rope. He calls up that there seems to be someone with him through the fog on his level, then a cut-off scream prompts the two on camera to begin desperately hauling him up. Just as they are about to succeed, one of them shrieks and lets go the rope, huddling and shaking against the mountainside. The other holds on alone until the rope frays and something falls away. “What were you doing, we almost had him!” he shouts angrily. “Didn’t you see?” comes the anguished cry from the other, “His head. It was torn off!”

There’s trouble on the Trollenberg, the name of both the mountain and the small town at its foot. The tragedy of the three young men is not the first mysterious death on the mountain, and even more climbers have disappeared. Those who make their living from the mountaineering tourist trade insist that it’s nothing more than an unusual number of inexperienced climbers foolishly going up without a local guide, but the ordinary villagers believe there’s something supernatural afoot, and have begun to flee.

The scientist in charge of an atmosphere and weather observatory built halfway up the mountain calls in a UN investigator about the disappearances - and a strange cloud he’s been tracking that stays still when it shouldn’t, and emits radioactivity. Isn’t this just like what happened in the Andes?

Meanwhile, two sisters, entertainers with a mind-reading act, are traveling by train to Geneva when the younger one, Anne - the one whose genuine psychic gifts make the act possible - hysterically insists that they have to get off at Trollenberg. She describes the mountain and the town, which she’s never seen before, and begins narrating the creatures’ attacks while slipping in and out of trances. Formally missing people reappear, moving stiffly as if zombified, and start trying to attack Anne. Can she See the secret to the creatures’ defeat before she is silenced forever?

Then the movie just gives up on that and has the UN firebomb the monsters. Oh well.

MST3K lore or notable moments: It’s the first episode to receive nationwide release! Drs Forrester and Erhardt are moving from the above-ground Gizmonic Institute of the local television era to the underground cavern Deep 13, that Joel suggests has been quarantined due to radioactivity. Have they been fired for not getting permission to maroon Joel in space, and are they continuing the “experiment” in secret? Also, we get our first look at GPC’s supposed actual size, as she comes too far out of the vents and fills most of the satellite set with her coils.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? You know, I’ve often thought that MST3K should be required viewing for film students - there’s just so much you can potentially learn from exactly how bad movies don’t work. Here we have a unique case in that The Crawling Eye is about 60-80% of a genuinely good movie. It’s successful in how it builds suspense, playing on viewers’ imaginations in being clever about what it shows and what it doesn’t show, and finding multiple ways to have us “witness” attacks we can’t see - using Anne’s gift, the fog, keeping perspectives on characters who are higher on the mountain or on the other end of a telephone from the victim. It holds off a little too long on showing the monsters - giant disembodied brains with one huge eye and tentacles that might also be nerve endings - but when it finally does, they’re impressively creepy. And it’s well acted, written, shot - for the first part I was annoyed whenever the riffs interrupted the film. I was trying to watch that! Then when it’s time for the climax, the movie just loses its own plot. It’s really hard to explain how annoying it is that Anne’s psychic powers don’t actually do anything, or that it barely matters that the characters are sheltering in an observatory with exterior cameras on the monsters. It’s like they shot the ending for a different movie and just pasted it on. Luckily, Joel and the bots are here to help, with riffs that really take off once the film gets bad. (I like the bits about trying to attack the giant eyes with lemon juice and bags of onions).

All of which is to say that while the show is still finding its footing early in season 1, it’s off to a strong start here, and I have no problem with this episode being the 82nd best episode.

[emilysidhe]

MST3K knitathon

98. Episode 804 The Deadly Mantis

Summary: Bomb tests on an island off Antarctica have caused vibrations in the Earth that wake a prehistoric giant mantis from its frozen hibernation on the other side of the Earth in the Arctic. It attacks several isolated weather stations on the US’s northernmost radar defense defense line before the military brings in a paleontologist from the Natural History Museum (and the tag-along lady reporter who works for the museum’s magazine) to identify the creature. Now it’s up to the civilian ground observation force to watch the skies and track the mantis as it heads south.

MST3K lore or notable moments: This episode is from when the show was on the sci-fi channel, and they did ongoing plot lines in the sketches for those seasons. This is the episode that ends the planet of the apes pastiche, when the super intelligent apes destroy themselves by helping a local bomb-worshiping cult repair their planet-destroying bomb, and the SoL crew, Pearl in her van, and Professor Bobo as a stowaway flee the blast just in time. It resumes the Pearl chasing the SoL in her space van format, and establishes Professor Bobo as a regular character outside his planet. Also, Mike accidentally helps the apes repair the bomb by advising them to use the correct tool, so the bots decide that the planet’s destruction is Mike’s fault. This will become a running gag across several episodes of the sci-fi era.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? I love the goofy black and white 50s giant monster movies with a hero scientist and lots of military stock footage, so I would be recommending this one to go higher on the list if not for how badly the second half drags. The sketches are pretty strong for the sci-fi era, though, which is also in the movie’s favor. Probably in about the right place on the list, but with the option to move up when I start encountering episodes that need to move down.

[emilysidhe]

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

77. Episode 504 Secret Agent Super Dragon

Summary: Interestingly, this movie reads a bit like a sequel to a movie that was never made. After presumably an amazing high stakes mission in which he saved the world (not pictured), America’s best spy (code-named Super Dragon) has retired from espionage and is enjoying the good life in his mansion when a beautiful lady spy from his past tracks him down for a new mission: college students in small town Michigan appear to be being drugged with some new substance without their knowledge, as if an unknown syndicate is testing a product. Super Dragon won’t take the case until he learns that a former colleague has been killed investigating it. He negotiates a work release for his Q (a former mob safe-breaker in jail for his crimes), and heads to Michigan, where he uses secret notes his spy predecessor has left on mirrors in key locations* to track the drugs to doped chewing gum at the movie theater’s candy counter, then to Amsterdam where the mysterious syndicate is planning to take over the world by shipping the drugs everywhere.** The beautiful Dutch lady spy he works with in Amsterdam turns out to be an unwilling double-agent, having been addicted to the drug by the syndicate, but she double-crosses the bad guys and dies in the hero’s arms. The beautiful American lady spy wants him to come home and receive honors, but he and not-Q are going to stay in Holland while he makes time with a beautiful lady restauranteur who flirted with him when he briefly questioned her earlier in the movie. Fin.

This movie was filmed in Italian and awkwardly dubbed into English, with voice actors speaking too quickly and occasionally talking over each other trying to match the actors’ lips. There are also some extremely abrupt cuts that I assume were introduced in the dubbed version.

*Actually, the secret mirror messages thing is never explained. I’m guessing they were written by the previous spy because he’s basically the only candidate, but that doesn’t fully make sense because Super Dragon also finds them in Amsterdam and it doesn’t seem like previous spy made it that far before getting killed. shrug emoji

**the master plan is never fully explained either, but since withdrawal from the drug is 100% fatal without an antidote only they possess, we can infer that they mean to control people by getting them involuntarily addicted and holding the cure ransom

MST3K lore or notable moments: we get so little background on Gizmonic Institute or the world it inhabits that I suppose it counts as lore when Dr. Forrester says that he studied super-villainy as an undergraduate.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? I’m actually really glad I started this project, because I feel like knowing that I have to write about them is making me pay more attention and therefore appreciate the episodes more, so I’m having a lot of fun watching these. I’m not sure if this is retained from the original or introduced by the dub, but the way this movie lays out information is somewhat hard to follow. Things are always happening, but we don’t always know how one scene is related to another. It’s a very fun episode though, and in addition to the riff, I also really enjoyed the sketches about Crow’s script for a spy movie “for the nineties” where the hero talks in therapy speak, and Joel’s guide to spy murder puns (when you throw someone out of an airplane, you have to say, “They just stepped out.”) I continue to agree that each episode on this part of the list is just a bit better than the previous one. No change.

[emilysidhe]

Still working my way through MST3Knitathon, watching the top 100 MST3K movies in reverse order while working on various knitting projects:

78: Episode 612 The Starfighters

Note of historical interest: The “lead” actor in this film (Bob Dornan) went on to be a particularly fire-brandy anti-LGBTQ, “focus on the family” US congressman, and Mike and the bots make a few jokes about how awful he is as a person.

Summary: This is a movie where nothing happens. Theoretically, there is a plot about three pilots trying to learn to fly the new Starfighter jets while the main guy’s father (a U.S. congressman) tries to get him transferred to fly bombers instead, and he’s falling in love with a girl at the base while knowing that he may at any time be transferred overseas to train NATO pilots on the new planes. But really, nothing happens. There are exactly one and a half events in the film: 1/2, a landing gear warning light goes on and emergency vehicles scramble to the runway in response, but it’s a false alarm (they must have had stock footage of an emergency drill); 1, a bad weather front moves up from Mexico during a training flight, but only one plane heads back to base and the commanders have to wait to find out if the new pilots have made the correct decision to land at a nearby base to wait it out, or if they’ve crashed the expensive planes (and maybe killed the congressman’s son). That’s it. Other than that, it’s badly acted scenes that go nowhere and endless stock footage of jets refueling. So much stock footage of jets refueling.

MST3K lore or notable moments: The United Servo Academy Men’s Chorus aviation hymn:

Magnificent. (No knowledge of the episode required to watch and enjoy.)

What do I think about it’s place on the list? Right after I defended Ed Wood for not having come close to making any movie as bad as the worst of what MSTK has to offer, we have one that’s borderline in contention. It does not cross the “so bad it’s become surreal by accident” threshold (we will get there), but nothing happens! Yet, the riff is so on point. It’s amazing that they can do so much with so little to work with. And the United Servo Academy Men’s Chorus! Amazing! Top quality episode, but the film does drag too much to keep it from moving up. #78 best is just right.

[emilysidhe]

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

[emilysidhe]

MST3Knitathon

87. Episode 704 The Incredible Melting Man

Summary: Three astronauts are doing a fly-by of Saturn’s rings when a solar flare does something to their spacecraft. We cut to the sole survivor being treated for radiation on Earth before he kills a nurse and escapes. His doctor theorizes that the radiation has degraded so much of his mind that he will only have brief flashes of who he is, but he will instinctively be driven to consume human flesh in order to replace the cells that are progressively melting off him. The astronaut terrorizes a small town while experiencing repetitive flashbacks to his mission; the doctor, instructed by the military to keep everything secret even as the death toll mounts, tries to track down his patient alone by trailing him with a Geiger counter.

MST3K lore or notable moments: Crow T Robot’s Earth vs Soup script is finally optioned for a movie! After having just made MST3K The Movie, the writers have fun poking fun at Hollywood.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? I had a lot more fun watching this one than movie number 88 - the riffing is just better on this one. Solidifies my opinion that Escape 2000 should move down, but I’m fine with this one staying where it is.

[emilysidhe]

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.

[emilysidhe]

MST3Knitathon: The Bottom Twenty-five of the Top 100

I’ve been watching the top 100 episodes of MST3K as voted by fans during the 2016 kickstarter from bottom to top while working on various knitting projects.

We’ve reached number 76 on the list, which means we’ve watched the bottom twenty-five (76-100) on the list. That means it's time again for a retrospective - what I thought overall, which episodes are overrated on this list, which are underrated, any that are must-sees for MiSTies, and any that would make good first episodes to show new fans. So without further ado:

76. The Beatniks - (415)  

77. Secret Agent Super Dragon - (504)  

78. The Starfighters - (612)  

79. Bride of the Monster - (423)  

80. It Conquered The World - (311) 

81. Rocketship X-M - (201)

82. The Crawling Eye - (101)

83. Moon Zero Two - (111)

84. Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster - (213)

85. Gamera Vs. Zigra - (316)

86. Robot Holocaust - (110)

87. The Incredible Melting Man - (704)

88. Escape 2000 - (705)

89. Gamera Vs. Gaos - (308)

90. Gamera vs Barugon - (304)

Retrospective on episodes 91-100

Overall thoughts: Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a good enough show (and a long enough running show) that it simply has more than 100 really good episodes, so even down here at the next step up from the bottom, these are all pretty good. What I'd like to talk about is kind of an accidental trilogy that this watch order introduced in numbers 80-78: It Conquered the World, Bride of the Monster, and The Starfighters. Bad movies fall into certain subsets, and these three films are respective highlights of their categories, what I'm going to call: Competent Indifference, Enthusiasm Surpasses Talent, and What??? (The three question marks are critical.) It Conquered the Wolrd is one of many movies made by extremely prolific B-movie director and producer Roger Corman. As a producer, he had an eye for finding and developing undiscovered talent, and famous actors and directors from Jack Nicholson to Martin Scorsese got their start working on his productions. As a director, he was basically competent - the actors are miked, the shot editing makes sense, and when he shoots day for night it's dark. But he famously did not care if his movies were good or bad as long as they were cheap. Get it done and keep it under budget were his watch-words, so while he made good movies when he managed to grab a good script, a lot of his oeuvre is stuff like It Conquered the World - decent actors saying goofy lines at a plodding pace so that the teenagers at the drive-in have time to visit the snack stand or start making out. Ed Wood did not have Roger Corman's technical skills or industry connections, but every frame of Bride of the Monster shows how much he's trying to do a good job. Watching it confers a sort of bizarre delight, even though you'd be laughing at it without the riff track. It's kind of adorable. And then you have The Starfighters - badly done on a technical level, and yet possessing no charm in its amateur clumsiness. Just a slog in which things fail to happen more so than a movie. Watching these three in succession is like a microcosm of the films MST3K covers in its entirety.

Overrated Episodes: The Beatniks and Escape 2000 are both a little higher than they should be. (Although I think I was too hard on The Beatniks in the episode write-up - it belongs in the 80s, not the 90s, rather than 76.)

Underrated Episodes: Bride of the Monster and Godzilla vs the Sea Monster should both be *much* higher on this list. Most of the Gameras are only this low because other Gameras are rated more highly, and that's pretty fair imho.

Must-sees for MiSTies: Surprisingly, most of these. The accidental trilogy I mentioned above (It Conquered the World, Bride of the Monster, and The Starfighters) are each iconic enough to deserve a watch in their own right, and The Crawling Eye (101) and Rocketship X-M (201) are important to the show's history as the first nationally released episode and the first one with what is usually remembered as the first "regular" cast: Trace, Frank, Joel, and Kevin. And not all kaiju movies make a must-see list; but the Gameras and the Godzillas all do. That's ... almost every movie in this section.

Good on-boardings for new fans? I'd say Bride of the Monster makes a really good one - bad enough to communicate the premise of "watching bad movies," but too lively to be a slog to watch, and the Hired! short means you could do Manos as a second episode (I wouldn't do Manos first despite how often existing fans show it to new ones due to the aforementioned slog-ishness.)

[emilysidhe]

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

76. Episode 415: The Beatniks

Summary: Famously, this episode contains zero beatniks. First there is a short, the middle of three segments of 1960s General Hospital episodes that were used as shorts in season 4. In the ongoing storyline, young nurse Cynthia is fleeing her feelings for married doctor Steve by throwing herself into an abrupt engagement with single doctor Ken; Steve angrily disapproves because he might be able to be in love with Cynthia while married to Jessie, but Cynthia is not allowed to pursue other men while loving Steve; and poor Jessie senses the romantic tension between Steve and Cynthia without confronting anyone about it. In this specific short, Steve and Jessie throw a private engagement party for Ken and Cynthia and we sit through a very painful dinner party as Steve is a dick to everyone, Cynthia stubbornly puts on a cheerful face and refuses to acknowledge anything wrong, Jessie suffers silently under the realization that Steve is not going to bow out like a gentleman and there’s nothing she can really do about it, and Ken is the only one who doesn’t know exactly what’s going on. Awkward.

The movie proper follows the meteoric rise and fall of a young hoodlum with a singing talent over what appears to be a very eventful 72 hours. Eddie Crane is the leader of a small gang containing a crazy on (Moon), a “funny” one (Red), a girl (Iris) and a guy who’s also there (did not catch his name.) After holding up a mini-mart, they go to a diner where Iris puts an instrumental dance number on the jukebox and begs Eddie to sing to her. Eddie ad-libs a few lines and his voice catches the attention of a talent agent whose car has broken down outside the diner. The agent brings Eddie in for an audition the next morning; sends him to buy clothes that afternoon; puts him on a talent hunt show on local television that same night; and, when the local television appearance generates immediate enthusiastic phone calls, books him to record an album the next day.

But Eddie won’t go anywhere without his friends, who immediately trash the hotel room the agent set up for them, cause noise complaints, threaten the hotel manager with violence, and get cut off by the hotel bar. In search of food and more liquor, they head to a bar and terrorize the place until the bartender pulls a gun to kick them out and Moon unnecessarily escalates the situation until Red winds up shot and Moon kills the incapacitated bartender. As Red lies wounded in the hotel room, Moon descends into violent madness and Eddie (gone to record his album so they can keep the hotel room) deals with having to dodge a murder rap just as a way out of this life is offered to him. Eventually Eddie decides the only way to escape his past is to go fully clean and after recording his last song he turns himself in, hoping that both his future and Helen (oh yeah, he apparently fell in love with the agent’s assistant while she was helping him buy clothes yesterday afternoon) will both be waiting for him when he gets out.

It’s worth noting that despite this movie being called The Beatniks, everyone in it, including the criminals, is totally square. Moon is the only one who reads as even mildly counter-cultural - everyone else is just violent, and singer-Eddie is a crooner. Established crooners did continue to be popular through the sixties, but 1960 is a bit late for a new one to cause this much immediate excitement, to say nothing of how not-beatnik that kind of music is.

MST3K lore or notable moments: none this episode

What do I think about it’s place on the list: You know, this is one of the ones I had the strongest memories of while looking over the list. Now that I’ve finally gotten to it, I don’t know if this is my actual opinion or if I just happen to have seen this episode too many times and am a little bored by it, but I think I’d move it down to somewhere in the 90s on this list. Pretty good episode, but not as much fun as any of the others we’ve watched recently.

The movie parody rise and fall of singer Tom Servo sketch is excellent, though. Up there with their better sketches.

[emilysidhe]

MST3Knitathon

80 . Episode 311 It Conquered the World

Content warning? I suppose? In the sketch where they’re parodying the ice sports short, they pretend to mess around with the frozen body of a cat. I found it more bizarre than upsetting, but I suppose if you’re particularly sensitive to animal death, be warned!

Summary: We start with a short! Our first stand-alone short (as in, not Commando Cody.)

Snow Thrills is a newsreel from 1945(!) about winter sports. A rapid fire announcer tells us all about the winter sports practiced across the country as we watch people in several layers of wool skate, ski (the narrator tells us it’s properly pronounced “shiing”), bobsled, ice yacht (using sled runners to “sail” boats over frozen water), and go polar bear swimming (as in, “in icy waters” not “with polar bears”). Much of it is a bit amateurish, with rickety equipment and many spills and tumbles from the skiers, and the riffers get a lot of mileage out of the contrast between the announcer’s jaunty tone and how dangerous everything looks.

In the movie proper, we have maybe the most fifties movie MST3K has ever done. MST3K frequent flyers Lee Van Cleef, Peter Graves, Beverly Garland, and Sally Fraser star as two scientists and their respective wives, who are all close friends. One of the scientists (Graves) works for a military project that’s just launched and important satellite; the other (Van Cleef) is a partly disgraced physicist who is against the project because of the attention he claims it will draw from the “other inhabitants” of the solar system, whom he claims to be in radio contact with. A Venusian shows up to take over humanity “for our own good” by stopping all the power, including wristwatches and hand crank generators, and sending mind control devices in the form of rubber manta ray bat things to take over a handful of important people. Everyone runs around trying to convince the one scientist to stop helping it, Tom! (Did it convince Tom that it would stop war or poverty, or save us from nuclear destruction? No, worrying about those things would be communist. Instead, it convinced him that scientists will have an easier time getting it to green light their projects.)

But eventually, Sally Fraser falls victim to the mind control and her own husband has to kill her (Peter Graves plays the kind of stiff-jawed 50s hero whose emotional reaction to this personal tragedy is over in 30 seconds), Beverly Garland is so upset that she tries to shoot the monster herself, and hearing his wife die over the radio finally makes Lee Van Cleef’s scientist join his friend in stopping the monster. Despite surviving several direct hits with rifles and a bazooka (the army was attracted to the cave it hides in by Beverly Garland’s screams), an improvised flamethrower to the eye kills it almost instantly, and the scientist and Venusian die grappled in each other’s arms as Peter Graves looks on, making a portentous speech about the nature of humanity.

MST3K lore or notable moments: Peter Graves’s final speech in the film is an iconic MST3K moment, so much so that they let it play four times virtually unriffed: first in the theater, when everyone gets quiet to listen; then on the Satellite of Love set, where Joel and the bots are eating TV dinners while watching that part of the movie a retro TV; again in Deep 13, where Dr. F and Frank are doing the same; and finally over the end credits. I will link to the speech, but it can only be fully appreciated with the accompanying visual of the monster that has just been defeated:

Please picture this thing moving as slowly and rubber-suitedly as possible while you listen.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? When I was down in the 90s on the list, the episode order seemed kind of random, but for the last little while, the episodes have been mildly increasing in quality as we move up the list. No change.

[emilysidhe]

You can’t see this because I schedule all the posts now, but it’s been almost a week since I watched the last MST3Knitathon and I was so excited to finally have time to do another one!

84. Episode 213 Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster

Summary: (This will be a long summary because I like this one and want to talk about it) Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, an island is guarded by a giant lobster kaiju. Often accompanied by a supernatural storm, this sea monster sinks any boats that come near its island.

In Japan, a young man sets out on a quest to obtain a boat to search for his missing brother, who was lost in one of these very shipwrecks. Through random happenstance, he picks up two goofy college boys (disqualified contestants in a “win a boat!” dance marathon that he was too late to enter) and a thief (hiding out in the marina after a large take) who get dragged along with him as he steals a yacht and heads towards his brother’s ship’s last known location.

The monster sinks this ship too, but since everyone was wearing life jackets, they survive to wash up on the shore of the island, where they find a mysterious paramilitary compound into which they witness a group of Pacific Islander people being taken at gunpoint. Several men are killed in an escape attempt, but a young woman uses the confusion to sneak into the jungle, where she meets up with our heroes and a Scooby gang is formed.

She is from Infant Island, home of Mothra, the giant moth kaiju who is a regular Godzilla foe (or ally depending on the movie), and who is worshipped as a god by the local people. While Mothra sleeps, the bad guys have been kidnapping the people of the island and forcing them to refine a native fruit into a yellow liquid that can be sprayed on the water to stop the sea monster from attacking their boats. Her people are praying for Mothra to awaken in an elaborate dance ritual that is a genuinely impressive spectacle, but also pretty repetitive as the film keeps cutting back to it.

The Scoobs decide to sneak into the compound and try to rescue the enslaved Islanders, but while the thief excels at getting them through locked doors, they are caught before they do anything but discover evidence of nuclear weapons manufacturing. They use smoke bombs they stole from the lab to escape, but one of the goofy college boys is captured, and in delightfully ludicrous sequence of events, the brother gets his foot caught in a weather balloon rope and is ballooned over to Infant Island to reunite with his brother, who was marooned there in the movie’s first shipwreck. Perfect, no notes, watch this on repeat.

The reunited brothers talk to Mothra’s fairies - different Godzilla movie, but these fairies:

- about the plot for a bit before deciding to row back to the sea monster’s island and try again to free the captives while everyone else continues their “wake up Mothra” dance.

Meanwhile, back on the island, 1) captured college boy is thrown into the slave labor camp and convinces the other captives to make a fake batch of yellow liquid using leaves and no fruit 2) the three remaining free Scoobs come up with an even bolder plan. I didn’t mention it before, but while hiding from the soldiers in caves earlier, they discovered a sleeping Godzilla. Now, they want to jury-rig a lightning rod to wake him up, on the difficult-to-argue with reasoning that if Godzilla’s around, the bad guys will have Bigger Problems than hunting them down in the jungle.

This plan works without a hitch, and there are some fun monster fights before the bad guys decide to evacuate the island, putting it on a two hour nuclear self-destruct. The originally missing brother and the thief rescue the Islanders, who decide to use what’s left of the two hours to build a giant net in case Mothra wakes in time to save them. The sea monster sinks the bad guys’ ship with its fake yellow liquid right before getting killed by Godzilla; with ten minutes to spare, Mothra finally wakes and fights off Godzilla to get to her people, who climb into the giant net so she can easily pick them up and evacuate them; at the humans’ shouted encouragement, Godzilla leaps off a cliff into the water just before the nuclear explosion destroys the island; and the thief announces that he liked saving people so much that when he gets back to civilization, he’s going to go straight. The End!

MST3K lore or notable moments: 1. Final sketch has the results of the “Cool Thing Contest” from Episode 208 Lost Continent, which we will get to at number 56. 2. Because the weird American dub they have of this movie is missing a title screen, the opening credits are shown to an empty theater, with Joel and the bots running in “late” just as the movie starts, and asking each other frequently what this movie is called. Also, Mothra drops by for a chat during the sketches, but as far as I can recall, doesn’t become a recurring character.

What do I think about its place on the list? In one of these other reviews, I’ve mentioned that I first watched MST3K as a kid when my uncle used to visit us and bring over VHS’s of episodes that he’d taped from the TV to watch together. Back then, this was my favorite episode. It had Godzilla, Mothra, and two other kaiju! (I didn’t even mention the bird one that apparently also lives on the island and only shows up for one scene.) Mothra’s fairies, whom I also loved (that same uncle would also bring over unriffed classic Godzilla movies), got a couple of little scenes. It was colorful! There were lots of zany action scenes for the riffers to make fun of! And I still like the running riffs about the fake bush the characters used to sneak up to the compound, and the frequent shots of the sky as “check ins with God.” This episode will always be in my personal top five, but if we manage to look aside it being my childhood favorite, surely it belongs somewhere in the top 10? Or at least it should swap places on the list with the other Godzilla movie they did, Godzilla vs Megalon, voted in at number 19 despite being, in my opinion, not as good as this one!

Fellow MiSTies, what do you think? Was this episode robbed?

[emilysidhe]

Getting worse at writing these up before bed, but I did watch one last night:

94. Episode 1011 Horrors of Spider Island

Content warning: Like I said in the last post, I’ll let a certain amount of unfortunate riffs pass by without any comment, but I’ll try to warn for anything particularly egregious in either frequency or degree of offensiveness, and in this one the anti-trans slur “she-male” is used to mock a cis-female character. (Disclaimer that I won’t always be paying enough attention to catch particularly offensive one-off riffs.)

Summary: A night-club producer and his secretary/girlfriend audition dancers for a troupe to go on international tour. But en route to their first stop in Singapore, their plane goes down over the Pacific and the survivors take the emergency raft to an uninhabited island. There, they find a cabin with the body of a lone geologist strung up in a giant spiderweb, along with his notes about finding uranium on the island and enough stored food to last them about a month. The producer (the sole male survivor) gets bitten by an irradiated spider the size of a small dog the first night and immediately transforms into a spider beast, subtly enough that the filmmakers decide they don’t have to bother with his makeup and prosthetics whenever they’re filming him from behind. Theoretically he spends a month lurking in the jungle and menacing the girls, but after killing the exotic dancer who’d been trying to tempt him into infidelity as a human, he’s barely glimpsed for weeks as the camera focuses on the dancers becoming more (sexily) distraught and their clothes being shredded by island living as the weeks drag on without rescue. But just when the food is running out, the dead geologist’s two research assistants return from the mainland, discover the girls, and announce that a new ship is swinging by in two days to pick up the geologist’s research notes. As the girls sexily compete over the first male attention they’ve seen in weeks, the spider monster finally gets around to attacking people.

MST3K lore or notable moments: None in this episode

What do I think about its placement on the list? I’m embarrassed to admit that I’d rank this one quite a bit higher. This is by far the most overt exploitation film of its kind that they’ve done; enough to make it immediately memorable, which is no small feat. (Eventually all the monster movies and biker films and bad 80s horror episodes start to run together, even when they’re good.) I know from the research of other MiSTies that this softcore exploitation film was more explicit in its original European release, but that the American version had to cut anything truly raunchy. The print MST3K uses is also a bit degraded, so there are also a lot of closeups that you can’t see details of anymore. The way that it’s So Very Much Exactly What It Is but also mostly failing at what it’s trying to do makes for a comedic experience throughout, and the riffing’s pretty solid (aside from the caveat in the content warning). Like the other girly pictures they’ve done, the riffers alternate between commenting on the movie’s sexism and making jokes that are just sexist, but this movie’s giving them so much to work with that they keep getting steered back to the first category. And these episodes often have one riff that particularly resonates with me for one reason or another, and the bit where the women are trying to make a smoke signal to a passing ship that ignores them and Crow quips, “Darn Californian, it never saves anyone!” has had me giggling all day. So in the end, I’m sorry women (including myself, who am a women), but Horrors of Spider Island should be a top 75 MST3K episode.