#mst3knitathon retrospective

[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 is a frog-a-thon today:

85. Episode 316 Gamera Vs Zigra

Summary: We’ve finally reached a full-zany Gamera movie! It’s the future of 1985. Fifteen years ago, the moon landing ushered in a new era of international cooperation on Earth, and a multi-national moon base has since been constructed. It’s attacked by a mysterious spacecraft from deeper in the galaxy.

Meanwhile, at Sea World Japan, two marine biologists and their two youngest children (one from each, not two shared children) are down at the beach investigating dolphin deaths when they are teleported aboard an awesome looking spaceship that can also sail or dive in the ocean: picture the Sydney Opera House turned into a hat with a bunch of jellybeans glued to it, it’s great! Inside, a human-looking woman explains that she is one of the Zigra, an underwater race who polluted their own world’s oceans and now mean to colonize Earth and live here. She uses advanced technology to cause earthquakes in several major cities and demands that the two scientists help her get the Earth to surrender, hypnotizing them into stasis when they refuse. The two children’s imaginations allow them to intuitively understand how the spaceship works, so they easily evade the woman and escape with their parents, just in time for Gamera to rescue them. The woman is sent to pursue and kill the children.

As Gamera fights with the spaceship, it transforms into a shark kaiju. Gamera nearly wins, but is hypnotized into immobility. All the armies of the world try to fight Zigra, but to no avail. Then Sea World’s dolphin trainer figures out that the hypnosis is sonar based, and the scientists are able to wake up not just the marine biologists, but also the Zigran woman, who turns out to be a Japanese astronaut from the moon base who was being hypnotized. There is no alien race of sea people coming to invade - just this one kaiju who wants to enslave humanity in order to eat us!

The two marine biologists (and their stowaway children) descend in a bathysphere to try to wake Gamera so it can defeat Zigra for them. But will they succeed? (Also, there seems to be a product placement thing going on here, as everyone is drinking the same orange soda in a key scene.)

MST3K lore or notable moments: For I think the only time (?) in the show’s history, the Satellite of Love crew is forewarned about this episode’s movie, as Frank has told them ahead of time that they’ll be getting their 5th and final* Gamera episode today. Prepared, Joel and the bots do a send-off to Gamera: they throw a root beer kegger with a Gamera piñata, Tom and Crow make a diagram of what they think Gamera is like inside its shell, everyone makes a diorama of their favorite parts of the Gamera episodes, Gamera itself flies by with the kids from the movie, and finally they all (including the mads) do their own riff on the Gamera song in a different musical style. Also notable is an appearance Gerry and Sylvia, the two mole people who live in the caves around Deep 13 and occasionally show up to help the mads. They are briefly visible in the background of the final sketch.

*well, final of the initial series run. The gizmoplex season does one more Gamera movie

What do I think about it’s place on the list? I’m of two minds about whether I prefer the more “serious” Gamera movies to the purely whacky ones. On the one hand, the sheer zaniness is very fun! On the other hand, there’s a lot of screen time spent on comedy relief bits that don’t translate, although the riffers do help make them funny. The send off to Gamera sketches are so charming that I want to move this episode up on the list, but both the OG Gamera and everyone’s favorite enemy monster are still to come, so my thoughts may have to wait for the next retrospective.

[emilysidhe]

MST3Knitathon: The Bottom Ten 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 91 on the list, which means we’ve watched the bottom ten (91-100) on the list. I thought it would be appropriate to do a little retrospective of the group - 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:

91. Tormented - (414)

92. Samson vs. The Vampire Women - (624)

93. Angels' Revenge - (622)

94. Horrors of Spider Island - (1011)

95. Invasion of the Neptune Men - (819)

96. Devil Fish - (911)

97. Master Ninja II - (324)

98. The Deadly Mantis - (804)

99. San Francisco International - (614)

100. Wild Rebels - (207)

Overall thoughts: A lot of good episodes down here at the bottom! There’s nothing too egregious here, and I had a lot of fun watching these. You could interpret that as me simply liking this show and therefore being inclined to like most of the episodes, which is fair! But I think that what’s actually going on is that the “so bad it’s good” phenomenon that MST3K trades on is highly idiosyncratic - what makes a “so bad it’s good” movie vs what is just a bad movie differs from person to person. So down here at the bottom of the top are a bunch of solid but not extraordinary episodes that are just good watching experiences. Whereas the stuff I find borderline unwatchable is going to be up near the top mixed in with my personal favorites because that’s someone else’s so-bad-that-it’s-good catnip.

Overrated episodes: Not too many! I probably wouldn’t put Devil Fish on the list at all, though I don’t know what I’d replace it with, and personally I’d move Angel’s Revenge much closer to the bottom, but it’s not some kind of injustice that either of these is where they are.

Underrated Episodes: There’s quite a few in this group that ought to be moved up! In addition to being a solid episode, Samson Vs The Vampire Women is too important to series history and lore to rank outside the top 50, and Horrors of Spider Island has a uniqueness of tone that should be worthy of a top 75 spot (and is just a fun movie to make fun of). In addition, both Wild Rebels and Tormented are simply too good to be bottom ten, with fun riffs and good sketches.

Must-sees for MiSTies: Samson vs The Vampire Women, for the touching goodbye to TV’s Frank, and I would argue Horrors of Spider Island for the sake of seeing the most exploit-y of the exploitation films they’ve done. It’s a standout.

Good on-boardings for new fans? Wild Rebels hits a good middle ground of a movie that’s bad enough to get the “making fun of bad movies” series premise across without being painful to watch the way some of their more notorious movies are, and Joel’s speech to the bots about how realizing that the movies are bad enough to laugh at can turn watching them from grueling to fun is kind of a series thesis. But there are better “first episode of MST3K” candidates coming up farther up in the list.