What moments from MSTed movies have you randomly seen, totally out of their original context? I don’t mean watching a MSTed film on an old horror movie program, unriffed. I’m talking about seeing moments from movies/shorts totally divorced from the movies that feature them.
As an example, the former PBS station in Los Angeles, during pledge drives, runs a pair of specials called Things That Aren’t Here Anymore, highlighted things and places that have disappeared from Los Angeles in the last few decades. In one of the specials, while highlighting old drive-ins that have gone away, they featured a three-second clip from the short What About Juvenlie Delinquency?, when the kids in the gang come into the diner.
It makes me wonder if anyone else out there has seen moments like this. Thanks for your attention.
Shorts are, I think, the most common MSTed movies you’ll see pop up randomly, because many of them are in public domain. The one I remember seeing is a snippet from “Design for Dreaming,” when talking about views of the future.
What have you seen?
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The problem is specifics but I’m certain I’ve seen the reaction shot of Jenny’s twisted screaming horror face from Screaming Skull and the shot of all the main cast laughing near the end of Santa Clause Vaguely Interacts with the Martians.
Oh and I’m sure I remember the sherif from Giant Spider Invasion bumbling around on an island in some long forgotten short lived TV show, possibly a one off. No idea.
I remember La Quinta Inn using part of The Phantom Planet, redubbing the two guys talking to have them talking about room rates rather than the good and the beautiful. Here’s the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MapIhTIc0xg
I’m sure I’ve seen several moments like this, and I get excited and embarrass my family (“Look! It’s Killer Shrews!”). But I remember only two right now:
The American version of Whose Line Is it, Anyway? used a scene from The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (when Kurt’s arm is torn off and he staggers around the basement) for one of their games.
How I Met Your Mother showed a condensed version of Manos on one of Ted’s dates.
There. I’m excited I remembered that much. Now to go embarrass my family.
Speaking of “Design for Dreaming”, my friends and I went to see “Nine Inch Nails” back in 2005 and during the song “Right Where It Belongs” the band was playing in back of a screen that showed snippets of “Design for Dreaming”.
I am going to show my age in this, but I remember seeing an episode of Muppet Babies as a kid that included a clip of robot soldiers exiting an armored tank. It wasn’t until many years later that I saw Undersea Kingdom, and realized that this was the film being shown.
On How I Met Your Mother, Ted and one of his dates get into an argument over whether Plan 9 or Manos is the worst movie ever made. At the end they watch an abbreviated version of Manos.
EDIT: Apologies to Dark Grandma, I just noticed yours.
I remember that one. The high point was when the monster yanks Kurt’s arm through the door and IIRC the line they came up with was, “Buy an encyclopedia. I’m saving up for choreography school.”
In intro to METV Svengoolie show I believe one of the shots is of
James Arness’ infinitely more talented brother running from the bug-eyed aliens
in Film Crew’s Killers From Space. It’s kind of weird when it just pops
up in that context.
I used to tape a lot of MTV back in the ’80s (back when they showed music videos). One of my tapes had a Valentine’s Day promo that used the “squishy” bit from Young Man’s Fancy. I remember seeing it years later on MST and being amazed that I’d seen it before.
Technically a home-made music video, but I came across a video for Daniel Amos’s “It’s the 80s, Where’s Our Rocket Packs?” It has a fair amount of Commander Cody in the video, plus a few other public domain sci-fi oldies. The song itself references The Day the Earth Stood Still as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXHWDhk7Hok
#8 (I can’t seem to use the Quote function for some reason), now that you mention it, the Svengoolie intro also has several clips from Robot Monster.
One more that I’ve just remembered is on one of my favorite YouTube channels, the Oddity Archive. The intro has a clip from Manos, where Maggie slaps Torgo and screams for her husband to save her.
Whose line did a sketch called film dub, and one episode featured a scene from “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyixvQAUJjI
And I forgot until I looked up the previous link, but they also did “Night of the Blood Beast”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvWM6jGGkWM
(Unfortunately, you may have to watch a short ad before the video begins if you decide to click on these links)
Just click on the link that says Quote and type away. If you’re editing down the OP to just the relevant bits, try to make sure you don’t partially or fully delete any of the tags.
There are a few different video versions of “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie floating around. This particular one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtrEN-YKLBM has several shots of Donna screaming from “Night of the Blood Beast” and a shot of the Teenage Caveman and his girl from, well, “Teenage Caveman”. There are lots of snippets of various movies in it so there might be one or two I missed.
Also in the music video “You Might Think” by “The Cars” lead singer Ric Ocasek sits down in a movie theater watching “Robot Monster”, and in the next shot he’s turned into Ro-Man.
I noticed at 2:55 “Screaming Skull”, 3:00 “Attack of the Giant Leeches”, and I think “Hercules Unchained” at 3:01. Also the shots of Donna screaming cracked me up.
I took home economics in 7th grade. Our teacher showed us The Home Economics story. It wouldn’t be until I was in late high school and discovered MST3K that I realized where I’d seen the short before.
I wouldn’t be surprised that many of us MST3K fans also love “Whose Line…” because the type of humor is often the same. They did a “Film Dub” short sketch using a clip of “The Undead” too. I can’t link to it right now but it’s easily found.
I saw a brief clip of the squishy girl also, just can’t remember where
I think I remember Judy the squishy girl appearing in an old Nick-at-Nite “How to be Swell” snippet they used to air during commercial breaks in the late ’80s-early ’90s. There was also a clip of Johnny from the “Cheating” short in another one.
I wondered about those clips but I haven’t seen those episodes in quite a while so I wasn’t sure.
DOH! I totally missed Krankor in this one as well at 2:25 with Price of Space a few seconds later.
In Disney World there was (is?) a 50s themed restaurant where the dining area is designed like a drive-in theater, with each table looking like half of a glittery fiberglass landyacht of the era. On one wall they projected a silent looping video made up of a random assortment of scenes from B-movies. One scene was Glenn getting stabbed by the giant hypodermic needle and then throwing it like a dart from “The Amazing Colossal Man”. The day I went, one of the servers working at the time would scream bloody murder when Glenn gets stabbed and again for the guy getting impaled.
Nice catch! I have always really enjoyed that song (and almost everything from that obscure but delightful band)…one lyric from this 30+ year old song that kept standing out as quite prescient to me this year was:
“(It’s the eighties so where’s our rocket packs?)
I thought by now we’d live in space
And eat a pill instead of dinner
And wear a gas mask on our face
a President of female gender?”
Design for Dreaming appears at the very beginning of the remake of The Hills Have Eyes.
Killers from Space shows up in It Follows.
We can’t forget about E.T. enjoying some Coors beer before running into “This Island Earth” on the TV.
Brad Jones (AKA The Cinema Snob) was talking about good and not so good bigfoot movies. Among the not so good was a still of Boggy Creek 2 with Mike and the bots silhouetted at the bottom.
I forgot — the most random, yet epic of all:
A few years ago I’m up late at night and I see Space Mutiny on TV, unedited (or less edited?) and in all of its glory. It’s bad, it’s cheesy, it’s not a good print, and it’s 2 in the morning…
…and it’s on Channel 23 in Minneapolis — formerly KTMA. Some things never change.
Speedy:
Whose line did a sketch called film dub, and one episode featured a scene from “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyixvQAUJjI
And I forgot until I looked up the previous link, but they also did “Night of the Blood Beast”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvWM6jGGkWM
(Unfortunately, you may have to watch a short ad before the video begins if you decide to click on these links)
Also “Once Upon A Honeymoon”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTrEbmaJ6rI
“Black Scorpion”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GmhjOgE-bQ
The Beastie Boys’ video for “Body Movin'” is their own take on some of the scenes from “Danger: Diabolik”, and uses brief clips from the movie.
When Pia Zadora was on talk shows (probably her early “Late Night with David Letterman” appearance) in the early ’80s, there were clips from “Santa Claus Conquered The Martians”. Of course, this was pre-MST3K
Speaking of LNwDL, in the earliest years of that show, Dave would show a serialized version of “Plan 9”, also long before seeing it done by Rifftrax.
In a reverse of this Weekend Discussion topic: the random appearance of something familiar on a MSTed movie: the Sylvester and Tweety cartoon on tv in “Kitten With A Whip”.
I remember that one, thanks to having watched too many music videos during my misspent youth in the Eighties. IIRC it features the scene where Ro-Man is carrying off a kicking and screaming Alice.
On Stephen Colbert’s Christmas special he sang a song with Toby Keith about “the War on Christmas” that featured footage from Santa Claus Conquers The Martians.
I don’t remember that on LNwDL, but I remember him playing “Coffee Cup Theater”, on his first morning NBC show, where he would serialize one baffling minute of an early PD talkie that was impossible to follow.
I can’t say for certain whether it was “I Accuse My Parents”, but if it had been, you get the general drift.
There is a cable/satellite channel called ARTS that shows clips from classical music performances, and scenes from “classic” movies and they ran the entire short “Design for Dreaming” on there. I guess that’s one thing they showed on MST3K that’s considered a classic. Somehow they haven’t shown Mr. B Natural yet.
Radio Shack was running this ad with an appearance by Gamera in 1995, coinciding with the last big push for MST3k by Comedy Central. Check out the commercial at the end – a Marc Singer-hosted movie marathon on TBS with The Last Dinosaur as one of the flicks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B77Pg3xjQQo
In the final episode of MST3K they watch
“The Crawling Eye”.
Weird Al’s classic “Christmas At Ground Zero” features a clip of the dancing sugar plums from “Twas the Night Before Christmas, which was on RiffTrax “Christmas Shorts-Stravaganza”. It also has a brief shot of women looking up and running, which I think may have come from “It Conquered the World”.
In the Washington D.C. area, there was one year where an ad for the Washington Auto Show consisted of clips from “Desgin for Dreaming”.
No more calls, we have a Winner… The video for The Avett Brothers song.. DIE, DIE, DIE!!! Once Upon A Honeymoon video with The Avetts music!!
Oh, how cool. My first reply is # 39! Which Mysteriously Mustached Macho Man wore that number into The NFL Hall of Fame?? Anyone? Troy?? You in the back..Rowsdower??
In an episode of Big Bang Theory they showed Wolowitz and Koothrapali sitting on the couch eating rice and watching a clip from Monster a Go-Go, but …
There was no clip.
Bazinga.
This Island Earth being referenced in Watchmen
http://images.yuku.com.s3.amazonaws.com/image/pjpeg/d8c264f129681aa27e10d106b874c79ed1df65e3.pjpg
Several clips from Design for Dreaming and Century 21 Calling show up in this Phenomenauts video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eaOOqd29aw
There may also be a brief clip of the Rocky Jones space wheel from Crash of the Moons, but that was a pretty common design in 50’s/60’s sci-fi.
And of course, clips from Robot Monster crop up all over the place, including the beginning of In the Mouth of Madness, I think a couple of DEVO videos, and of course It Came from Hollywood which includes a ton of movies featured on MST3K.
The Great Miss Julie Brown did a skit on her MTV show ‘Just Say Julie’ where she gives some dating advice and shows clips from What to do on a Date, specifically the Weenie Roast scene. (Nick, no!)
Narrator: …or maybe go on a Weenie Roast
Julie: I think we know what their secret code really means!
She also riffs on the short a little, very much in the MST spirit. (If you can’t tell I have a huge crush on Julie Brown)
I have also heard the weenie roast sound clips on the LA radio station KROQ when they advertise their concert called the Weenie Roast.
In the animated Will Farrell movie “Megamind”, his minion is a fish who travels around in the dome-head of a robotic gorilla. It looks very much like, and is probably a homage to, Ro-Man from “Robot Monster”.
I remember a ton from ‘It Came from Hollywood’.
Another one for Robot Monster- The song ‘That’s Not Nastassia’ by Sparks uses Ro-Man’s musical motif. Given the kind of guys the Mael brothers are I don’t think it’s just coincidence.
I remember seeing a commercial a long time ago that had a brief clip of a fat woman dressed in caveman style clothes, doing an over-the-top “take” to the camera and screaming. I don’t remember what the commercial was for, but years later I recognized that clip when I saw RiffTrax’s “Wild Women of Wongo”.
A picture of the actor who played Torgo was used on an episode of Elementary a few years ago. They used it as a mug shot to determine someone was lying, and then Watson flat out said it was Torgo and that Manos was considered one of the worst movies ever made.