Sometimes a film shown on MST3K will feature a performer of some notability or notoriety, but the riffing fails to make mention. Usually this is because the person in question wasn’t immediately recognizable. On occasion (such as with Robert Reed in Bloodlust!), they deliberately choose to hold back. So what riffs would you retroactively add in such situations? Mine is for Hamlet when the title character enthusiastically greets Horatio, to which I would append a, “You magnificent bastard!”
Mine would be in episode 409- INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN, which has Lon Chaney in BOTH the movie and the short. I feel that deserved a menton.
Have at it! And keep those WDT ideas coming!
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The Killer Shrews –
This WDT is a tough one, indeed. Help me out here. Did they mention that Festus Hagen from Gunsmoke (Ken Curtis) was in the show?
In ‘City Limits’, one on the unfriendly DAs was Kane Hodder. AKA Jason Voorhees. A “Ch ch ch ch, ha ha ha ha” music cue would have been called for when he was on screen.
Indeed this is a tough one. I had to look through IMDB to see if there were any famous/pre-famous people in ‘City Limits’. I feel a lot of posters will have to do this.
I always wanted them to riff on John Phillip Law, in Space Mutiny and even more so in Diabolik. When Diabolik jumps from the plane with Valmont, I kept expecting to hear something along the lines of, “Angels don’t make love, angels are love…now, DIE, you bastard!”
first for me is not so much an actor but a TV classic and has been mentioned in passing before.
the constant clips from the original BSG in ‘Space Mutiny.’ as flagrant as the usage was, i felt it deserved a mention at least.
i also have to second John Phillip Law with the exception of my expectation of him calling Valmont a ‘meddling fool!’ or at least cruise the highway of Italy in his cherried out death scooter.
This is kind of a tough one, and of course what’s notable to one person isn’t to another. I’ll pick someone who is fairly obscure but who has become immediately recognizable to me via numerous Twilight Zone marathons: actor Barney Phillips. He played the diner owner in the famous TZ episode “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” and I would have loved more Martian or diner comments during his performance as the cop in I Was a Teenage Werewolf.
John Agar in Women of the Prehistoric Planet
Well, it would have been nice if the guys in Cinematic Titanic had picked up on the plumber in “Rattlers.” That was the last role for Tipp McClure, Bruce Green in “Daddy-O” (“Sorry, fella…”).
And the riff could have been something like, “Sorry, lady. Can’t work on the plumbing in the crawl space under your house unless you’re actually takin’ a bath. Company policy.”
I posted this in last week’s WDT, but it fits here too, so I am copying/pasting it here and adding another example. In the season 12 movie Killer Fish, I was quietly watching the movie, laughing at the riffs, until I saw someone I recognized from my youth – Dan Pastorini, quarterback of the Houston Oilers! I remembered he had a short, unsuccessful stab at a movie career, but had never seen one of his movies until this. Jonah and the bots had no clue who this was, so I had to add my own riffs. For example:
Karen Black’s character, while dressing Dan’s wounds: “I hope you are a fast healer.”
Me: “As a lifelong Oilers fan, I can definitively say – no, he is not!”
Later, as Dan is walking through the forest, favoring a wounded left side:
Me: “I (unh) gotta tell Earl Campbell to (unh) pick up that blitzing linebacker!”
I can only think of a couple of RiffTrax live shows, off the top of my head. One of the stars of The House on Haunted Hill was Richard Long, a.k.a. the professor from Nanny and the Professor, but they never mentioned that. And in the MST3K reunion show they had a short called a Talking Car, which starred Brian Forster, who played Chris Partridge in the Partridge Family. I wanted to yell that one at the screen, but I stopped myself.
Y’know, this topic has two forks.
One is riffs on people that the crew SHOULD have gotten.
The other is riffs on people that would have worked IF THEY WERE DONE TODAY.
Shawn Levy, the spaghetti-slinging, 924-driving, Twist & Crème-frequenting dickweed in “Zombie Nightmare,”is now a MONSTER in the entertainment biz (executive producer of “Stranger Things,” TEN projects currently in pre-production or announced). When “Zombie Nightmare” was MST’d, he was just getting started, so the guys couldn’t have known. Now–“This spaghetti goes back to the kitchen, Jean-Luc!”
Don’t think they should have missed Gloria Talbott in Girls’ Town, though. Poor woman battled unnatural relationships in “Leech Woman”, “Girls’ Town”, AND “I Married a Monster from Outer Space,” all done well before MST, of course.
Here’s another one. When Dietz first appears in The Land That Time Forgot, they could have done a Norelco jingle with a mention of the sonic screwdriver slipped in.
Well, this question is a REAL poser for me, since I don’t have anywhere near the depth of cinematic knowledge that most of the rest of you have! Nonetheless … How ’bout Harvey B. Dunn, an instantly recognizable character actor who appeared in (by my count) three MSTied movies: Teenagers from Outer Space, Bride of the Monster, and The Sinister Urge. I don’t recall hearing any riffs in the later two episodes that acknowledge his previous performances (unless you count Crow’s ecstatic “Oh, goody, this guy!” when Dunn stomps into the police station in Sinister Urge).
Poor Dan Pastorini, as good as he was at times, he’ll always be Ringo to Terry Bradshaw, Roger Staubach and Dan Fouts as far as ’70’s QBs go.
According to The Annotated MST, there were four Gunsmoke riffs in that episode.
http://www.annotatedmst.com/episodes/55/The_Killer_Shrews
Very good points. And FYI, Gloria Talbott is lovely in one of my all-time favorite Christmas movies, We’re No Angels, the original version with Humphrey Bogart, Peter Ustinov, Aldo Ray, and Basil Rathbone.
In both of the movies Tommy Kirk did, (Catalina Caper and Village of the Giants), I kept wanting them to make an Old Yeller riff.
The kid who plays Ernie/”Michelle Shocked” in “City Limits” is Dean Devlin. He probably wouldn’t have been notable when the episode originally aired, but he wrote/produced some blockbusters later in the 90s — Universal Soldier, Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla. His latest is the highly riffle Geostorm.
One from the original series and one from The Gauntlet:
First, I was surprised that, after three shorts and one feature with Roy Thinnes, there were no “Invaders” riffs. You’d think there’d be at least one joke about somebody’s non-bendable finger.
And in “Killer Fish”, you’d think the presence of Karen Black would inspire a few “Airport ’75” jokes. Like when she gets into the motorboat: “Watch, another boat’s going to hit them, and she’ll have to steer it all by herself.”
To be fair, they might not have recognized him without the beard.
I may be wrong, but who cares, since it lets me mention Allison Hayes again this week. ;)
I don’t recall that there were any 50 Foot Woman references made in ANY of Ms. Hayes’ four MST3K appearances. Hopefully someone will correct me if I’m wrong.
Regardless, a good riff might be “Gee, she looks a lot shorter in person…”
Also, Guy Williams in Teenage Werewolf…I think they should have worked in a, “hwit–hwit–hwit,” at some point (the sound effect when Zorro, “Carves a Z/With his blade.” in the intro to the TV show, for you young people).
A good partner WDT to this one would be someone in a MST3Ked movie who resembles someone else in pop culture or history that the riffers miss, or don’t make the connection. F’rinstance, in The Giant Gila Monster, Mr. Wheeler (the lead character’s dad) looks plenty like Joe McCarthy, which always leads me to plenty of riffs on that when I watch. And in Alien In LA, the villain (or one of them, at least) is the spitting image of John Belushi. The Brains just didn’t make the connection (Why don’t they look?).
Back on topic, the latter movie is perfect for one or more riffs like the Stephon character from SNL (in the riffs they couldn’t know when they first did that movie but would work now dept.). There are plenty opportunities for that.
Well, that’s a whole different direction, and I was gonna just walk past, but then I thought about how much the hefty couple in “Ring of Terror” resembled Wayne Knight and Edie McClurg….
I can only think of a Rifftrax instance because I just watched it a couple days ago…Hank Patterson in Attack of the Puppet People. His appearance CRIED OUT for a Mr. Ziffel or Arnold the Pig reference!! I was completely astounded when it never came.
Not a riff for an actor, but for footage used. in Space Mutiny, with all the re-used Battlestar Galactica shots. (I haven’t seen the Rifftrax version to know if they referenced it there.) but, when I watched Space Mutiny, I would do Adama’s closing dialogue from every episode. “Fleeing from the Cylon tyranny, the last Battlestar, Galactica, leads a rag=tag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest. A shining planet, known as Earth.”
My brother pointed that in the conference room scene in ROTOR where Coldyron is explaining ROTOR to the executives, Mike, Kevin, and Bill completely fail to pick up on a very bizarre in-joke in the dialogue.
For God knows what reason, there are about a good dozen references to the Beach Boys and their music. This includes names of band members and their songs, including the strange lines about being both “Heroes and Villains” and ROTOR being a technological “Rock and Roll To The Rescue”.
Joel and Jonah don’t quite seem to find the idea of “The actor was in OTHER THINGS!” as rollickingly funny in itself as the M&tB SciFi/RT years do, and their implied wish that the actor is now permanently unemployed and/or wearing a Sylvester Jr. paper-bag-of-shame over his head for the entire rest of his career for his folly of even being associated with such a movie…
In the Netflix episodes, we only got a few obligatory jokes about Jayne Mansfield in “Loves of Hercules”, or Mia Farrow Allen in “Avalanche”, and a few brave stabs at Death Star jokes for Peter Cushing in “At the Earth’s Core”, but it still just seems, y’know, off the subject: Yeah, you saw it and we saw it, what’s the point?
When we see Kirk in an overcompensatingly hot session on the couch with his girl in the opening of Village of the Giants, I expected the riff of “Oh, Tommy, you shaggy dog!”
Even as someone who held on to his Hulu subscription until they pulled the Nanny & the Professor reruns, I don’t know of any human being who would admit remembering the show. At least not publicly.
I’m so glad you highlighted Barney Phillips! He’s one of my favorite “Hey, it’s THAT guy!” character actors who had a nice, varied resume. It always makes me happy to see someone in some old TV show, wonder why I recognize him or her, and then realize it’s because I’ve seen them in a MSTied movie (though in this case, I recognized Phillips because I’d seen him in lots of TV shows).
Mmmm…how about “Village of the Giants” as an example, then? Joy Harmon was, of course, one of the “teenagers” in “Village of the Giants.” Joy Harmon’s AVN-award-worthy performance as Car Wash Girl in “Cool Hand Luke” is so iconic that there’s still several GIFs of her soaping the hell out of that ol’ Pontiac Custom out there on the Interwebs (no, no link, I don’t want to get perma-banned), and a quick nod to her accomplishment wouldn’t have been out of line–I can just hear Crow’s sotto voce, “Baby, you can wash my car…”
Too obscure? OF course not. [Now, THERE’S a WDT–what’s the most obscure reference ever made in an MST episode?]
LOVE the Twilight Zone photo imdb uses on his Bio page!
Think it’s been done, but not bad to bring back once in a while–There are a few that spring to mind, including one so psychic-lawn-dart obscure, I can’t believe even they would know it.
I would have loved Tim Donnelly’s EMERGENCY! character Chet Kelly getting a reference somewhere during 811 – PARTS: THE CLONUS HORROR. Sure, it would have fallen on the more-obscure side of the riffing fence (Chet was a supporting character usually used for comic relief; it’s not like he was the main star of the show), but even just a quick reference would have sufficed. Maybe they didn’t recognize him sans mustache?
How about Starcrash? There’s a whole forest of opportunities they missed: David Hasselhoff, Marjoe Gortner, Christopher Plummer, Caroline Munro. Basically every single lead in that movie offered a whole wealth of references that they didn’t take advantage of.
Think we got one obligatory “laughing cavegirl” joke about Rae Dawn Chong, but, as with everything City Limits, I…………don’t remember.
And as Stephen points out, it wasn’t 90’s enough yet for Dean Devlin jokes. Nowadays, it’s enough just remembering why James Earl Jones kept getting “CNN” jokes.
Cheryl (Rainbeaux) Smith who played the girlfriend in Laserblast was in a minor film I’m a big fan of called Massacre at Central High (which has a plot very similar to Heathers). A riff to the effect that Having sex with Billy was a worse fate than what happened to her in Massacre at Central High (where her character was crushed under some boulders) would have been a sweet psychic dart.
Mr. Ohman, the fortune teller character in “Invasion USA,” was Dan O’Herlihy, who grew up to be the CEO of OCP in “Robocop.” Maybe when they were fawning over the girl someone could have said, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” But that might be too obscure. I watched the movie this morning and don’t think I would have never made the connection without reading the episode guide.
What about Roger Corman’s cameo in Lords of the Deep? Maybe I missed the riff?
All those years of making fun of his movies and they didn’t riff an appearance with maybe something like: “Well, he deserves this part more than the oscar he got.”
Holy Poverty Row, you’re RIGHT. THAT was, in fact, unforgivable.
Raymond Bailey in The Space Children. As obsessed as they were with The Beverly Hillbillies, they made no reference to the fact that he played Mr. Drysdale. I think they just didn’t recognize him because he’s bald in the movie but wore a hairpiece for the show.
There is an awful lot of “Famous name, no”, whenever they think someone resembles someone else, in the Joel era.
He’s not Merritt Stone!
What about Larry Pennell who played Major Thomas in THE SPACE CHILDREN? No riffs on him being on The Beverly Hillbillies who played Dash Riprock…
Not a riff or about an actor,but what about film flubs that are really obvious? Case in point in RACKET GIRLS where Peaches Page is wearing a white tube top when she gets dressed,but when she’s training,she’s a wearing a black top…No comment or riff about that??
Did they ever make mention of SCOTTY BECKETT of the Our Gang/ Little Rascals, when he was “Winky” in “Rocky Jones Space Ranger?” They went overboard riffing on John Banner, so perhaps they overlooked Spanky’s sidekick.
i would have said (when he dies), he will be back as Michelle Gomez (Missy)
could have quoted this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CP3_5HPWA0
Wulp, it may have been a rare case of sensitivity about a guy who came to a horrifyingly bad end. If you haven’t read his imdb bio, his life kind of stepped off a cliff within weeks of finishing shooting “Rocky Jones.”
Anyone who even noted that Peaches Page was WEARING a top gets a gold star from Sister Alice Cecilia for deportment.
Crunch Vander Huge!
Oh wait, wrong guy…