Sci-Fi Archives 
Visit our archives of the MST3K pages previously hosted by the Sci-Fi Channel's SCIFI.COM. |
Posted by Sampo, on January 8th, 2015 
Movie: (1957): Two hitchhiking sisters are sentenced to 30 days labor at a cotton farm run by a scheming, corrupt boss.
First shown: 1/27/90 (unconfirmed)
Opening: Joel explains the premise, again; Tom has a tape-worm
Invention exchange: Joel shows off the “never-light” pipe; the Mads have invented tongue puppets
Host segment 1: J&tB perform a pageant dedicated to Greg Brady
Host segment 2: Crow recalls when J&tB rigged up Cambot so they can see what Gypsy is thinking
Host segment 3: Gypsy’s sick, and Tom is no help
End: Joel tries to explain the goofy guy from the movie, and reads some letters
  (133 votes, average: 4.29 out of 5)
 Loading...
• The episode has some things going for it. The movie marks a real departure for the series: It’s the first non-horror/sci-fi movie of the national series. (In fact, all the movies in season one except this one would have fit easily within the restrictions Sci-Fi Channel initially imposed on the Brains.) Then there’s Mamie. All in all, it’s reasonably watchable, but the riffing is really only so-so and the host segments, like last week, seem to be either long marches to nowhere (segment 1) or disjointed messes (segment 3). If feel like it could have been better.
• References.
• This episode is included in Mystery Science Theater 3000: Vol. XXIX.
• Crow still has the thick chin twine.
• Tom Servo observes: “That’s the only torso I have.” That would not be true for long.
• Joel again tells the bots to “look downcast.”
• The bots wince in pain when Joel strikes a match on them. Nice touch. And Joel doesn’t seem to care! Why? Why were the bots created to feel pain?
• Born Joan Lucille Olander, you might remember Mamie’s appearance on the 1994 Turkey Day bumpers hosted by Adam West. You can read about her life in her autobiography “Playing the Field.” Mamie’s also very tech-savvy: You can visit mamievandoren.com, visit her Facebook page, visit her YouTube page or follow her on Twitter @mamievandoran. Mamie’s now semi-retired from film. But she’s still singing, and in 2010 she put an album called “Still a Troublemaker.”
• They may not have made a cotton picker out of him, but Tom’s wrong: they WERE able to make a singer out of him. That’s rockabilly star Eddie Cochran, playing a character named “Bong” (it was a simpler time). He was only 19 here, but sadly only a couple of years away from his death in a car crash at the age of 21. (Cochran holds the dubious distinction of being the youngest person to die in our MSTory database.)
• “Untamed Youth” was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, but reportedly it only increased the film’s popularity.
• You can definitely see the blue tinting in this one.
• Strange line from the movie: “I’ll give ya an Italian haircut.” Several commenters say it means slitting a person’s throat.
• There was a certain type of MST3K fan who, when you asked them why they liked the show, would say something like “because that guy Joel was SO HIGH.” Why that would be a positive attribute of a TV show escapes me, but that’s just me. At an appearance more recently, Joel stated categorically that he was never stoned while shooting MST3K but, I gotta say, in host segment 1, he sure LOOKS it. I’m going to attribute it to Joel’s acting skills.
• Joel also almost falls over as the segment starts (though, to be fair, there was only a very small platform behind the desk for the host to stand on–the rest was an open trench where the puppeteers stood; I once stood there, and I can attest to the fact that it would be very easy for even a completely sober person to accidentally misstep and almost fall).
• I was never that much of a “Brady Bunch” fan, so I don’t really get why the detailed minutiae about the show they spout in segment 1 is funny. These season one “pageants” don’t really stand up well to repeat viewings.
• I wonder why they added the flashback element to host segment 2. Doesn’t seem necessary and certainly doesn’t add anything. To add time?
• LOTR reference: “Sauron’s dark army?”
• Callback: “No dancing.” (Crawling Hand); SPACOM! (Project Moonbase).
• We get several more uses of “Wonder what (s)he wanted…”
• Gypsy enters the theater for the first time (not counting KTMA) in this episode: Joel calls her into the theater to produce cotton in response to Tom Servo’s query (apropos of NOTHING, by the way) about what real cotton feels like (though how exactly Tom Servo would “feel” the cotton is unclear–I know, it’s just a show). Joel tells her to use her “teledyne vector” to perform this function, whatever that is.
• Gypsy’s lips fall off during a very hectic segment 3. They keep going. Then when she spits out a new Tom Servo, there’s no hand on his left arm. Either it wasn’t there to begin with, or it fell off during the fall. They keep going.
• While we’re more used to Joel stumbling over his lines, in the last half hour in the theater, Trace commits a doozy of a line flub with: “Hey, it’s Grg-brg-grg-Greg Brady!” They keep going.
• With this episode, the MST3K “Fan Club” becomes the “Information Club” in the end-of-show announcement.
• I think a brief explanation of the final musical number is called for: It feels shoehorned in, because it is. In 1957 (as this movie was being made) Harry Belafonte scored a HUGE hit with “The Banana Boat Song.” The song was mostly a hit because of its different sound and of course Harry’s charming singing style. But music promoters, as music promoters so often do, completely misread the public and decided that what the teeners wanted was calypso, calypso and MORE calypso. They didn’t, and the whole fad folded in a matter of weeks, but not before Les Baxter threw a little calypso number into this movie. (Also THIS travesty got made. Needs to be seen to be believed.)
• Stinger suggestion: Goofy guy dancing.
• Cast and crew roundup: This week they’re all in front of the camera. Lori Nelson was also in “Revenge of the Creature.” Lurene Tuttle wqas also in “Parts: The Clonus Horror. Yvonne Lime was also in “I Was A Teenage Werewolf. Robert Foulk was also in “The Indestructible Man.” Michael Emmet was also in “Attack of the Giant Leeches” and “Night of the Blood Beast.” And, of course, Mamie was also in “Girls Town.”
• CreditsWatch: Additional production assistants, again, were Melanie Hartley and Neil Brede; and the additional production staff was Jim Erickson. Audio post production was, again, by IVL Post in Minneapolis.
• Favorite riff: “Wait…so you’re my grandma, my sister, my mom … did you marry Bill Wyman?” Honorable mention: “And who are all these guys on the floor?”
Posted by , on January 3rd, 2015
Posted by Sampo, on January 3rd, 2015 “Sitting Duck” writes:
One of the laziest methods of presenting exposition in a movie is to have a voiceover guy read it off. So naturally this technique is used in several MST3K films. So which of these voiceover guys do you think particularly sticks out. I’m going with the one from Robot Holocaust. That guy was cropping up everywhere in the film.
I’m going to expand this to include all narrations and voice overs, and let’s include the shorts too.
I gotta go with Ted Husing, Ross Allen’s “boyfriend” in the short “Catching Trouble.” He seems almost as appalled by Ross as we are.
What’s your pick?
Posted by Sampo, on January 1st, 2015 
Movie: (1969) On a colonized moon, the services of a disaffected former-astronaut-turned-“moon ferry”-pilot are needed by sinister tycoon and a woman looking for her moon miner brother.
First shown: 1/20/90 (unconfirmed)
Opening: Joel explains the premise and suggests viewers go get a nutritious snack
Invention exchange: Larry’s hair is lifeless. Joel demonstrates his food teleporter; the Mads have invented celebrity mouth-to-mouth toothpaste
Host segment 1: J&tB perform a moon landing pageant
Host segment 2: J&tB conjecture about games of the future
Host segment 3: Crow and Tom fight over the women in the movie, in zero gravity
End: The bots play the “good thing/bad thing” movie review game and Joel reads a letter. Larry’s hair is better.
 (159 votes, average: 4.15 out of 5)
Loading...
• I’m going to put this one, just barely, in the “good” column. The movie is just so goofy, but actually pretty watchable. (It’s interesting — to me, anyway, since I lived through that time period — to see an enactment of the future a lot of people considered almost inevitable right after the moon landings took place: that NASA would smoothly continue, colonizing the moon, beginning passenger space travel, then mounting expeditions to other planets. I think if you went back in time and told the movie makers that, in the second decade of the 21st century, we haven’t done any of it, they’d be amazed.) The riffing is also quite good. The host segments aren’t terribly funny, but they’re passable.
• References.
• This episode was included on Shout’s Mystery Science Theater 3000: 25 Anniversary Edition.
• The bots are wearing robes in the opening, but not Joel.
• When Joel dances to the movie credits music, he jumps up on some sort of low platform to the left.
• When Magic Voice attempts to announce “commercial sign in 15 seconds,” her mic is off. You can hear her somewhere in the studio, but she is very faint. It’s back on for the final countdown. Either nobody noticed or they didn’t bother to do it again.
• That twine attached to Crow’s chin is again very noticeable.
• Joel once again explains the premise, using almost the exact same language as in previous openings.
• The Bots are uncharacteristically silent during the opening segment and the invention exchange.
• Joel is playing with something as the invention exchange begins. Some sort of magnetic game? Anybody know what it is?
• As the Mads call, Joel says: “Try not to look so happy, you guys.” One of the interesting things about the first season is the way Joel didn’t seem to be that upset about being stranded in space. It was only in later seasons that his character seemed to become more anxious to get back to Earth.
• Joel’s invention is one of his lamer efforts, I’d say. You can pretty much see the mechanisms of everything. Or is that the point?
• Joel still has part of his invention exchange on his head when he comes into the theater.
• I have a question about our hero’s space ship. The movie takes place in the 21st century, so it’s been at least 30ish years since the Apollo program. The bad guy says Kemp’s “moon ferry” is 10 years old–so that means it was built in the 1990s at least. So, it’s not like it’s a leftover Apollo lunar module. So, why does it look exactly like a lunar module? (I know, the real answer is probably because the filmmakers thought audiences would immediately recognize it as a space vehicle.)
• Josh reads that whole moon landing sequence in segment 1 like he had it memorized, but I asked him on Twitter and he said he wasn’t that big of an Apollo buff–he just read the script they gave him.
• Also one minor fact is wrong. The Eagle landed on the moon on July 20, not July 22.
• Crow is still wearing his helmet when he returns to the theater after the first host segment. Joel later removes it, causing Crow to yell “Ow! Ow!” It’s those little touches that make Trace’s performance so amazing.
• “I kinda miss the moon, you guys.” Joel is still horny.
• Several times, the bots sing snippets of “The Wiener Man,” a campfire favorite. I remember there was much fan chatter about this when it aired. It was mentioned in one of the early newsletters and there was an entry about the song in the FAQ for a while. There are a number of variations to the lyrics, but I think the most standard one (the newsletter notwithstanding) is:
I know a wiener man
He owns a hot dog stand
He gives me everything
From wieners on down.
Someday, I’ll be his wife
And then we’ll live the wiener life
Hot dog! I love the wiener man!
• We get another reference to “Yards of Leather.”
• One of the waitresses on the moon base is played Carol Cleveland, who, that same year, began making regular appearances on a little TV show called “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”
• The down side of the higher resolution you get with a DVD is you can see little things you might have missed. Example: At the end of segment three you can the string attaching the bottle to the glass. If one carefully pours down the wire, you can’t see it, but Joel isn’t quite that careful.
• Toward the end of the show, they come back from commercial and only Joel and Crow can be seen in the theater. After a few moments, Tom Servo pops up from the last seat on the left and heads over to his seat, saying: “Got my gum back.” Did he leave it there at the end of the last theater segment?
• Gypsy’s light is on at last! She again answers “Richard Basehart” when asked a question, and is again rewarded for it.
• Suggested stinger: Any portion of the floor show.
• Cast and crew roundup: art director Scott MacGregor also worked on “Fire Maidens of Outer Space” and “Million Eyes of Su-Muru.” In front of the camera, Catherine Von Schell was also in “Cosmic Princess.” Sam Kydd was also in “The Projected Man.” Michael Ripper was also in “The Deadly Bees.” Warren Mitchell was also in “The Crawling Eye.”
• CreditsWatch: additional production assistants were, again, Melanie Hartley and Neil Brede. The additional production staff was, again, Jim Erickson.
• Fave riff: “Fourth floor: Tyrannical tycoons, loose women.” Honorable mention: “In space, no one can art direct.”
Posted by , on December 31st, 2014
|
