In The Not Too-Distant Future: MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 VOL. XVII
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Mar 16 2010, 10:03 AM
It’s stunning to realize that “Mystery Science Theater 3000” is now 22 years old and that the concept of a guy watching a “cheesy movie— the worst we can find” with two robots crackin’ wise and talkin’ trash is now part of TV comedy vernacular. I stumbled across the show in college and fell hard for it, both for the gags and riffs as well as the jaw-droppingly awful movies they found. Between shorts like “Mr. B. Natural” (in which a woman dressed as a pixiesh elf extols the virtues of music and frightens the cast) and sub-Ed Wood features such as MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE, it was if the show had been tailor-made for a mouthy genre nerd like me.
Not everyone has embraced the show— filmmakers treat it with disdain and cineastes look down their noses at what they think is disrespect for the movies themselves. But there’s a real love for the trashy genre material from the MST3K crew; rarely are the jokes mean-spirited or cruel and you can’t help but cut the guys some slack— after all, they might be the only people on Earth who, through the process of writing and producing the show, have been forced to gut through bottom-of-the-barrel dreck like RED ZONE CUBA over and over again.
VOLUME XVII, the fifth in Shout! Factory’s releases of the series (Rhino held the rights previous to this), is a mixed bag of older and newer episodes, two with series creator Joel Hodgson and two hosted by Joel’s on-screen replacement, series head writer Mike Nelson.
THE CRAWLING EYE is the first bona-fide MST3K episode to appear on “The Comedy Channel," the precursor to today’s Comedy Central; the show had run as a cable-access program on Minneapolis’ KTMA for a year, but it’s extremely unlikely that those crude episodes will ever see the legitimate light of day for rights reasons alone (plus, everyone seems pretty everyone seems pretty embarrassed by these). Everything about THE CRAWLING EYE feels primitive— the sets, the designs of robots Crow and Tom Servo, even the timing of the jokes, which often seem few and far between. Watching THE CRAWLING EYE is sort of like sitting through a DVD commentary where the director does little but tell you what’s happening on the screen. It doesn’t help that the movie itself is only average; the running gags all center around star Forrest Tucker, best known for the 1960's sitcom “F-Troop," which gives you a sense of how weak the laughs are.
The second Joel episode, Season Five’s THE BEATNIKS, is significantly funnier and more self-assured. Out is Season One’s Dr. Erhardt character — played by “Freaks and Geeks” writer J. Elvis Weinstein — and in is Frank Coniff’s inspired and whiny TV’s Frank. The movie itself, about a singer who falls in with the wrong crowd, is a snoozer written and directed by legendary voice-actor Paul Frees, but Joel and the ‘bots have fun skewering the ridiculous, over-the-top characters, particularly veteran TV actor Peter Breck’s shameless mugging as twitchy, switchblade-wielding bad guy “Mooney.”
The two Mike episodes are both solid, with the movies so stunningly awful that it’s hard to imagine that it was too difficult to come up with material— both 1990’s THE FINAL SACRIFICE and 1975’s BLOOD WATERS OF DR. Z (aka ZAAT) hold spots on the Internet Movie Database’s “Bottom 100” (#12 and #10, respectively). THE FINAL SACRIFICE, a shot-in-Canada clunker about what seems to be the world’s lamest Satanic cult, is a favorite of “MiSTies” and was long-rumored to have been tied up due to rights issues, which is a key reason so many episodes, with ownership issues ranging from Universal Pictures to frequently mocked film distributor Sandy Frank, might never see the light of day on DVD. The interstitial skits aren’t particularly funny or clever, save for a bit involving “hockey hair,” but the riffing is some of the show’s best, a steady stream of Great White North jokes (you could easily start a drinking game based on "Count The Canadian Band References," which include Rush’s Geddy Lee, Bachman-Turner-Overdrive and The Guess Who’s Burton Cummings) and the constant ridicule of beefy trucker character “Zap Rowsdower,” whose ridiculous, oft-repeated last name once appeared on a bumper sticker available from MST3K’s parent company, Best Brains.
BLOOD WATERS OF DR. Z isn’t as laugh-out-loud funny as THE FINAL SACRIFICE, but this episode, from the show’s last season, has plenty going for it—weird narration, South Florida community theater acting, awful ‘70’s fashions and vehicles (including a bizarre dune buggy that the ‘bots nail as looking like something out of the old Hanna-Barbera TV show “The Banana Splits”), and an incredibly silly-looking man-in-suit monster.
Shout! Factory gets big points for doing the show right, with decent transfers and ample bonus features, something rarely found in the Rhino episodes or box sets— fans of THE FINAL SACRIFICE are going to love the ten-minute interview with Bruce J. Mitchell, Zap Rowsdower himself, who sheepishly admits that he's never seen the MST3K version of the film. Other extras include a 35-minute “Crow Versus Crow” panel from DragonCon ’09 where Trace Beaulieu (Crow for the first eight seasons) and Bill Corbett (Crow for the last three seasons on the Sci-Fi Channel) talk about their robot creations and take a very funny question from Frank Conniff posing as a nerdy con attendee. Joel Hodgson offers his views on THE CRAWLING EYE and all of the films contain original trailers and, in the case of BLOOD WATERS OF DR. Z, an entire gallery of press clippings that showcase the ridiculous-but-eye-catching ad campaign that makes the already-goofy monster look like a bloodthirsty artichoke.
Shout! Factory has just announced the titles for Volume XVIII, due later this year— LOST CONTINENT, CRASH OF THE MOONS, THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS (yes!) and JACK FROST. But if you need a new Mystery Science Theater-esque fix right this second, Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy skewer shorts and newer films with downloadable commentary tracks on Rifftrax, while Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, Frank Coniff, J. Elvis Weinstein and Mary Jo Pehl can be found talking over bad movies at Cinematic Titanic.
It’s stunning to realize that “Mystery Science Theater 3000” is now 22 years old and that the concept of a guy watching a “cheesy movie— the worst we can find” with two robots crackin’ wise and talkin’ trash is now part of TV comedy vernacular. I stumbled across the show in college and fell hard for it, both for the gags and riffs as well as the jaw-droppingly awful movies they found. Between shorts like “Mr. B. Natural” (in which a woman dressed as a pixiesh elf extols the virtues of music and frightens the cast) and sub-Ed Wood features such as MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE, it was if the show had been tailor-made for a mouthy genre nerd like me.
THE CRAWLING EYE is the first bona-fide MST3K episode to appear on “The Comedy Channel," the precursor to today’s Comedy Central; the show had run as a cable-access program on Minneapolis’ KTMA for a year, but it’s extremely unlikely that those crude episodes will ever see the legitimate light of day for rights reasons alone (plus, everyone seems pretty everyone seems pretty embarrassed by these). Everything about THE CRAWLING EYE feels primitive— the sets, the designs of robots Crow and Tom Servo, even the timing of the jokes, which often seem few and far between. Watching THE CRAWLING EYE is sort of like sitting through a DVD commentary where the director does little but tell you what’s happening on the screen. It doesn’t help that the movie itself is only average; the running gags all center around star Forrest Tucker, best known for the 1960's sitcom “F-Troop," which gives you a sense of how weak the laughs are.
The second Joel episode, Season Five’s THE BEATNIKS, is significantly funnier and more self-assured. Out is Season One’s Dr. Erhardt character — played by “Freaks and Geeks” writer J. Elvis Weinstein — and in is Frank Coniff’s inspired and whiny TV’s Frank. The movie itself, about a singer who falls in with the wrong crowd, is a snoozer written and directed by legendary voice-actor Paul Frees, but Joel and the ‘bots have fun skewering the ridiculous, over-the-top characters, particularly veteran TV actor Peter Breck’s shameless mugging as twitchy, switchblade-wielding bad guy “Mooney.”
The two Mike episodes are both solid, with the movies so stunningly awful that it’s hard to imagine that it was too difficult to come up with material— both 1990’s THE FINAL SACRIFICE and 1975’s BLOOD WATERS OF DR. Z (aka ZAAT) hold spots on the Internet Movie Database’s “Bottom 100” (#12 and #10, respectively). THE FINAL SACRIFICE, a shot-in-Canada clunker about what seems to be the world’s lamest Satanic cult, is a favorite of “MiSTies” and was long-rumored to have been tied up due to rights issues, which is a key reason so many episodes, with ownership issues ranging from Universal Pictures to frequently mocked film distributor Sandy Frank, might never see the light of day on DVD. The interstitial skits aren’t particularly funny or clever, save for a bit involving “hockey hair,” but the riffing is some of the show’s best, a steady stream of Great White North jokes (you could easily start a drinking game based on "Count The Canadian Band References," which include Rush’s Geddy Lee, Bachman-Turner-Overdrive and The Guess Who’s Burton Cummings) and the constant ridicule of beefy trucker character “Zap Rowsdower,” whose ridiculous, oft-repeated last name once appeared on a bumper sticker available from MST3K’s parent company, Best Brains.
BLOOD WATERS OF DR. Z isn’t as laugh-out-loud funny as THE FINAL SACRIFICE, but this episode, from the show’s last season, has plenty going for it—weird narration, South Florida community theater acting, awful ‘70’s fashions and vehicles (including a bizarre dune buggy that the ‘bots nail as looking like something out of the old Hanna-Barbera TV show “The Banana Splits”), and an incredibly silly-looking man-in-suit monster.
Shout! Factory gets big points for doing the show right, with decent transfers and ample bonus features, something rarely found in the Rhino episodes or box sets— fans of THE FINAL SACRIFICE are going to love the ten-minute interview with Bruce J. Mitchell, Zap Rowsdower himself, who sheepishly admits that he's never seen the MST3K version of the film. Other extras include a 35-minute “Crow Versus Crow” panel from DragonCon ’09 where Trace Beaulieu (Crow for the first eight seasons) and Bill Corbett (Crow for the last three seasons on the Sci-Fi Channel) talk about their robot creations and take a very funny question from Frank Conniff posing as a nerdy con attendee. Joel Hodgson offers his views on THE CRAWLING EYE and all of the films contain original trailers and, in the case of BLOOD WATERS OF DR. Z, an entire gallery of press clippings that showcase the ridiculous-but-eye-catching ad campaign that makes the already-goofy monster look like a bloodthirsty artichoke.
Shout! Factory has just announced the titles for Volume XVIII, due later this year— LOST CONTINENT, CRASH OF THE MOONS, THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS (yes!) and JACK FROST. But if you need a new Mystery Science Theater-esque fix right this second, Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy skewer shorts and newer films with downloadable commentary tracks on Rifftrax, while Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, Frank Coniff, J. Elvis Weinstein and Mary Jo Pehl can be found talking over bad movies at Cinematic Titanic.
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