I know there’s quite a few MSTies on this board and I wonder if any have seen other shows that “mistreat” movies in a similar fashion. Here’s a couple I’ve seen:
“Mad Movies with the L.A. Connection” (1985): The L.A. Connection was/is an improv group(?). They would take a public domain movie (in this case, a Shirley Temple movie where she searches for her father), cut it down to 22 minutes (for a 30 minute time slot) and dub in new dialog thereby changing the plot of the movie (kinda like What’s Up Tiger Lily?). In this case, Shirley went from lovable moppet to a girl possessed by her evil doll. Extremely funny. The show lasted one summer and I only saw the one episode, but it was quite funny.
More recently there was a show on FX whose name slips my mind in which they would take three bad movies and cut them down to seven minutes each and re-work the dialog and present the movie as something else. For example, a “horror” movie could end up as a seven minute infomercial for real estate. FX moved this show around a lot and it was never able to get an audience.
Have there been any other shows in the same vein?
sorta kinda but the old Whose Line from the UK would take out the dialog from an old movie and have the actors improve a new one. Was only occasionally really funny
Zacherle used t do this sort of thing in the late 1950s/early 1960s on CBS’ The Late Show (I believe) on WCBS out of New York. Later on in the 1960s he did the same shtick for Chiller Theater on WPIX in New York. There were a lot of other Horror Hosts elsewhere who did similar things in the 1960s and 1970s (Like Ghoulardi, but I don’t have a good list of these). They didn’t comment throughout, but only at station breaks an occasional cut-ins in the movies.
Billy Bob did the same thing on TNT, and Penn and Teller also did a little on cable.
In Salt Lake City n he mid-80s there was a show called “Turkey Theater” that deliberately ran really bad films, but they didn’t do the witty comments. However, they had some dynamite guests (Ray Harryhausen!) Around the sam time, Larane Newman had a syndicated series that ran old and bad flicks. (They did “Operation Moonbase”, which MST3K also did, but Newman’s show was earlier.)
Sandra Berhnardt hosted a show on cable that condensed down some wonderfull bad flicks, with her comments. During one of these he sad the one genuinely funny line I ever heard from her. The movie featuede – I kid you not – a monster sheep (!). At the end, Brnhardt says, Lector-like “Have the shee stopped screaming, Clarice?”
I should add that I’v been having a Bad Film Festival to do exacly this for the past fifteen years (before MST3K!). My next one s comng up n a week and a half.