First, a note - if you folks are at all interested in these ongoing reviews, please reply to the thread, ask a question, make an observation, etc. I think it would be against the rules for me to continually bump my own thread - though this sort of thing might have an exception. I’ll email Dex and ask.
Season Two seems to heavily feature Jerry and Silvia, the mole people neighbors of the Mads in Deep 13. We also seem to get a lot more skits withthe Mads, rather than just seeing them at the beginning and end.
MST3K 2.02 - Sidehackers
By airdate, this is the second episode commercially available; It’s in Collection Three. This movie’s mildly infamous, I’m to understand, because it had a horrible murder/rape scene in it that the crew didn’t discover until it was too late to change movies - they cut that scene from the show, of course, and watched their movies all the way through thereafter.
They manage to have fun with it anyway - the field frolicking scene at the beginning is hilarity incarnate, and the main character’s moniker of ‘Rommel’ provides us with endless references to the Desert Fox. At one point, Cambot’s interposes a ‘Sidehacking Scoreboard’ which is a fairly unique gag for the show. We also hear what I think is the first reference to “McCloud!” in this one.
Mike shows up in costume on the hexfield again, which notably has no iris yet.
Signature Riff :
<Crow> : “For those of you playing along at home, Rita is dead.”
MST3K 2.03 - Jungle Goddess
Joel manages to amuse me with his Invention exchange here - a circular saw wired to a remote control car.
We start off with a short - The Phantom Creeps, part one, starring Bela Lugosi, making his second MST appearance. Among his mad scientist achievements are mechanical spiders that wilt plants, and the goofiest looking robot, ever. One of the bit players in the credits has my name!
Then we get into the horribly racist “white people in the jungle” movie. Starring George Reeves, AKA ‘Superman’. There was a great riff that caught me offguard - two people chatting, and Joel pipes in with “Saigon. I’m still in Saigon.” - whereupon I noticed the silhouette of the ceiling fan in the background, and split a gut.
Outside the theater, we get to see some of Cambot’s attachments, and there’s a fun skit in that regard; in closing we get one of the funniest Joel skits I’ve ever seen - “My White Goddess”, a sitcom premised on the ending of the movie. This sketch is the ultimate genesis of Pearl’s later tendency to refer to Crow as ‘Art’.
MST3K 2.04 - Catalina Caper
Commercially available, on Collection One.
This time, the Mads give me a hoot with their invention exchange, the “tank tops”.
The movie is a psychadelic, fun sixties romp, and I mean that in the worst way. Tommy Kirk, our “hero”, resembles a weather-beaten Wil Wheaton. Little Richard makes a musical cameo, inspiring Joel to surmise that he might be “hopped up on goofballs”. Crow makes a couple of the usual Seahunt jokes (“By this time, my lungs were aching for air…”) and gets nixed both times.
Outside the theater, the bots ask Joel to explain the 60’s, which Joel does not remember fondly.
Most importantly, we get to hear Tom’s musically-expressed obsession with ‘Creepy Girl’.