LOOK!
Thank you! I’d wondered where that came from.
And he, in turn, was imitating Jackie Gleason.
Yeah but my memory only goes back so far.
MST3K 3.06 - Time of the Apes
Another Sandy Frank production, brought from Japanese obscurity.
We open on the SOL as the crew enjoys a little tee-ball, with Tom as the Tee. Of course, they promptly manage to breach the hull with an errant ball. The Mads have a Miracle-Grow Baby Formula for their invention, and we’re off to the races.
The funniest thing about this movie is the downright chirpy delivery of some of the kids lines - it may just be the dubbing, but the kids expressions seem to go right along with it. (Mom : “Johnny, don’t go, it’s too dangerous.” Johnny (beaming) : “I don’t care!”) (see also : Caroline (happily) : “It seems wrong to tamper with the forces of nature!”)
On a tour of a research facility, our three protagonists get accidentally sealed in cryo-pods. That’s right, the Futurama premise. They wake up in the future, when Apes rule Japan. They meet a human survivor named Godo, and Joel and the Bots wait until the last 15 minutes to bust out the reference I was “waiting for”. Heh. Godo’s chief nemesis is the Ape security chief Gaybar. (technically, Gebar - but pronounced Gaybar) It’s good that they finally meet, because Gaybar was waiting for Godo, and Godo was looking for Mr. Gaybar.
Our other interesting characters include Pepe, the mime-monkey girl; and the mysterious flying saucer, which is apparently from the Yukon, or University of Connecticut, or something. These Japanese folks sure do gasp a lot. Well, towards the end, the security guy finds out it wasn’t Godo who killed his family, and that he in fact shot his own son. (Crow : ‘I did it! I did it! Damn me all to hell!’)
And that’s Crow’s only Heston impression during this one - I had expected at least one ‘A Planet Where Apes Evolved from Men?’
The ending gets all acid-trippy, and it looks like they’re about to shoot for a Wizard of Oz style ‘It was all a dream, right?’ ending, when out of nowhere the lead scientist decides that they did indeed get sent back through time. Apparently, the UFO guys made the cryo-pods so cold, they transported the protagonists back through time. Yeah.
Our host segments include ‘Why Doesn’t Johnny Care?’ and at the end, the Sandy Frnak song. At last, Frank and Clay’s new Grown baby pushes the button.
Signature Riff :
(as we see stock footage of monkeys)
<Crow> : ‘It looks like they’re on a playground. They must be ‘recess’ monkeys.’
MST3K 3.07 - Daddy-O
Shown with Short, Alphabet Antics, which doesn’t seem to have an IMDB entry.
We open with the Crew gossiping around the water cooler. I got a special kick out of this as Tom Servo refers to Joel as ‘J.R.’ - presumably for ‘Joel Robinson’ - but special to me, as that’s my chosen appellation. The Mads still have their Miracle Grow baby, and use him to demonstrate their invention this week - the alien teething nook, a facehugger-styled pacifier.
Alphabet Antics is a real hoot, a semi-educational short aimed at little kids, and the crew riffs it with Seussian precision.
Daddy-O marks the debut of film composer John Williams. ( Tom : “Before he heard Stravinsky. But I kid Stravinsky…”) It’s a little murder mystery with fast cars and middle-aged teenagers. Our ‘hero’ looks like the love-child of the ‘Clonus’ guy and Beef Hardcheese from Space Mutiny. He also wears his belt as if it were a sports-bra. He also likes to slap fruit out of peoples’ hands.
His pal, Sonny, who looks like an anorexic Clint Howard, gets offed in the first act, because of being mixed up with a couple of no-goodniks : Bruce, the near-sighted gym owner, and Charles Foster Kane’s fatter brother.
Our host segments include a musical number riffing on the high belts, and a visit from Mike Nelson as Bruce while Joel demonstrates spit-takes. We also see Joel as a method actor, practicing fruit-slapping.
We close with an amusing bout of Creditus Interruptus, where ‘the button’ has been damaged by the baby’s antics.
I remember seeing this episode way, way back when I was a lot younger. I never did see the beginning; I think I turned it on when the people were getting into the cryopods. As a result, for the longest time I thought they were showing the actual Planet of the Apes. At the time, all I knew about PotA was that there were talking apes, so that was good enough for me.
Everything (except for the movie itself) was clicking wonderfully with Daddy-O. The satire was dead on, the funny bits were hilarious, the interaction among all the players was flawless. Even the terribleness of the movie added to the whole, as it gave loads of ammo to the writers. One of my fave MST3K eps.
I think the fat guy in Daddy-O was also the cuckolded husband in “Attack of the Giant Leeches” Is there a union specifically for b-movie actors that gets them all these roles in crappy flicks? But it seems like it’s the same stable of actors over and over again. God knows how many MST shows have had Merrit Stone in them.
Many studios had contract actors, often pigeonhold into certain types of roles.
[OT Nitpick]Actually, the name of Johnny Carson’s sleazy pitchman/movie host (“Go to the Slausen cut-off, get out of your car, cut off your Slausen.”) was Art Fern. Carson’s Floyd Turbo was the right-wing dumbass who periodically appeared on the show to give “citizen” TV editorials.[/OT Nitpick]
He was, it seems; and three.
Are you sure? It seems that Mike and the bots went over this question in “The Rebel Set.” But I don’t think they ever settled the question. I know stone was the Sheriff in “Attack of the Giant Leeches” and “Earth Vs the Spider.” He was also the soda jerk in “Tormented.” so that’s three. But there is debate about whether he is the conductor in “The Rebel Set” so it may be four. And for the life of me it seems like we’ve seen him in other episodes, too. In “AOTG Leeches” Joel specifically says something to the effect of, “Man, that guy is the sheriff of everywhere.”
Thanks for the reminder NDP. I don’t remember anything about Floyd Turbo but the name so I guess I attached it to Art Fern and his routine.
We open as Crow and Tom try to out-gravel-voice each other in “Lucy vs. Harvey Fierstein.”
Ah, Gamera. This tepid outing opens with some protests over a road being built - a road that is soon delayed because of a mysterious green minty glow that blasts aircraft with cutting beams. We get a Rex Dart callback! We meet a cowardly reporter who abandons a chunky kid in a yellow hat to save his own skin. This works out like one would expect and the kid survives, the reporter doesn’t. The kid is Kenny… er, Ichi, Gamera’s new pal. Gamera, in fact, saves the brat from the triangle-headed bird-dinosaur, cementing his moniker as ‘Friend to All Children’.
Gaos shoots Gamera in the arm with his cutting beam, like, fifty times in the same spot. What a jerk. Fortunately, the master military minds of Japan are able to recruit Ichi to do the thinking for them. The plot unfolds like any giant monster movie with “vs.” in the title, and ultimately, the humans come up with their genius ‘spin Gaos to make it dizzy’ plan. I’m not kidding. The best part of the final act is a mostly-inappropriate Deliverance riff as Gamera lands on Gaos from behind.
Host segments are solid, including the Bots heckling Joel as he makes a paper Gaos; The Gameradammerung; Crow as Ed Sullivan; and the ‘Ways to Snuff Gaos’ game.
Signature Riff :
(as Gaos spreads its wings)
<Crow> : “I’m Batman.”
MST3K 3.09 - The Amazing Colossal Man
We open as the Bots play in a cardboard fort of their own design, from which they have excluded Joel. The Mads invent a plant that reviews music, played by Kevin Murphy in his first on-screen performance.
In shades of the Incredible Hulk, Glenn Manning runs out onto a test range - the bomb suffering from Delayed Explosion Syndrome - to save a pilot who’d crashed. Oops! His fiancee is left quite distraught that he suddenly looks like he has crispy bacon skin.
Not to worry, though - he regenerates skin overnight! This astounds his doctor, who seems to be voiced by Rod Serling. As the military tries to figure out what the heck is going on, they have a meeting with the most amusingly in-denial scientist on the planet. He keeps loudly and angrily decrying any idea that the plutonium exposure might be at fault. Well, the cover-up starts as Manning begins to grow. Both in the conspiracy sense, and the special expandable diaper sense. There’s an amusing reference to A&E during Manning’s Korean flashbacks, and Crow refers to it as the ‘All-Hitler Channel’. This was '91, before they shunted that off to History.
(Crow : “Stock footage is hell.”)
We get one of the stupidest science blunders of all time, as the scientist explains that Glenn’s heart only grows at half the rate of the rest of his body because it consists of a single cell. Then Glenn breaks free, smashes the Las Vegas strip, and impales one of his would-be helpers with an enormous syringe. Pretty exciting, really.
Host segments include Joel lecturing the Bots on sensitivity; Joel pretends to be Colossal; and as the Crew wonders ‘What do you say to a Colossal Man?’, Glenn shows up outside, bumping into the satellite, played by Mike Nelson.
Signature Riff:
<Doctor> : “I wish I could give you some hope.”
<Joel> : “I prescribe me, Dr. Chad Feelgood. Ciao.”
Joel’s gone bonkers, and thinks he’s a farmer! The bots are all dressed as farm animals. We meet Mike Nelson as Jack Perkins, who introduces the movie.
It’s another freaky Sandy Frank film. Made form recycled bits of a Japanese TV Show. It starts as a race of “aliens” (who look just like humans) raid the Earth. Amusingly, they all wear jumpsuits that look like rejects from the Rainbow Raider’s closet, bug-eyed half-helmets, and most bizarrely of all, they all wear Shirley-Temple wigs. Built into the helmet. The confusion gets off to an early start as Ken (Alien Raider) refuses to kill Ken (human child) and is branded a traitor by his kin. (BWAHA! I kill me.) We get a reference to Marooned - AKA Space Travelers - which makes it the first time that I recall where they reference a film that they’d later be forced to watch. (in the theater - I seem to recall a host segment ref to Marooned before, as well.)
And yes, this episode is FULL of callbacks - justifying my obsessive chronological watching of the series all by its lonesome, with lines from Lost Continent (“Rock Climbing, Joel.”), Sidehackers, Cave Dwellers, Pod People, Wild Rebels, Robot Holocaust and Women of the Prehistoric Planet, at the least. (The Robot Holocaust riff is especially well-placed.) Captain Puffycheeks is a hoot as well, as are the Watermelon Squad we meet later, but the highlight is the Forklift song. (“He triiiiied to kill me with a fork-lift, Ole!”)
Host segments include a Hat Party, where they mercilessly mock Frank’s hair.
Signature Riffs :
<Ken> (narrating) : “What is this strange feeling inside me?”
<Joel> : “It’s a voiceover, called love.”
<Rita> : “I can’t kill the man I love!”
<Crow> : “Then kill the one you’re with.”
“And that’s when I told him to GET OFF MY LAND!”
“He TRIED to kill me with a fork lift!”
Just popping in to say that I purchased the Volume Four set this weekend. Overdrawn at the Memory Bank and Space Mutiny were, if anything, funnier than I remembered. Girl in Gold Boots was not so great, especially by comparison. I preferred Hamlet (“Alas, Poor Who?” was a great host segment), although that too didn’t stack up.
Space Mutiny is one of my alltime favorites - I showed it to a couple of friends last Friday.
“Big McLargeHuge!”
A friend of mine has a commercial copy of Space Mutiny (that he got before it was ever MSTied!) and told me that Best Brains did us all a big favor by editing out some of the more vile portions of the flick. I may have to borrow it and see what we missed.
It was one of those Never Meant To Be A Movie Movies™. It was pieced together from episodes of a serial TV, iirc. That’s why it has no real plot and jumps from one thing to the next.
The blonde wigs, tho. That’s pure gold, man! Pure. Gold.
Fugitive Alien*, that is. I need to actually read the posts, don’t I?
Oh god—not more love scenes with Flank Beefsteak! :eek: