Gamera, you’re reports were especially funny and on the mark today. I think I’ll go rewatch The Unearthly again. That one isn’t an Ed Wood masterpiece-of-crap, is it?
Nope, not yet. Unless I’m completely high, it’s one of the Sandy Frank productions, and Frank is holding the rights to those as well as the Godzilla and Gamera movies and preventing Rhino from releasing them. Makes it kind of hard not to wish that someone would find Mr. Frank and, you know, try to kill him with a forklift. Or something.
Fuck all. I’ll have to try to find it elsewhere.
One of my favorite lines from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians:
[The action cuts to lots of clips of military maneuvers, then cuts to a martian coming into the bridge of the ship.]
<Crow (as the martian)> Hey, there’s a ton of stock footage out there!!!
I wouldn’t sit around and wait for the Sandy Frank movies to come out ever. He was none too pleased at the way MST3K ripped him and his movies.
They say the truth hurts…
I suppose it’s his right, but it’s just too bad he can’t take a joke. In the online MiSTing world, where people take fanfics and write riffs into them just as if the fanfic were a movie the gang was watching, Stephen Ratliff became a name similar to Sandy Frank; his fanfics were just screamingly painful to read, and the MiSTings are some of the funniest I’ve ever read. They took plenty of jabs at Ratliff himself in those MiSTings, too.
Despite being absolutely skewered by the MiSTers, Ratliff took it as a huge compliment, and he was nothing but gracious to the MiSTing community. That’s the kind of thing that’ll turn what might otherwise be snide jabs into playful fun among friends.
By the way, here’s an archive of the Ratliff MiSTings, if anyone’s interested. It helps if you like Star Trek, as all the fanfics take place in that universe, but the MiSTings are just too damn funny even if you’re not hugely familiar with the series. I’m of the opinion that some of the MiSTers produced better jokes than the Best Brains crew; I’ve never laughed so hard at any of the MST movies as I have at some of these fanfics.
On Mikes intro on the Time Chasers DVD, he says that the cast and crew of the flick were all excited about being picked for MST and had a little party to watch the episode. They were rather dissappointed and upset at how M&TB savaged their little opus. What did they think would happen?
Yeah, you’d think that after 8 seasons, the producers would catch on.
Scarier still:
Gah! A sequel!!
It feels a little like Ed Wood, especially with Tor Johnson hanging around, but it isn’t.
A footnote on Sandy Frank - as far as I can tell, he does not have anything to do with the Godzilla movies. Everything in the Frank catalogue, as far as MST is concerned, seems to be contained within Season Three.
E-mail me, Marley.
So CG, do you have every episode?
Is there some kind of trick question associated there? 
I have access to every episode, but do lack physical possession of a couple of the SciFi era ones - but I intend to get them in the very near future.
Except, I assume, for those two or three KTMA episodes where the only copies known to be in existence are locked away in the producer’s vault?
Technically true, but this is the sort of ‘trick’ to the question I was wondering about - as I noted in the OP, I don’t count the KTMA stuff.
Nope; the Video Toaster was a vision mixer/effects generator created by NewTek to run on the Commodore Amiga desktop system. Joel might build some nice props, but that kind of engineering is out of his league.
Hmm… I thought there was some dinky special-effects thing that Joel and his brother came up with… Let me research.
Seems they formed ‘Visual Story Tools’ after departing MST3K, but it appears to be more of an idea factory than a special effects tech company, and may even be defunct. My dim, dim memory of that fact conflated with ‘Video Toaster’.
I hope to be adding another review tomorrow, but to tide over the throng, check out Wikiquote’s MST3K page : http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mystery_Science_Theater_3000
IMDB has a good listing as well, but this Wiki one is new to me.
**MST3K 3.22 - Master Ninja I **
Another “made from TV” movie - a feature cobbled together from two episodes of ‘The Master’, a short-lived 80’s action series. Dick Van Patten’s son stars as Max, the unlovable, unloved sidekick to the “only occidental American ever to become - a Master Ninja” - played by Lee Van Cleef. They also drive around in a Van. We get five minutes of exposition in the beginning, as “Max”, Van Patten’s kid, tells us about how he gets thrown out of bars, and introduces us to Van Cleef, who found out about a longlost daughter and fled to America, his Ninja brethren hunting him all the way. Max travels with a pet, Gerbil Van Hamster, and gets involved with some trouble when he picks up the daughter (Demi Van Moore) of the local airport owner, Claude Van Akins. You’ll notice quickly that everyone has their own theme music.
Host Segment One : Crow outlines the ‘Van Patten’ project.
Max has five minutes of training with the Master Ninja, or rather, the Master Ninja’s somewhat obvious stunt double. This apparently qualifies him as a ‘sidekick’. There’s a really bizarre moment there - Van Cleef senses a ‘presence’ as one of the Ninja hunting him spies on the training. So he’s not just a Ninja, he’s a Jedi! Jeez, if he was a Pirate too, he’d be the coolest guy EVER! Max and the Master sneak into ConHugeCo to confront the Evil Corporate Guy (Clu Van Gulager) who’d threated the airport owner, but that wacky nemesis Ninja is there, too. (Let me say this - this “movie” moves fast. There’s no rock climbing here - they don’t even show the capture of the “oily corporate sidekick” guy.) Joel and the Bots make a Simpsons ref in this scene… (“Mendoza!”) which the Simpsons folks apparently saw as a sign they’d “made it”.
Host Segment Two : Tom’s a ninja, and so is Crow. Everyone has theme music.
In episode two, Max and the Master will help out a nightclub owner being extorted by Chinatown mafia thugs. The nightclub owner has two daughters - one a dancer, the other in a wheelchair. I summarize this now so I can breeze through it all. The head mafia thug is the most singularly smug actor I have ever seen on the screen. I mean, it’s unbelievable, this guy. The thugs kidnap the dancer, and hold her for ransom, which turns out to be an excuse for us to see more Lee Van Cleef (or Stunt Van Double) Ninja action.
Host Segment Three : Joel demonstrates various variant ‘Chuks’ (Nunchaku), and there’s a viewer contest to suggest other ‘Chuks’.
Well, Lee pulls the old ‘ride under the car’ gag to find the thugs’ hideout, and he and his sidekick plan a nighttime Ninja raid to rescue the girl - and it actually goes very smoothly. At least, up until the Master’s pursuer-Ninja shows up and engages him in a rooftop duel. But it’s only the second episode, so Van Cleef outwits the bad guy and everyone lives happily ever after. Watching this - compared to the spectrum of other 80’s action shows, this one’s not that bad. Van Cleef’s got a lot of Charisma - if they’d cast Max differently, it could’ve gone somewhere. The fight choreography is actually decent, too.
We close as the Crew sings the Master Ninja Themesong.
Signature Riffs :
<Tom> : ‘Those who can’t Ninja, teach.’
(the thugs loose track of Van Cleef)
<Thug> : ‘Where’d he go?’
<Crow> : ‘I hear his theme music, he’s around here somewhere!’
Two more to go for Season Three - Castle of Fu Manchu, and Master Ninja II - hope to do both this weekend.