“Tom, I don’t get you.”
“Nobody gets me. I’m the wind, Baby!”
Before you get to “The Day the Earth Froze,” let me just say,
BRING ME THE SAMPO!
I came into temporary possession of some money and bought Volume 8 the other night. (Three to go!) When this movie ended, I felt like I hadn’t watched a movie at all. This thing is a nullity. [Looks like the Agony Booth guy said something very similar.] If I may pilfer from Douglas Adams, the movie sort of suffers a Total Existence Failure.
That is a tough, tough call - and that itself is a major achievement in lameness. I guess in Manos, you don’t know why anything happens, but you at least stay with the same uninteresting characters instead of meeting new, equally uninteresting ones, as you do with Monster. The dialogue is totally inaudible and the scenes bear almost no relationship to one another. In Manos, you wonder why anybody (Hal Warren) thought this was something people would enjoy seeing on a screen, and where he found these losers to act in it. In Monster, you just don’t know what you’re looking at. It’s like Ed Wood, but with a lot less laughable camp. (Except for the scene with the “scientists” in what looked like a laundromat.) Strangely enough, I think the riffing is better in Monster a-Go-Go than in Manos.
Yeah, that sums it up pretty perfectly.
I loved Tom’s song during the Circus short. “And/When you see pink/You’re gonna think/‘We’re doomed!’”
Just as a footnote, should get to 4.22 tonight!
If I may offer another signature riff from Monster a-Go-Go:
Crow (during a particularly random scene in which a woman’s car breaks down at night): It’s like It Happened One Night, only it makes me want to kill myself.
I have a question for those who are buying the box sets. Do you buy them in order of release – Volume 1, Volume 2, and so forth? Or do you just buy them at random, or pick and choose to get specific titles? I plan to get them all eventually, but right now I only have 1, 2 and The Essentials. The next one I buy might be 6 or 7. I’m just idly curious what everybody else does.
I’ve been snapping them up as soon as they’re released, starting with Vol. 1 – so I guess, by default, I’m buying them in order of release.
I’ve seen all the Sci-Fi era eps (seasons 8-10) but there are many Comedy Central era episodes I’ve never even seen – so I’m particularly happy when Rhino puts those on a collection (although it’s hard to say that I’m “happy”, now that I’e seen Monster a Go-Go). But I take everything.
I got my first set as a present, and for no particular reason, my mother decided to get me Volume 2. I’ve been buying them out of order ever since. I now have 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8, plus Essentials and Mitchell.
**MST3K 4.22 - The Day The Earth Froze **
Shown With Short :** Here Comes the Circus ** - featuring Emmett Kelly. Another fairly innocuous short that inspires some riffing that gets a little dark at times, and includes the bizarre tightrope clown-spanking scene. “More, more! I’m a bad clown.”
The main feature is a fairy tale. There are humble villagers, whose blacksmith is going to make them a Sampo. What’s a Sampo? I’ll explain momentarily. The blacksmith has a sister, who falls in love with strapping young lumberjack, Lemon-Kainen. (Lemminkäinen) There’s an evil, very masculine witch who wants a Sampo of her own, and abducts the young girl with an eye on extorting the master Smith to make the Sampo, since her minions can’t.
And this smith guy, he can make anything. When he and the lumberjack are challenged to plow a field plagued by monster snakes, he forges a live horse to pull the plow. He forges a sentient boat with a moosehead after their wooden one is destroyed. (This inspires some great Bullwinkle comments from the crew).
Well, he makes the Sampo, they start to leave, but apparently he can’t make another and the villagers would really like to have one, so the lumberjack goes back to steal it - he takes the “dome” which is apparently the important part, and tries to escape, but his ship is wrecked and he only comes back with a fragment. Incensed, the witch conjures a blizzard and locks away the sun - and there is serious talk of the smith forging a new sun at that point - then the villagers gather together to defeat the witch and rescue the sun.
The Sampo - is like a cornucopia, sort of. More like an Age of Empires cheat code. It pours forth gold, grain, and salt. Handy thing to have, really. The nice thing about this episode for me was that there are a lot of great referential riffs… Like “Sorry, Sampo’s Off.” “It’s!” and a hilarious callback to Spinal Tap as a man breaks out of an ice cocoon. (“It was a rock’n’roll… cre-a-tion…”)
Host Segments include : Joel tries to get everyone together for a formal picture - the Mads invent Unhappy Meals, but used Frank’s money, so he refuses to push the button until threatened with ‘the box’; Tom and Crow plan a dark, disturbing clown act based on the short; the crew muses about what a Sampo is, encouraging viewers to write in with ideas; Gypsy’s one woman show; and the Bots play at being trapped winds like the witch’s trapped winds in the movie, except they’re trapped scents.
Signature Riff:
(as the lumberjack carries out the plowing trial, fighting the snakes)
Crow : “Kind of a goofy Scandinavian Double Dare…”
Is this one anything like the Russo-Finnish production of Jack Frost?
There’s a phrase that should not exist!
I skipped some of the recent ones (I think 5 and 6?) because they consisted mostly of SciFi-era episodes I have on VHS and have seen many times. Now that they’re putting out CC episodes again, I’ve been a little more diligent about getting them.
Somewhat. Though instead of our romantic lead being the center of the universe and all magical, the smith has the mojo. They definitely share sensibilities.
I think the line was “… by the way, this is officially the worst movie we’ve ever done.” Paul Chaplin does the summary. Amusingly (although that’s the wrong word here), I watched Hobgoblings last night - horrific movie, but some very funny counterattacks by the SOL crew - and in the Wikipedia entry for that film, they quote Chaplin as saying “it shoots right to the top of the list of the worst movies we’ve ever done.” So do they think they put their two worst movies in one set? Yow.
**4.23 - Bride of the Monster **
Shown with short, **Hired! (Part One) **
Well, what can I say? This is MST3K’s only solid interaction with legendary bad-director, Ed Wood Jr. As a bonus, we get repeat offenders, Bela Lugosi, and Tor Johnson. Basically, Bela’s in mad scientist mode, out to kidnap folks to turn into a race of atomic Supermen. Tor’s his mute but surprisingly competent assistant. Bela’s set up shop in a swamp, and people are disappearing - the police are looking into it, but only really kick into high gear when one officer’s reporter girlfriend gets herself kidnapped in the swamp.
There’s also a “German” researcher who claims to be an investigator of prehistoric monsters. (Where do you get that degree?) He’s actually out to bring Bela back to the Fatherland, where he can produce atomic Superman for Germany.
And then, there’s the octopus. It’s Bela’s pet monster. It abducts people for him - by attacking them from a separate shot. Seriously. Shot of octo, shot of victim. Alternate until satisfied. Though there is an Octo model they use to have shots of people falling on the thing and attacking themselves with its tentacles. Well, Eventually, Tor falls for the lovely reporter lady, and as Bela’s about to experiment on her, he betrays Bela and puts the scientist through his own process - which he duplicates perfectly, throwing all the right switches - it works this time, and Super-Bela (stunt double) and Tor fight. Bela wins, only to be crushed by a boulder the reporter’s boyfriend rolls downhill at him.
Host segments include - a peek into Crow’s dreams, and Tom’s nurse outfit; Hired! the musical; complaints about the not-scary Monster of the film; Tom complains about advertising prompting Crow’s return as Willy the Waffle : “Noooo Ads!”; the crew re-edits the climax of the film.
Signature Riff:
(as the scientist scolds Tor for not backing off the lady quick enough)
<Crow> : “I’m so sorry, he’s from Barcelona.”
Now this is interesting. The Willy the Waffle/“Nooooo Ads” thing seems to be a reference to A Case of Spring Fever, which they wouldn’t show for another 6 years. Did they see the short, write the skit, and then lose the rights?
They saw the short, wrote the skit, performed the skit… later on, they needed a short, and were able to acquire the rights. It is an intentional reference to Spring Fever; they, as far as I can tell, never tried to acquire the rights to use it as a short before the ended up using it as a short. It’s just something they’d seen.
Must’ve whooshed their entire audience, at the time.
I seem to remember hearing they’d been planning on using it with an earlier movie. They’d gotten far enough along that they felt comfortable referencing it in this one, but for some reason they ended up switching it with another short. I want to say it was because the movie ran too long, but you’d think they would have caught that sooner…
One of their funniest sketches. Like this bit:
Tom: Okay. I suck at my job.
Crow: No, you don’t.
Tom: Yes, I do.
Gypsy: Oh, my.
Tom: My salesmen are slobs.
Crow: No, they aren’t.
Tom: Yes, they do.
Crow and Gypsy: Huh?
I don’t get it. Crow used it in “Untamed Youth” refering to a Mexican border-runner, so I assume its’ a reference to something.