Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Celebrate Thanksgiving with Kyle's Top Ten Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episodes


It’s Thanksgiving again; one of my favorite times of the year. The weather has cooled down, football is in full swing, and we can all sit down as a family to stuff ourselves to a level of comedic absurdity. While this is all well and good, Thanksgiving has only ever meant one thing to me--Mystery Science Theater 3000. It was on that Turkey day every late November that my family would travel to my grandparents’, a magical place with riches unforetold at the Radford household, namely, cable.  While the family would crowd around the living room to eat, watch football, and enjoy each other’s company, a young Kyle would hunker down in the back room and watch every single minute of MST3K’s annual Turkey Day Marathon. It was the time every year where not only was my sense of humor being formed, but also validated. Do I enjoy the comedy I do because of MST3K or did that wonderful show speak to something already inside of me? I’d like to think it was a little of both, but I’m sure Joel, Mike, and the robots had a lot more influence than I’ll ever realize.

For the uninitiated, the show’s premise is a simple one (beautifully laid out in the opening credits song); a man is marooned in space on a ship, The Satellite of Love, and forced to watch terrible movies. To keep his sanity the man (Joel Hodgson in the early seasons and after he left the show, Mike Nelson) has built wise cracking robots that watch the movies with him and help make jokes at the screen. Episodes lasted a glorious two hours, with the movies being interrupted by periodic “host segments” where Mike/Joel and the bots would leave the theater to perform skits of varying success. 



This November marks the 25th anniversary of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and to commemorate this the show’s creator, Joel Hodgson, will be hosting a six episode Turkey Day marathon online at MST2KTurkeyDay.com. This should go without saying, but I’ll be glued to my iPad under the dinner table this year, and I would encourage everyone else to check it out as well. For those of you who missed the nineties completely, this would be a great opportunity to ignore your family and discover this national treasure of a show. If you like what you see, Netflix has a small selection of episodes streaming and fans of the show (MSTies) have uploaded tons of full episodes on YouTube.

It’s in that spirit that I thought I’d share my favorite 10 MST3K episodes. These movies represent some of the funniest out there, most of which highlight what I think are the great final few years.

10. Pod People, 1983

ET, eat your heart out.

Official Description:   A young boy discovers a lovable alien creature in the woods, but the alien's mother is on the prowl. 

9. This Island Earth, 1955 (MST3K: The Movie)

Don't stare at his forehead. Don't stare at his forehead.

Official Description: Two mortals trapped in outer space... challenging the unearthly furies of an outlaw planet gone mad!
This one is streaming on Netflix, and you can find it in pieces on YouTube here

8. Soultaker, 1990

Don't adjust your sets, kids, that's Martin Sheen's brother, Joe Esteves.

Official Description: Four teenagers are killed in a car accident. Two of the teenagers refuse to go with "The Grim Reaper" and a race between life and death ensues!

7. The Phantom Planet, 1961

Still looks better than the prequels.

Official Description: After an invisible asteroid draws an astronaut and his ship to its surface, he is miniaturized by the phantom planet's exotic atmosphere.  

6. Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders, 1996

Not pictured: Ernest Borgnine who also stars in this "movie".

Official Description: Two creepy "horror" films joined together by Merlin's Shop which is, in turn, introduced by a Grandpa telling the story.

5. Manos: The Hands of Fate, 1966

Not a snuff film. I promise.

Official Description:  A family gets lost on the road and stumbles upon a hidden, underground, devil-worshiping cult led by the fearsome Master and his servant Torgo.

Truly one of the worst movies every made...I'd work my way up to watching Manos.

4. Werewolf, 1995

Yes, that's a werewolf driving a car.

Official Description: Unscrupulous archaeologists try to take advantage of an outbreak of lycanthropy prompted by the discovery of a werewolf skeleton in the Arizona desert.

3. The Final Sacrifice, 1990

That's our hero, folks. Canadian badass Zap Rowsdower.

Official Description: Fleeing from the cult that murdered his father, a teen is aided in his quest to find the lost city of the fabled Ziox by a secretive drifter.

2. The Pumaman, 1980

The superhero is able to fly...like a real puma.

Official Description: Professor Tony Farms discovers that he is really Puma Man, a superhero who is descended from the gods. Together with an Aztec priest, they try to thwart the plans of Kobras, who is in possession of the sacred puma mask, and plans to hypnotize government leaders with it and take over the world.

1. Space Mutiny, 1988

I could post a thousand pictures from this movie. Please watch it.

Official Description: A pilot is the only hope to stop the mutiny of a spacecraft by its security crew, who plot to sell the crew of the ship into slavery.