Well, yes, he is.
In the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, Paul Chaplin says he actually learned something useful from a hygiene short the show riffed (“Keeping Clean and Neat” from episode 613).
Of it, he writes, “I especially appreciated the short’s recommendation that one should clip one’s toenails after taking a shower, because the nails are softer then.”
So what other useful gems have we learned from the shorts? Keeping a budget the Ben Franklin way? Telephones of the future will be all that AND a bag of chips? The truck farmer keeps us knee-deep in beta carotene throughout the winter?
I’d like to see a discussion about how shorts have contributed to better MSTie living.
For one thing, I learned never to make light of BOOIIIINNGGG! And it’s a lesson that has served me well.
I also think some of those budgeting ideas in “Money Talks” are pretty smart, even if an imaginary fat guy with gout is explaining them to me.
How about you?
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Lick your eggs. Or have a friend lick them.
Cheating is bad…Richard Basehart is good.
“Cheating is bad…Richard Basehart is good.”
Wait a minute, that’s not in a short. DA cheated. That’s bad!
(And upon further reflection, Richard Basehart IS good—except
when he’s in a Columbo movie set in London).
Sampo, we did this one already….
“Instructional Shorts that Were Actually Informative”
Check your notes again.
I learned that a world without springs is a world I don’t want to live in.
Also, that Union Pacific makes the BEST movies!
Corn IS grass……I looked it up.
Also, if your wife has a child, and you get too excited about it, you will be blinded.
I learned not to like like “eh…. em one night, there was em….. a noise in the bushes”. In other words, don’t talk in um’s and er’s like that guy did in the speech: using your voice short. XD
FWIW, I always thought Paul was being sarcastic about bloody toenails. You don’t think if that were really a problem one wouldn’t look for a solution, right?
Union Pacific taught me that the cause of all accidents is joy, sex and old age. :ghost:
the ghost of ben frankliln? (is that right?) will come visit you when you need to manage money.
I didn’t learn anything….except that they would have sucked w/out my boys Mike, Joel, and the bots.
Shorts never taught me anything! I still want to know where my BOING went. Oh,and now Im deathly afraid of insulting springs. Thanks a lot.
Make sure you stock your truck up, so that you don’t– well, you know…
I learned that if I’m blinded by a blowtorch, I’ll end up looking like T-Bone Burnett. COOL!
I learned how to “do it clown style.” :shock:
Most things have already been mentioned, so I’m going to go with the one that Rifftrax did that has really stuck with me.
Don’t wash your clothes in gasoline.
Why has this stuck with me? Because who the *bleep* seriously thought that this was ever a good idea? And it got so bad they had to do a service video on it? As my father would say it was simply “thinning of the herd.”
There’s a difference between “Actually Informative Shorts” and “Lessons Learned from Shorts” in that the second one allows for joke answers.
Well, the reason you’d wash stuff in gasoline is it’s an effective way to get stuff clean. It’s a pretty potent solvent, in part because it does react with stuff and effectively burn the stain away (which, done slowly enough, avoids actual, y’know, fire). The earliest dry-cleaning was done with gasoline or kerosene, or slight variations on them. Modern dry-cleaning solvents are pretty much the result of trying to get stuff that cleans like gasoline or kerosene do but doesn’t blow up.
Anyway, I think the thing I learned most from Educational Shorts is: if you want people to actually remember your educational short, it has to be pretty deranged because the standard level of nuttiness is fairly high. If you want them to learn from it, you have to be somehow informative on top of utterly loopy.
Also, one of my books on the History of the English Language (I want to say McCrumb, but that would involve me actually looking) says that yeah, actually, “skiing” was pronounced “shee-ing”, at least originally, until people started figuring it wouldn’t be written with a “k” unless it was said with a “k”, which is the kind of thing that happens to foreign-word imports.
I learned that a lot of companies used the same stock library music at the same time, and that creates unintentional hilarity after seeing these shorts. Hearing the “Progress Island U.S.A” music during the 1977 World Series film makes it very difficult to take seriously.
I learned that all music comes from a sexless man/woman and that when I shower I should keep scrubbing and scrubbing and repeating the name of our lord and savior.
State troopers need a lot to do or things get ugly. Also, if you start to fall asleep at the will your chances to almost kill Henry Kissinger go up exponentally (sp?).
Coily the Spring Fairy taught me that it’s not the powder in the bullets that make my gun go *BOOM*… it’s the springs!
That’s right, guns don’t kill people, springs do!
Trains hate you and want you dead. The human body is filthy and hideous.
I learned that God and Satan have a much stronger interest in the bread delivery industry than I expected.
C. #117: There’s a difference between “Actually Informative Shorts” and “Lessons Learned from Shorts” in that the second one allows for joke answers.
IIRC the Actually Informative Shorts topic didn’t exactly have a shortage of joke answers.
@ noplot, #119: I don’t think it’s possible to take anything involving Tommy Lasorda seriously.
– Joseph Nebus, #118
That, right there, is a very keen observation. In fact, your entire post was extremely informative. However, none of the information stuck because you didn’t use cartoons or hideous monkey masks. No one was even hilariously gored on their own stupidity. :-((
What have I learned from the MST3K and Rifftrax shorts?
1. It’s a Wonderful Life is basically a rip-off of an instructional short about the importance of springs.
2. Mike’s impression of Marv’s laughter at the end of “Tooth Truth” would make a good “let’s loop something for ten minutes straight” Youtube video.
3. Corn is a grass.
4. That Weird Al used the Castle Films version of “The Night Before Christmas” as one of the source footage for his “Christmas at Ground Zero” music video.
5. The priest in “The Days of Our Years” is more evil than Mr. B Natural, Coily the Spring Sprite, and the Grocery Witch combined.
6. It was natural to attend car shows dressed as Tuxedo Mask in the 1950’s.
7. Sousaphone is another term for a tuba.
Angels love getting a ring in their pants.
I learned not to be an idiot when I’m driving.
I learned that cheating technology and the means to counter it were still in their infancy back in the 50s. Apparently, a guy back then didn’t suspect that he’d get caught by leaning forward and simply asking the girl in front of him to give him the answers. Teachers are so much more sophisticated these days!
@Nebus 118: Ditto the observations about the weirdness of the shorts. To be memorable you have to get pretty loopy. I help produce shorts at my office (theyre called “industrials” because they are for not made for the general public, but as training, etc.) Also, since they are not made to make money, they often use the same very tired cliches over and over, like Coily the sprite giving you a taste of a world without ______ . (springs, cotton balls, zinc… COME BACK ZINC!) Or the devil/angel trying to push you on the path to success or failure. Since Industry middle men approve these things, they can actually get more creative than Hollywood bigwigs, but they usually have much lower standards of what is creative.
back on Topic, I thought is was neat that baby chicks are born with enough yolk nutrition for several days. And from Truck Farmer2: The Awakening, i did learn that at one time before I was born the only fruits and vegetables you had were the ones in season, and in your area. (not that area.)
And I have learned that even if it was your fault, don’t attend your best friend’s funeral because it will probably be BOOOORING.
I learned that many of these shorts were better than the movies that followed them.
also, Angels work about as hard as road crews.
I learned that I’ve been sitting here a lot longer than you seem to think I have.
I also learned that being Mrs. Brylcreem Whiteman is the most important job of all. And I have Iowa State College, the high school AFTER high school, to thank for that!
If you criticize springs, all Hell will break loose.
SPRINGS! Why I hope I never see another spring as long as I live!
(Obviously, I learn nothing.)
-schippers
:laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
@ Joe Klemm, #127,
A souspahone is a tuba you can wear, for marching band purposes. Imagine the Conn employee guy hunched over his coffee-stained drawing board, surrounded by crumpled paper and pencil shavings, ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, desperately trying to figure out how to wear a tuba in time for his meeting with the boss Monday morning.
Fun topic! I haven’t read through all the comments yet, but I’ll just jump right in and say that…
THE most important revelation imparted to me in a short HAS to be the astounding news that in the 1950’s, American young people who were intelligent enough to attend the college of their choice STILL didn’t have the slightest clue how to TAKE A SHOWER or even DRESS THEMSELVES without close supervision…and a long, complicated list of highly detailed instructions.
…take a good, long look at your nearest college campus and you’ll see that not much has changed in that respect.
I actually took some stuff away from “Appreciating your Parents,” about repairing toys instead of throwing them away. When my (then 6 now 21) six year old’s game of “Ants in the Pants” broke instead of throwing it away, I patched it. It ended up looking like a pair of old pants with a patch on it (made of masking tape) but it worked again.
When my husband saw it, he laughed himself silly, but the game worked again! Thanks MST3K!