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Weekend Discussion Thread: Host Segments You Just Didn’t GetAlert longtime MSTie Jenny suggests…
I’ve always been a bit baffled by the “emotional scientist” sketch from episode 210- KING DINOSAUR. Too many layers. What segment would you pick? 123 Replies to “Weekend Discussion Thread: Host Segments You Just Didn’t Get”Commenting at Satellite News
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The, “Is it 11:30?” sketch from Beast of Yucca Flats. Likely because I’m not quite that anal about when I have lunch.
Ok, I admit it, I never grokked the repeated “in Denver!” part of the “Bannergram” sketch in one of the two “Rocky Jones” episodes. (TV’s Frank voice: “what’s THAT about?”
Sampo:
I completely agree with the A Star is Born” sketch. However, it is long enough for me to go to the bathroom and come back!
@1: I believe the 11:30 sketch was an inside joke at Best Brains. Frank was always asking if it was 11:30 (BB lunch time) and someone would tell him ‘it is so NOT 11:30!’
Hmm, interesting question. I think the “singers overboard” sketch from Tormented is probably one of those for me. I understand the concept of throwing singers you don’t like off a lighthouse, but I think it was a bit of a reach for connecting to the movie.
There was a while when I thought Tom was laughing hysterically in “the Star is Born” sketch. I just had no clue what he was doing. My sister explained it to me later on.
Theres probably too many obscure references in host segments and invention exchanges to name since I was around 8 when I first started watching and tons of stuff went over my head. For starters I’m still not sure what a Daktari stool means. Also, Willie the Waffle randomly explaining advertising. There’s lots more I can’t remember off the top of my head.
@canucklehead, wasn’t the main characters fiancé who he killed in the film a singer who fell out of a lighthouse? I could be wrong about her being a singer.
@ Sampo
“Emotional Scientist” is not hard to understand at all. And it’s also one of the “broken sketches”. It’s a little tenuous but it isn’t hard to understand. At one point in “King Dinosaur” Servo says that the music sounds like “Soap Opera music.” And he has a point in that it DOES sound like the melodramatic music they used to use in early soap operas from the 1950’s and early 1960’s.
So “Emotional Sicentist” is actually a mockery of early soap operas. It does a fairly good job of it too. The sketch then “breaks” when Joel can’t go through with it.
Joel and the bots then have a melodramatic, soap opera-y moment where they make up and then turn their soap opera into a zany TV comedy instead.
For me, I’m not finished with the whole series yet but so far I haven’t run into a host segment I didn’t get… unless you want to count the bizarrely random KTMA segment where the guys start off talking about one thing then end up doing a rendition of “Wipe Out”. Everything else I’ve ‘gotten’ I just maybe didn’t like it (*cough*Joey the Lemur*cough*).
JOEY THE LUMUR!!!!
Although I like it just because of how weird it is (and from having watched The Brady Bunch when I was a kid thanks to reruns), I don’t get the Greg Brady bit from Untamed Youth. I don’t see any sort of resemblance between her and Barry Williams. Then again alot of these Season 1 host segments were just as odd and weren’t very coherent, especially the later ones.
Oh, and even though I don’t technically get it (having not seen “A Star is Born”), I’m probably one of the few people out there (perhaps the only one?) who likes that bit from The Violent Years. It is loud and obnoxious and goes on just a little too long, but I like how it comes out of nowhere and REALLY has absolutely nothing to do with the movie they’re watching, and I think it’s that aspect that makes it hilarious to me. Plus they’ve done stuff even more annoying than this that I haven’t seen as many people complain about (e.g., Frank getting sprayed with Dr. F’s mace mousse over and over again at the end of Teenage Crime Wave. On the other hand, I must be the only person who DOESN’T like this bit at all. I can’t believe some people think it’s the only good part of the episode! All that great riffing and THAT’S the highlight for you?!?!).
Huh, I guess I can say that I don’t get that one either. Or at least why most fans like it, since there isn’t anything to actually get about it.
I’m with Jbagels on the Daktari stool thing, but I’m also baffled by the Skull-ship sketch in Teenagers From Outer Space – was it really just an excuse to have a skeleton in the sketch? Others are just ones that fell flat for me, like the Tibby song in Gamera: I get it, but it was too heavy-handed to be made funny. Tom only makes it worse by snapping at Crow when they go back into the theatre. I got the Eddie thing in Time chasers too, but I hate Eddie in the theatre.
“The, “Is it 11:30?” sketch from Beast of Yucca Flats. Likely because I’m not quite that anal about when I have lunch.”
This is the archetypical “insider” sketch for me. It’s as if they the took the “she stole my keyboard!” riff and stretched it beyond recognition.
“JOEY THE LUMUR!!!!”
This is Joel being Joel. Either you get it or you don’t.
The whole bit at the beginning of “Beginning of the End” where Mike inexplicably has the robots singing “Yellow Rose of Texas” … and then Pearl interrupts as a White Trash Lady asking for Arnie or something. That whole episode had a miasma of “bad” when it came to host segments (“Eight of Chris Lemmon,” whatever) but the opening segment and the follow-up were serious headscratchers.
There are lots of jokes I just don’t “get.” Thats part of the fun. Just sit back and relax.
Heh, I meant Mary Jo for Pearl, of course. :D
I’ll also add that, yes, we know that the Tom Servo crying scene is from “A Star is Born,” but WHAT THE HELL DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING? I can’t add enough how misguided that was. Season Six started to lose me during its original airing with sketches like this and episodes like “Kitten With a Whip.”
There’s the “life of Richard Burton” sketch from Gamera vs. Guiron. There’s nothing puzzling about the sketch itself, although Crow’s Richard Burton voice isn’t quite funny enough to sustain the whole segment. What I don’t get is why Joel et al. seem to think the kid in the movie looks anything like Richard Burton. He doesn’t.
Daktari was a 1960s childrens TV series about a veterinarian in East Africa. From there it’s just a matter of getting the bad* pun.
* and by bad, I of course mean “so bad it’s kind of good.”
I still don’t get the pun. Stool? Oh yeah and the second and third host segments in teenagers from outer space (like the skeleton) are very odd as someone mentioned but love mace mousse (“it’s not even my birthday!”)
****So “Emotional Sicentist” is actually a mockery of early soap operas. It does a fairly good job of it too. The sketch then “breaks” when Joel can’t go through with it.****
It’s also a swipe at the movie (King Dinosaur) because it was at that point that the brunette female scientist was trapped in the cave with the fake T-Rex outside and she freaks out and tears up the Polaroid of the “dinosaur” – therefore she’s an “emotional scientist”. A tenuous connection, yes…but they’ve come up with worse.
Which ones I didn’t “get”? Guess there’s a benefit with being approximately the same age as Joel…I can relate to the cultural references in the sketches.
Like everyone, the “11:30” thing was pretty random until they took the time to explain it.
The only one that I didn’t “get” as in “didn’t think it was funny enough to take up that much time” was Gypsy’s one-woman show.
#12-
There is an explanation, although it has nothing to do with why Mary Jo shows up.
Mike and the bots are singing “Yellow Rose of Texas” in the style of the old TV show, “Sing Along with Mitch”. The way Mike is “conducting” is similar to what Mitch Miller would do, and “Yellow Rose of Texas” was a hit record for him.
This is why I feel a little sorry for younger people watching the show. You’re just never going to get a lot of the references. I don’t say that to sound superior, it’s just a fact of life. If there were a similar show today made by younger people, I wouldn’t get a lot of the references.
#15 –
I think the kid looks a lot like Richard Burton. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw him in the movie.
I believe “Daktari stool” could be heard as the gastroenterological term “dark, tarry stool”…
Eww.
For sketches, I don’t get why Gypsy being obsessed with Richard Basehart is funny. I understand the genesis of the joke and all of its iterations. But I don’t understand why the Brains thought it was worth taking past Season 1.
There are a couple of running riffs that I don’t get. Some of them are so pervasive in the show that I’m almost embarrassed to ask what they mean. The biggest on is probably: What is “Manix” a reference to? Why is it funny? I don’t see any common stimulus that seems to prompt the brains to suddenly say it. (Except perhaps an action scene.)
Yes, some of the humor has to be explained to us young bucks. But that’s actually part of the rewatch value of MST3K. It’s almost like reading Shakespeare and Chaucer and exploring the editor’s footnotes to the actual text.
@ #18
The skit also works because each of the scientist Joel and the bots portray in the skit had something to do with the development of nuclear technology — Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Enrico Fermi — and of course, at the end, what happens? They blow up the island with an atomic bomb and say they’ve brought “civilization” to the planet (I’m with Crow on that one, though — was that supposed to be satire?)
Really “Emotional Scientist” was one of the more well-put-together and intelligent skits the guys did BECAUSE it works on many layers.
It’s a spoof of soap operas in general, it also echoes the soap opera-y relationships of the scientists in the movie (two guys, two girls and of course they pair off), and it sppofs the ‘nuclear’ ending of the film.
Mannix
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyZL_3bxD68
#20 Sounds like a lot of crap to me.
I don’t think there was a sketch too abstract or sophisticated for me to understand.
I will say that the Urkel segments from San Francisco International drove me up a wall with annoyance and the horrible Torgo payoff joke at the end. I suppose there I couldn’t understand why they thought that was funny enough to keep pushing over three segments.
@10 – I’d like to think the skull-ship from Teenagers was just finally having enough of the “Viewscreen” sketches (at least in the Joel era).
The Mike era could parody their own desperation for host seg ideas and keep at it, but think Joel had more of a sense for what wasn’t working.
(And as funny as some of the Joel-era Viewscreen “Excuse for Mike’s imitations” sketches go, even the funny ones could get a bit, um, long and Joel-era Mike could come off as the MST3K equivalent of Chris Elliot on the old NBC David Letterman–Every time we hear “Gimme Rocket #9”, we expect to hear the Superman theme and hear Mike imitating Marlon Brando. ;) )
@21 – What is “Manix” a reference to? Why is it funny?
It’s “Mannix” with two N’s, btw: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF_49tWPNWA
@18 – Trying to think of a sketch I didn’t “get”, but there are plenty of “Why are they here?”
The nuclear game show in Rocket Attack USA (yes, there’s a connection, but you’d think they’d make it clearer for being that long and preachy), Gypsy Rose Me in “Day the Earth Froze”, Orville Redenbacher & son in Godzilla vs. Megalon…They usually came at the 3/4 mark, where we were so caught up in the cheesiness of the movie, it felt intrusive to have them suddenly take on Pop Culture In General.
(The Monster a Go Go sketches, with the keep-away game, Gypsy “not getting” Tom, and the Pina Colada song feel okay, though, since in this case there’s just nothing in the movie to pick on, and they’re letting us know it.)
@23 and 26: Thanks for educating me in Mannix. Both opening credits sequences are very much a product of their time period. It makes me wonder what riffs the Brains would have thought of for those video clips.
Even though I get the “Mannix” joke now, I still don’t think it’s funny.
I used to not “get” the A STAR IS BORN host segment… then later when I became obsessed with Barbra it all made sense. :D
Man, someone actually thinks of Barbra Streisand in connection with A Star Is Born. It’s understandable but still, incredibly depressing.
daktari stool – throwing the dark, tarry stool…. i STILL laugh at that one, but did have to explain it to the hubby :rotfl:
The only one I didn’t care for and didn’t get was the A STAR IS BORN host segment.I remember the remake barely,but didn’t find the host segment funny and Servo’s “breakdown” or crying went on a little too long.When I watch the episode(can’t even remember what movie it was),I always skip over that part.
Unrelated topic: Joel is interviewed in the new issue of SCREEM.It’s a one page interview and it’s on page 53.He talks about MANOS..
Sometimes a reference like MANNIX isn’t meant to be “funny” per sé but rather make an acknowledgment of something the visual could be connected to and when it’s even more obscure, for those in the audience in the know, it almost becomes a “You read my mind” situation or a you feel like that joke was written just for you.
There have been several instances where a joke or comment has been so obscure or of such a particular nature that I was sure someone at BEST BRAINS must have grown up with me.
Other times you can clearly tell that something in the movie got the writers going off in different directions to the point where something was making them laugh and it had nothing to do with where they began. Whether or not that’s fair to the audience who wasn’t privy to the journey to get to that sketch or inside joke is subjective. But I for one enjoy feeling the underlying fun of it all.
Actually, I now HAVE thought of one host segment I didn’t really get…. (And thanks to the poster who mentioned “Godzilla vs. Megalon”)…..
Rex Dart, Eskimo Spy.
Whaaaaaaatttt?
I suppose there’s a little pun in there about Eskimo pie — Eskimo spy but the whole thing just kind of baffled me. Why make fun of spy movies/action hero TV shows? Why “Eskimo” when the actor in question was Japanese? What did it have to do with the movie? I just didn’t really get where they were going with this and as a result I don’t find it as funny as the rest of fandom seems to.
I’ve never understood the “Klack” segment from “First Spaceship on Venus”. I think it’s hilarious and Kevin’s delivery is superb, but what is Klack and who are they making fun of?
Nobody gets ’em. They’re the WIND, baby!
@33 “There have been several instances where a joke or comment has been so obscure or of such a particular nature that I was sure someone at BEST BRAINS must have grown up with me.”
It’s funny, there are times when I watch Rifftrax, when I’ll have that reaction, and think “That *must* have been a Conor riff,” since he’s closer to my age (early 30’s) than Mike, Kevin, or Bill.
#35-
Klack is making fun of the old commercials that Kraft would insert into shows they sponsored. They always had some God-awful looking concoction made with some Kraft food-type product, and I think Ed Herlihy really was the announcer in them.
@jbagels re: Tormented
You are probably right that she’s a singer, but for me, personally, it still doesn’t explain the host segment. Was it supposed to be funny? I just found it boring, and didn’t get the point of the segment.
Another one that I really don’t understand was the overall theme of “Crow accessing the internet” plotline from the “Starfighters” host segments. It had nothing to do with the movie, which would be fine, except they did do 1 and a half segments that did have something to do with the movie (the Crow/Tom refueling reenactment while on hold is the half segment). Could they not come up with 5 host segments that either had something to do with the movie or not? It seems kind of haphazard.
What’s not to get about the simple pleasure of tossing Michael Bolton of a lighthouse?
#6 I can’t look at a black and white zebra print without laughing inside. Dark-tarry stools is a description of the way poop looks when someone has old blood coming out thru their bowel movement.
In other news, I watched “Night of the Blood Beast” today and the second host segment with Mrs. Forester and Doctor Forrester was confusing. Pearl insists Clayton “come over here” and admit and apologize over “the high school incident”.
Dr. Forrester keeps trying to guess what it is he should apologize for to seemingly the bots and Mike. Finally he says, “Is it poop related?” to which his mother calls him sternly by all his names, “Clayton. Deborah. Susan. Forrester!”
Then he pulls a knife on his mother and she ends up shooting him. Then she looks at the camera and says, “Aren’t you hooligans due back in the theatre?”
I don’t get that segment.
It’s spelled “KLACK.” 8-) And a trillion times the atom bomb power.
Always loved a good non-sequitur.
Found this page with lists for the Tom Servo’s Fave Host Segments, if anyone needs a reference: andrewrogers.net – Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episode Library. I’m hard pressed to think of these sketches outside of the context of the movie, to be honest; and they were always a favorite part of the show for me, too.
When the ACEG came out I noticed right off the bat that the host segments in the earlier shows often warranted a whole paragraph to explain in full, whereas towards the end more and more they could be summed up in a sentence, which suggested to me that the show was running out of gas.
There was never a host segment I didn’t get, though there have been those that I liked and didn’t like.
Sometimes I don’t understand the point the Brains are trying to make. Particularly in Joel era sketches such as the 3rd Host Segment from Earth vs Spider when J&tB discuss Creeple People and other dangerous but fun toys and in King Dinosaur when Crow asks if he’s “qualified”. Maybe I’m over thinking them, though.
This is slightly OT, but not by much: I recently re-watched one of my favorite (non-MST3K) movies, *The Great Race*. That movie features a mad scientist, Professor Fate, and his much-abused assistant, Max. In the very last scene, Prof. Fate snarlingly says, “Push the button, Max.” Max does, and the movie ends.
Sound familiar??? Have all of us not been getting this particular joke all these years? Or am I the only one who didn’t know that this tagline/way to end the show came from *The Great Race*?
@35 – Klack = Kraft Music Hall, a frequently cited source of 60’s-70’s TV refs.
Back when shows still had one sponsor, the long-running variety show would often say “We’ll be right back after this word from Ed Herlihy” (another popular Joel/Servo riff), who would parade two to three sponsor-announcer minutes of debatably-appetizing holiday and entertaining ideas with Kraft cheese products.
(Qv. the frequent early riffs to “Polynesian cheese devils”, with fresh delicious Spacom.)
@39 – Could they not come up with 5 host segments that either had something to do with the movie or not? It seems kind of haphazard.
Sometimes they could, but the Mike era had a particular stumbling block with it. (Since it would involve making fun of the movie itself, and, well…)
Back before SyFy imposed the useful time-filler of Pearl, Brain Guy and Bobo on them, the Mike-era Season 5-6 tried to dodge the dreary drudge of actual movie parody, with their own useful self-navel-gazing invention of the RUNNING-GAG SUBPLOT!
This way, they could do an entire episode of running-gag segments around the Cheating short, or the Design for Dreaming short, or the Jerry Garcia joke from “The Dead Talk Back”, and get an entire episode of host-segs without having to write a second joke that somehow related to watching the movie! ;)
(That might actually be another discussion thread, if it hasn’t already:
What movie-parody host-segs COULD a subplot-heavy movie-ignoring episode, like “Last of the Wild Horses” for ex., have done instead if it tried?
I can only think of one for “Monster-a-Go-Go”, though, that one was pretty tough.)
“I think it’s time we blew the lid off Love American Style!”
Maybe it’s because I’m a lousy bacon-lovin’ bastard Canadian, but… HUH?
Does the movie really need to be parodied in every sketch though? I’m perfectly fine with the skewering the movie gets via theater riffing, anything else is gravy.
And EricJ’s Mike bashing is so ridiculously over the top that I now deem it hilarious. MORE MORE I SAY!
#35:
I think the phrase “shoveling **** (excrement)” comes in handy when trying to understand the Klack commercial skit.
@47 – “Love American Style” aired in Canada as “Canada Style Love” and was edited down to 5 minutes as a result of having to remove all the Canadian slurs.