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Weekend Discussion Thread: Most Underrated EpisodeAlert reader Marty K (aka pondoscp) suggests we discuss:
Good idea! My pick would would be episode 315- TEENAGE CAVEMAN. Great shorts, great episode all the way around but you never tend to see it on lists of classic episodes. What’s your pick? 138 Replies to “Weekend Discussion Thread: Most Underrated Episode”Commenting at Satellite News
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Jack Frost – great movie, cute girl, & hilarious commentary
Puma Man. I always get that silly song in my head… “Puma Man, he flies like a moron…Dick’s Red Owl, selection and service…”
^^ I loooooooooooove Jack Frost AND Pumaman!!. (sorry to help ruin your answers… heh heh)
Tough question. Alien from LA maybe…?
Alien From L.A., while awesome, still requires you to hear the voice Kathy Ireland knowingly chose to inflict on the rest of us.
Because it gets a number of negative views; I’d say
Time Chasers, with one of the chief negative reviewers
being Mike Nelson (not the scuba diver :) ). His comments on the
dvd are surprisingly negative and dismisive towards the cast. I think,
given the film makersinexperience and low budget, it was a good effort
and much better then many time travel efforts, which usually (surprise!) mostly
time travel to the time in which the film is being made- how about the
way they recreate the era! In TC an effort is made to sketch eras, even using
one or two cars and Mrs. Khruschev sweeping the street to recreate the 50s
(that’s the 1950s, not the Roman Empire 50s).
Btw, about Kathy Ireland, if you’ve seen her infomercials,
she seems to have a pretty normal speaking voice. Has it
changed or did they think it would be clever to have her
movie voice?
I think The Unearthly is often overlooked, but it’s really a strong episode. You have not one but two great shorts (“Next Week, ‘Posture Pope,’ in color!”; “Teacher, Tommy drew a bong!”), and John Carradine in a dull yet absurd movie. I watch it frequently, and always enjoy it.
“I’m a Weeble. I don’t sit down.”
radioman970-good, I’m not alone on Alien From LA, tho it sure seemed that way a few weeks ago.
I’m going with Hercules And The Captive Women, though. Mostly known for being the one time Gypsy appeared in the theater, there’s all kinds of hilarity going on there, not even counting the innocent genius of “Today is dedicated to Uranus.” I really wish they’d release all the Herc films, as my vhs of this one bit the dust awhile back.
I’ll say Invasion of the Neptune Men over Prince of Space. I know that Prince of Space has all those great wormhole segments but after about the 12th time of hearing “Ha ha, your weapons are useless against me” I start rooting for the chickenmen. What a unlikeable hero. I love all those references to Lord of the Flies and the bizarreness of Japanese pop culture not too mention blowing up the Hitler Building.
I’ll also say that Reg Park in Hercules and the Captive Women is my favorite of the three Hercules we got to see. Steve Reeves was always scowling and had that God awful gutteral voice over. I can barely watch him or Hercules Unchained. I can barely tell what’s going on.
Catalina Caper. I LOVE this episode, and we get to laugh at Tommy Kirk (who, thank God, dispenses with the little pants in favour of fashions from Montgomery Wards). Seriously, though, I have heard many bash this episode, and I simply don’t buy the idea that this episode isn’t funny because they had trouble riffing on a comedy. Toss in the guy wearing a crayola hat, lots and lots of cheesy music (with the exception of Little Richard, “the only genuine talent in this film”), and a CLASSIC skit in which Joel loses it as he waxes nostalgic about the sixties (and laments the fact that he couldn’t go to Woodstock, because he was nine-years old), and–well, I just like this episode.
There. I said it, and I’d say it again.
Great choices so far, by the way, and I am most definitely in agreement with you on The Unearthly. It was one of the first full-length episodes I saw after the movie, and I love it to this day.
Robot Monster. This is from season 1 and the riffing that early on wasn’t as fast and crisp as it is in the later part of the shows run but the movie is just so nutty it’s funny on its own. If you’ve only watched it once, give it another try. You’d be surprised.
One episode that never gets talked about on here is, Manos: The Hands of Fate. It’s not bad.
“Boggy Creek 2: …and the Legend Continues” is one of the better episodes I do not see much discussion on. It means quite a bit to me having lived just on the other side of the border with Arkansas and recognizing soooo much of what is in the film. Still, it’s funny, the riffing is top notch and the film itself is mind-blowingly stupid. :pain:
Consider: Our bra-less and shirtless foursome is on the hunt for evidence of the Boggy Creek “monster”. They bring NO cameras or any type of recording equipment, though they do have a radar system that can be tuned to weight…riiiiiiight :shock: …anyhoo after telling and hearing a bunch of stories about the “monster”, they run into it 1/3rd the way into the film. So what do they do next? Why, they LEAVE the area of course to go and hear more stories….un-freakin-real. :-D
Wild Rebels (Virgin goddess is private stock; That square bugs me)
Viking Women and the sea serpent (But I’m a prince!)
City Limits (James Earl Jones!)
Girl In lovers Lane (Big Stupid)
High School Big Shot (Tribble guy)
Laserblast (Dixie Dregs riff)
Agent From HARM (oh..you lucky trunks)
The Deadly Bees (Ron Wood!)
Boggy Creek II (when you major in Boggy creek studies, you can pretty much write your own ticket)
Kenmore and trickymutha-I didn’t realize Boggy Creek 2 was an underrated episode, it’s been a favorite of mine ever since it first aired!! I guess it just depends on who you talk to? Then again, I lived in SW Missouri for over 25 years, so the works of Charles B. Pierce hit kinda close to home.
“Like a sign from above….on the wings of a dove (wings of a dove)”. “We’re goin’ camping, and you’re gonna watch.”
Even the Brains dissed Season 1, but some of my favorite episodes come from it. I say Untamed Youth is one of the best episodes ever. Mamie Van Doren, a funny skit about Greg Brady, all around good times. Tally my bananas!
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies is an episode I started watching again and the riffs just get funnier. I should also include the segments where Pearl is returning the Space Children back to their immipotent mommy and daddy.
The whole “open mike” theme, where the strippers come out dancing to “The Little Drummer Boy” is hilarious; I love Mike’s comment that the 15 year-olds who snuck in with fake id’s must be feeling profoundly ripped off. :)
Finally, Mike’s mile-high hair is a great middle segment.
The patina of years has definitely moved this episode into one of my favs.
I think that “Track of the Moon Beast” is an underrated episode. The people who like it (me included) like it alot, but there is also a lot of hate directed at it. The film itself is a harmless knockoff of the “I was a Teenage …” movie genre, but it is likeable and the riffs are good. I’m also enjoy the song “California Lady.”
Not an actual episode, but I could never figure out why people didn’t like and/or got tired of the Commando Cody serial. I loved it!
Also I think all of the season 1 episodes are underrated.
How about “Red Zone Cuba”, the Coleman Francis movie? It’s full of good riffs, including a throwback one (“The Master says you cannot stay here”)… Did you know that Coleman Francis was the delivery guy that Mr Nelson riffed in “MST3K The Movie”?
On another note, how about releasing all of the Herc movies as a boxed DVD set, a la Gamera?
Re: Kathy Ireland’s voice-I noticed that when she transitioned from model to businesswoman, she started speaking normally. I guess that when she started wanting people to take her seriously she either took elocution lessons or simply dropped the helium voice.
Slartibartfast @18 – I agree on Track of the Moon Beast, particularly because it was filmed and set in/around Albuquerque, which increases the fun factor for me.
In general, I know the first eight or so episodes of Season 8 get dissed a lot, because they are all in B&W and kind of the same, and Bill is just hitting his stride as Crow, but they don’t get the love that they should. In particular, I think Mole People and Deadly Mantis are great episodes. They are both decent enough to be watchable, and bad enough to be eminently riffable. In Mole People, I love the musicless rope descent, the constant riffs on John Agar’s ego and “The Load”, and the Cindy-Lou Who dancing segment (Possible WDT: best/worst dancing segments in a MSTed movie?). Deadly Mantis has its share of great moments: the pointless GoogleMap search at the beginning, the young paleontologist’s take down of the old guy at the museum, and of course, great lines about “dishonorable discharge” and “mantis in my pantis”.
Y’know, I think some people may not understand what “underrated” even means. Puma Man underrated, really? One of the most popular and beloved episodes that was, like, even voted a couple years back for the most demanded on DVD or something UNDERRATED? How?!
I’m seeing some good and legitimate choices though (Unearthly, High School Big Shot, Catalina Caper). I’d go with The Hellcats. I really like all three of the biker films from Season 2, but I found this one the funniest last time through. It actually isn’t as consistent as Wild Rebels, but there’s just something about the mood they were in (there’s a lot of really silly and goofy riffing here that’s right up my alley) combined with a truly incomprehensible and terrible film that I just find it delightful. The flashback host segments don’t detract at all like they do for others. It’s such a small amount of time in total compared to the (mostly) excellent movie segments that I don’t see why some people have to make such a big deal about them. I’m not saying I think they’re great or anything, but I at least find the set-ups cute.
And while I’m going over one Season 2 episode, let me just say: Sea Monster > Megalon.
“Riding With Death” and “Agent for H.A.R.M.” are two of the funniest episodes, yet I rarely hear them mentioned. “Okay, shorts, prepare to wrap a beautiful package.”
The Incredible Melting Man would count. I think the fact that it was in Season 7 worked against it somehow. Had it been aired at a different point of the show’s run, you’d have “HOTCHKA!” and “I’m Doctor Ted Nelson!” counted amongst the show’s most recurring catchphrases.
That, and the gore and ickiness worked against the episode too. If you look past all the gooey stuff, you’d see a consistently hilarious episode with many classic riffs.
“The Clonus Horror” comes to mind for me. I just showed it to my friend a couple of days ago, and he’s seen more than a few MST episodes, and he said “This one is genuinely scary in some parts. And unlike a lot of MST films that have scary parts, this one means to be scary!”
The first two seasons (three, if you count KTMA) can be pretty uneven, but I’ve always thought that Ring Of Terror deserves more props. The forty year-old college students provide plenty of great riffs and the vacuum cleaner autopsy is one of my favorite sketches (“…from which we drink LUSTFULLY from!”)
“You taste like They!”
I’ll have to go with Time of the Apes.
It’s actually the show that won me over. Before that, I HATED MST3K because I love bad movies, and the only place I could see them was MST3K. But I hated they were talking over the movies. But Time of the Apes, I finally got it, and I started laughing my head off. (I had only been watching, though for a very short time before. Because we couldn’t afford cable before that)
The line that did it: After shaking hands with an ape, “You might want to wash your hands after this, that’s my throwing hand!”
I’ve been a fan ever since.
I’d go with Monster-A-Go-Go. The movie is so horrible, the sound is so muffled, yet the guys don’t let any of that get in their way. The moment when the phone rings, and it’s clearly a human voice doing the ringing, is a classic moment. One of my absolute favorites!
I’m going to put my vote in for Moon Zero Two. I believe Mike Nelson writes in the reflections section for the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide book “that not a single person had a single concrete memory to recall” about the episode. I can understand why it gets lost in the shuffle, being the second color movie after Robot Holocaust. While not a “Good” movie by any stretch, I found Moon Zero Two to be bright, relatively fast paced, and a bit goofy, all traits that Joel, Trace, and Josh used to their advantage in the theater. The sketches are somewhat trifling yet a lot of fun, especially the “zero gravity fight” about which woman from the movie is best (which reminds me a bit of the “more lucid” version of the credits J&TB do for Cave Dwellers.
I wonder if I’m the only one who feels this way about Moon Zero Two? I actually find myself returning to it a few times a year when I want to watch MST but no episodes jump to mind.
It Lives By Night – by far the most underrated and least-mentioned episode.
I also think all the Season 1 episodes are underrated, and I get irritated when I see the entire season written off like they’re nothing. Without them there wouldn’t be any other seasons, after all. Personally, if I were told I had to watch either Moon Zero Two or The Final Sacrifice, Moon would win every time, so Faruk Alatan is not alone. Of course, I also like Hamlet.
@ Loran Alan Davis: I absolutely love It Lives By Night, and would like muchly to see it released on DVD. Very underrated episode and one of my all time favorites.
Invasion of the Neptune Men actually might be my favorite episode. I never understood why so many people thought it was so difficult to watch. I thought, while some Mst3k episodes do tend to fall a little flat when the movie descends into total obsession with some action (I’m looking at you Lost Continent) all the senseless stock footage in Neptune Men was really held up by the riffing. Even if you do recognized how awful it is that they used that footage in a children’s film, you can still laugh at the Hitler building explosion.
I would say The Black Scorpion. Of course I would say that,it’s still one of my favorite eps. The movie itself is pretty good, with nice special effects, and good acting, good actors and quality riffing, if not quantity. I still like all the Season One eps, well most. It seems like they got a few pretty well made movies then, and didn’t always go for the crummy ones. I liked Moon Zero Two as well. Honestly, to be underrated, the ep probably has to be one that is not on DVD yet.
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Thanks.
I have a hard time answering this, because I don’t know what are the “underrated” episodes. It seems like every episode has fans who say it’s great and others who say it’s not so good, and all chime in when each one is discussed.
One that I think does not get mentioned as one of the greats is “A Touch Of Satan.” I think I’ve probably watched that more than any other. I consider it among probably their top two. Every quip knocks it out of the park and the movie is just so much fun in its badness.
If I had only one MST episode I could watch for the rest of my life… well, I think the Mads would eventually break me from the repetition, but it would take longest with that one.
If I had to nail down criteria for an underrated episode, it would be eps that don’t get talked about a lot for any reason (how funny or not funny they are, how good/bad the movie is) but they’re the hidden gems of the MST3K pantheon.
Since people already picked Moon Zero Two, I’ll have to go with Girls Town. I didn’t find it exceptionally funny until my third or fourth viewing. EARL’S TOWN!
I’s nominate “Track of the Moon Beast. Between Johnny Longbone’s authentic indian stew recipe (rattlesnake, velvetta…)and the band that sang California Lady, how can you go wrong?
I agree that some of the episodes people are listing haven’t been underrated at all. I mean, “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies,” seriously? No offense, but that’s infamously, um, famous.
I’d have to go with “The Deadly Bees.” It’s not in any DVD collections and I rarely see it mentioned. I recently watched it on Google videos and thought the riffs were excellent, and you can’t beat those 1960s British fashions.
Horror of Party Beach…that scene with the two drunks alone always gives me a laugh. Add in some of the worst cotumes, dancing and racial stereotypes, I can’t understand why it isn’t more popular.
Hamlet…everyone hates this episode, but I though it was great. At least it got my son to watch Shakespeare!
I would second Riding With Death but also one of my all time favorites is San Francisco International. The movie is just filled with fantastic opportunities for riffing and they are taken advantage of!
King Dinosaur. Some VERY funny riffing, especially for how early in the show’s run the episode came.
Also, I agree with princeofspace about The Touch of Satan. Brilliant.
I don’t think everyone understands the question. The topic is about UNDERRATED episodes. Most titles mentioned so far are very popular and receive frequent discussion.
This is going to be a controversial choice… Actually, wait, no it isn’t, because noone else will agree with me. But I find STARFIGHTERS weirdly fascinating in the same way I find reruns of THE LAWRENCE WELK SHOW fascinating. It’s like visiting an alternate universe where Eisenhower still rules, the 60’s never happened, and cocktail music jazz is the ginchiest.
Second for “Parts: The Clonus Horror” (Unless I am wrong about it being “underrated”, I just personally feel that it isn’t brought up a ton in discussions). This is one of my favorites of the whole series actually. There are episodes that I find to be completely unwatchable that are mentioned all the time (Monster A Go Go for example) while this actually funny episode seems to be under-noticed.
My pick would be ‘First Spaceship To Venus’. It had that fun 60s look to it, the sets of the planet Venus were well done and the cast was good. The riffing was pretty solid and the ‘Klack’ skit was one of my all time favorites.
“Stranded in Space”
Even Frank Conniff bemoaned in the Episode Guide that it’s an unfairly overlooked episode.
And I agree.
I’m going to say The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy. It’s not a great episode, but considering it’s just the second episode of the first cable-aired season, the riffing is surprisingly good.
The Undead purely because it was my introduction to Mystery Science Theater, here in England early hous of a sunday morning drunkenly flicking through the channels i stumbled on Digger Smolkin and ever since then ive been hooked.
“Future War” is overlooked in my opinion. Maybe because it was a season10 ep with a short broadcast license. Also, the later cast seemed much more hostile and mean to the movies in my opinion, and the off-handed disdain they treat this lousy movie with is a delight throughout. I wish they would have done more Robert Z’Dar movies (“Oh Z’No!”)