I was watching “Alien From LA” recently, and was noting one commenter’s post about how, for her, the movie summed up the 80s, fashion-wise anyway. I then thought about how many of my favourite episodes (“Outlaw,” “Pod People” “Warrior of the Lost World,” “Zombie Nightmare” and the last few from Season 8) are 80s movies–whether that’s because bad 80s movies have a special kind of cheese not found in movies from other decades (big hair, shiny costumes, and the “no-earth-tones” look inspired by “Miami Vice”), or whether it’s because I turned 20 in the early 80s and so remember that decade with a special kind of fondness (what I remember of it, anyway).
So here’s my suggestion: what decade of movies do other MSTies cite as their favourites? The cardboard-studio black-and-white 50s? The handmade, 16mm quality of a lot of the best of the worst 60s movies? The Made-for-TV 70s? he big-hair/low budget 80s? Each decade seems to have its own special quality, and demands its own style of riffing–and, no doubt, has its own set of fans.
Me I gotta go with the 50s, the era of the best giant bug and goofy spaceship movies.
What’s your pick?
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Tough call. Each decade has its own charm, though the Nineties tend to be a bit too self-conscious for my taste, and the horrors of Seventies fashion can be a bit much. I’ll go with the Fifties, as that is arguably the height of b-movie hokiness.
Like #1, it is a tough call. I was born in the 60s, was a child in the 70s, and came of age in the 80s. But for me it’s not so much the decade but the genre ( prefer the sci-fi and horror episodes) but if I had to chose, I suppose I tend to gravitate towards the 70s because of such episodes like “Godzilla vs. Megalon”, “Riding With Death”, and “The Incredible Melting Man” but then again we have “Zombie Nightmare”, “Space Mutiny”, and “Escape From the Bronx” from the 80s. Oh, I guess I’ll go with the 70s but I will probably change my mind to the 80s later.
Depends on standards used:
70s fashions, esp. bell bottom trousers, open shirts with jewelry (or is the excessive jewelry wearing a later trend?) and haircuts/haurdos worn by wild and crazy guys hurt a whole lot to see now.
Btw, I’ve still got a Nehru jacket somewhere (hopefully it self destructed).
Oh, and a not awful movie, 1989 movie Milennium—with Chrtis Christofferson and Cheryl
Ladd—in one bit Cheryl and her cohorts are impersonating 60s stewardesses and wear
60s hairdos and tiny hats.
Moviewise, the 50s have a combination of cheesy black and whites and some
classics, for example, the Thing From Another World.
Has to be the 50’s for me, black and white, monsters and aliens, the movies from the 70s are bad in a distracting way, just low rent movies, while the ones from the 50s are bad in a nostalgic and cool way, they werent bad when they were made,its just the way they did it back then, the ones from the 70’s were bad the day they hit the big screen. Giant spider invasion is a good one though. Not a huge fan of the japanese ones.
I’m gonna voice my support of the 50’s. Those are just SO MUCH FUN! People were freaking out space travel and nuclear power. Movie technology hadn’t progressed past grainy film and believable special effects were still people in rubber suits and string. Awesome material!
The SOL crew tore up several movies from my year of birth. “It Conquered The World”, “The Indestructible Man”, “Fire Maidens of Outer Space”, “Bride of the Monster”, “Swamp Diamonds”, “Gunslinger”, “The Mole People”, and “The Undead”. If we include shorts, we also have “Why Study Industrial Arts?”, “Once Upon a Honeymoon”, “Assignment: Venezuela”, and “Robot Rumpus”. Man, quite a lot of low-quality mud there. No wonder I turned out so boring.
Me personally? My favorite era would probably be the 80s. Those movies were so brash and asinine, yet completely unrepentant about it. They’re easy to watch yet completely riffable. Most of my favorite episodes are 80s movies. Second would probably be the 60s; we have our hokey black-and-white horror films (“The Atomic Brain”, “Horror of Party Beach”, “The Phantom Planet”) and our colorful foolish fluff (“Operation Double 007”, “Jack Frost”, “Catalina Caper”). So, a nice variety in that decade for MJ&tB.
I’m with Sampo; for my wife and me it’s the 50’s. I grew up watching big bug films, etc. (and fondly remember going through the TV Guide and marking anything that remotely connected to the horror/science fiction genres [although I preferred the former]), so I can’t help but feel nostalgic when watching, say, EARTH VERSUS THE SPIDER (one of my favourite episodes, and hugely underrated in my opinion).
THAT SAID, while I tend to hate the eighties movies, I LOVE CAVE DWELLERS, and watching RIDING WITH DEATH reminds me of the countless hours I spent watching BAD 70’s television while waiting for Saturday Night Live to come on, so I can’t help but feel happy (or something) thinking about all those hours I wasted. (And besides, RIDING WITH DEATH is so utterly harmless that I can’t possibly hate it.)
All of THAT said, the truly great thing about MST3K is that it is ultimately NOT an exercise in nostalgia for me; the show takes me out of all that and places me in the Pure Space of High Hilarity (via riffing and host segments), and that’s why I love the show. The nostalgia I feel when watching WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST is an added bonus.
To reiterate, however, I like the 50’s movies; I feel they represent the bedrock of the show (for a certain generation).
I would also like to point out, however, that I appreciate the fact that they tackled ALL KINDS of bad movies, older and newer (Werewolf, for example). It kept everything fresh.
Difficult to pick a decade. I mean, the favorite of the creator is a movie from the 1940’s! For me, it depends on the situation. 50’s movies have more gaps for riffing, and, more silliness in general. But, a helping of Laserblast, tight pants, long hair, makes me love the tackiness of the 1970’s- the decade this writer came of age. Mitchell comes to mind as well. So- I can’t make a decision.
i’d have to say the 80’s. i remember them a little more fondly from my high school days. plus i think all the directors were all reallllly stoned and/ or just didn’t care.
the 50’s do have their charm with the goofy science and immortal b-movie stars like Bella and Lon Chaney Jr. but the black and white along with the plodding pace keeps me from really warming up to this decade.
the less said about the 60’s and 70’s the better.
50s and before for me, followed closely by the 60s. Although there are several exceptions the 70s, 80s, and 90s don’t do much for me. The cheesy earnestness of those early movies, especially the B&W ones, give me the most pleasure. Early Season 8 doesn’t bother me like it seems to bother a lot of others, and neither does Season 1. Heck, I even like Hamlet. Given a choice between Hamlet and The Final Sacrifice I would definitely choose Hamlet.
Agree with many others who say it’s tough to choose. For pure bad-movie entertainment I’d have to go with the 1950s and its giant bugs, radiation hazards (real and imagined), aliens, and teenagers who look to be in their 40s. For nostalgia I definitely have to pick the 1970s, since it was the decade that held all my high school and college years. The clothes, hair, fads, and slang of “Riding with Death” never fail to crack me up and also offer the painful reminder that, yes, I used to dress like Abby! :-O
For me, I can’t say enough about the 60s and 70s movies!
I can’t choose between the two decades; they both have an element of simultaneous campiness and nihilism that I like. Wild Wild World of Batwoman, Hellcats, all the Coleman Francis movies, ISCWSLaCtW, The Creeping Terror…there are so many to choose from in the 60s, and they have a great feel, as if the film-makers had looked at the 1950s paranoia, and either turned it inward or extended it. There’s a different look and feel to the films, less serious in many cases. And, hey, it’s the decade that gave us Manos – enough said!
As for the 70s, there’s Mitchell and Angels Revenge, two takes on cops/women who don’t play by the rules, and Riding with Death, which is silly sliding right into ridiculous, with 70s hair, Don Galloway and Ed Nelson. Lovely! And of course the 70s masterpiece Incredible Melting Man, the ultimate bit of feel-good movie making – almost all the characters dead, the monster being shoveled into the trash at the end, but by golly that space exploration is going to continue! What’s not to love about 70s movies?
This was a great excuse for me to compile a list of subject films by production / release date.
If I had to pick a ‘standard’ decade it would have to be The Fifties. It was a quaint and simpler time, bad movies were bad but not aggressively unpleasant like so many of the films of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties.
But if i could make up my own decade it would be the ten years from Revenge of the Creature 1955 to The Starfighters 1964. Which luckily for me makes up something like 45% of the total episodes.
good topic Sampo !
Seems like most of my favorite episodes feature movies that come from the ’60s. The first few years of the decade were still basically the ’50s, with big dumb goofy sci-fi junk like The Phantom Planet, The Horror of Party Beach, and The Creeping Terror still popping up everywhere. But then there seems to be an increase in directors who consider themselves “auteurs”, despite the fact that they have absolutely no business being behind a camera. Thus, we get the Coleman Francis trilogy, the icky one-two punch of Eegah and The Incredibly Strange Creatures…, and of course, “Manos” The Hands of Fate – all putrid hunks of celluloid garbage made by talentless doughy guys who thought they were Orson Welles. Spectacular failures of this magnitude tend to make for the best riffing.
Then suddenly, halfway through the decade, the drugs kick in, and things start to get really goofy. We got Village of the Giants and Catalina Caper, two swingin’ teen romps that substitute attempted humor for actual plot; Monster A-Go Go, the worst attempt at stitching found footage together into a “parody” I’ve ever seen; Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, one of the grandest insults to the audience’s intelligence ever put to film; the Gamera movies, which just get weirder with every progressive outing; dopey James Bond knockoffs like Operation Double 007 and Danger!! Death Ray; and the inexplicable brain-melting stupidity of The Wild World of Batwoman that makes the Adam West TV show look like the work of Christopher Nolan by comparison. It’s pretty much impossible to look at the ’60s and not find something to riff on.
I think the ’80s provide a close second, with the rise of the direct-to-video market providing the perfect outlet for low-budget trash that nobody cared about making. Between Puma Man, Warrior of the Lost World, Zombie Nightmare, Robot Holocaust, Alien from LA, Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell, Space Mutiny, and Outlaw, there’s a delightful earnest stupidity to the decade that can’t be found anywhere else.
I like the movies from the mid-fifties to the early sixties. They’re so earnest in their badness. I also like some of the creakier ones from the forties.
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Do you remember the 50s, when Emperor Claudius died? The Apostle Paul travelled to Greece and… What’s that? Oh you meant the 1950s? Well I don’t shinola ’bout the 1950s. Sheesh!
I’m going to have to go with the 80’s as well:
Outlaw
Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell
Escape 2000
Space Mutiny
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank
Hobgoblins
Devil Fish
Soultaker (released in 1990 but far more indicative of the 80s)
These movies have that very slightly washed out color along with campy dialog, hair or fashion or all of the above to accompany a goofy premise or execution: buff dudes with swords or guns, clumsy monsters, oversize computers with tinny voices, big hair, cheap rock music, cringe-inducing attempts at comedy or horror, among many other things. Each of these movies also rank among my favorite episodes of the show.
The older movies are my favorites. Early 60s and back. They had a quaint naivety that makes mocking them fun.
Well, I was born in 1957, smack dab in the middle of my favorite bad-movie era, that Golden Age of “B” sci-fi and horror, that period stretching from 1950 to around the early/mid ’60s. This was the age of stinkburgers like Rocketship XM, Project Moonbase, Attack Of The Giant Leeches, Leech Woman, Beginning Of The End, and Night Of The Blood Beast.
This isn’t to say that later eras gave us their own, equally wonderfully stinky brand of cheese. The mid/late ’60s gave us those third-rate attempts to cash in on the James Bond craze: Secret Agent Super Dragon, Danger: Death Ray, and Agent From HARM. Then, of course, is the Biker Trilogy — Sidehackers, Hellcats and Wild Rebels, trying to exploit the biker-flick craze sparked by the classic Easy Rider.
I was in high school and college throughout the ’70s; I had a bit of trouble with the ’70s movies on MST3K at first as so many of them reminded me of the things I hated most about the ’70s — like frosted, flipped-back women’s hairdos, and all that friggin’ disco, man. Still, once I got a load of Angels’ Revenge and Riding With Death, I quickly learned to lighten up and enjoy a good cheap laff at the expense of a decade I always considered to be the beginning of the end of American pop culture.
The ’80s, though, were extra tough for me — I spent most of my 20s and early 30s in the decade of SDI, AIDS, The Moral Majority, Reaganism, neon spandex, drum machines, big-hair metal and skinny necktie bands, and the last thing I needed was to be reminded of those days on MST3K, at a time when my memories of those days were still painfully fresh. Still, it only took Warrior Of The Lost World, Deathstalker, Escape 2000 and Space Mutiny to help me lighten up and enjoy that special kind of cheese that only the ’80s could deliver.
Still, if I had to pick just one era, it’d have to be the ’50s/early ’60s. Admittedly, this is at least partially due to nostalgia for my adolescence, when I first acquired my taste for bad old movies by watching all those Roger Corman, Bert I. Gordon, Ed Wood and Japanese monster flicks on the old Count Gore DeVol show in the early/mid ’70s — ironically, at a time when many of those movies were already old, and already being enjoyed by my generation for their unintentional humor and irony long before MST3K appeared.
Think M&tB said it best in “Village of the Giants”(?):
“Y’know, as much as Bert I. Gordon was the 50’s, he just wasn’t the 60’s…”
That alone just sort of sums up why, as 50’s vs. 60’s movies go, “This Island Earth” is more fun to MSTie than “Hellcats”.
The 80’s were the last decade when B-movies still played theaters (before they all went to video and cable in the 90’s, and didn’t have to care anymore), and you could see they were already turning into “Alien From LA” and “Hobgoblins”.
(But at least they weren’t all driving pickup trucks in the sticks, like the 70’s characters in “Laserblast” and “Giant Spider Invasion”.)
So far, nobody’s mentioned the 30’s and 40’s, but that’s probably because we’re all trying to block memories of “Mad Monster” and “The Indestructible Man”.
30’s/40’s movies make better targets when they’re iconic, like the warning-movies of “I Accuse My Parents”, or the newsreel shorts and Commando Cody serials.
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I am an equal opportunity lover of movies from all decades. I love old b/w noir movies and science fiction films of the ’50s and dramas, comedies, action, and horror films from about almost every era of cinema. Movies are my life, which is one (of many) reasons I love MST3k so much. Schlocky B-pictures from any era are a favorite of mine.
SO,
to answer the question, my favorite era of MST movie is the same as my favorite era of American film: the 1970s.
I’ve always been enamored with the decade, especially the cinema from the era, and most of my favorite films are from that time frame (although not exclusively). There’s just something about the style, the clothes, the sets, the cars, the hair, the way the movies looked and felt, that just totally does it for me. I can’t fully explain it; as a child of the 1980s (I was born in early 1980) you would think that ’80s MST films would be my favorite, and while I do like and used to look forward to the “more recent” movies they would do on MST (“more recent” in relation to the 1990s), it was always the ’70s films that really tickled my funny bone.
Mitchell. Parts: The Clonus Horror. Angels’ Revenge. Laserblast. Squirm. Incredible Melting Man. Riding with Death. Master Ninja. Track of the Moon Beast. The Giant Spider Invasion. The list goes on. . .
But not for long. According to MST-Wiki, there are only 31 films from the 1970s riffed on MST, 9 of those being KTMA episodes.
To compare, only 21 episodes are from the ’80s.
And only 7 are from the ’90s.
That means that only 59 episodes are from the 1970s-90s, meaning that the 135 episodes left are from the ’50s and ’60s (with only a couple from the ’40s, right?). Interesting, huh?
I’ve got nothing else to say about that. Just stating facts.
60s, 70s, 80s,….no good. How could anyone possibly pick just one?
Note: there are 6 movies from the 1940s done on MST3k. This leaves 129 episodes of 50s/60s films. I think we can see where their bread-and-butter was.
Gotta go with the ’60’s. Many of my favorite episodes are from that decade. Eegah…Girl in Gold boots…Horror of Party Beach, the coleman francis trilogy…the “biker trilogy”…Hellcats, Wild Rebels and Sidehackers…the “spy” films…Creeping Terror and on and on.
One of my very favorite movie genres is sci-fi & monster movies from the 50s so it’s a no brainer that those are most of my faves MST eps. I would put the 80s at number 2.
This is a tough one for me. I’m biased for the 50s because they were often that optimistic sci-fi that is so reminiscent of my youth but also so, so easy to riff on. The 60s started out that way, but got well too dark. The 70s have some very laughable movies, but I find them hard to watch some times. The 80s were just goofy.
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The movies from the ’80s. I’d throw in the ’90s movies from the show, Werewolf and Quest of the Delta Knights too. All of those movies have a unique cheesiness that is unmatched by the others. Cave Dwellers, Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell, Zomie Nightmare, etc all benefit from being made during the ’80s.
I’d put the ’70s in second place. I always find ’70s horror movies to have unique kind of creepiness. I like the movie the Touch of Satan for that reason.
Good topic. The interesting thing about looking at the different decades is you can notice different trends in each.
The one that immediately comes to my mind is the 80s. That was the time right after Star Wars came out and it was a trend for B-movies to be made with a larger budget than they were typically allowed before then. So you had a lot of cheaply made movies trying to knock off the big budget ones, and I think its fascinating when they just can’t pull it off. Pod People, Space Mutiny, etc. But then my other favorite is the 50s for the opposite reason: a lot of those don’t show too much effort to make it look like something good. They were just interested in making money.
If we were talking about least favorite decades, I’d go with the 70s. Color was becoming more common during this time, but the problem is that unlike the few color movies from the 50s or before (This Island Earth for one), they don’t take advantage of the fact they are in color. They somehow come across to me as being more dark than the black and white ones. The riffing makes them more fun, but they’re still not my favorites.
@29, MikeK, you make a good point about “The Touch of Satan.” Anyone else who lived through the ’70s will remember the fad/fashion/extreeeeeeeme fascination with witchcraft and possession. It was like the vampire/zombie craze now.
@ready4sumfootball. I agree about the color movies from the ’70s. I forgot the episode, but I know there’s one ’70s movie with such a muddy looking picture that Servo says, “I wish this was in color.”
It’s funny, love the b&w 50s and 60s stuff in mst3k, but with Rifftrax releases I’m all about 70s. So it depends, as long as it’s funny.
#32, that’s San Francisco International.
I think I’ll probably have to go with the 60s, but with a caveat. I will always go for the crime/espionage movies over anything else (regardless of decade.) The 60s spy stuff (Operation Kid Brother, Agent for HARM, Danger! Death Ray, etc.) are some of the episodes I love the most. But give me any episode from another decade in that genre and I’m just as happy.
The 60’s. Seems like they let any idiot with a camera attempt to make movies. Manos. ‘Nuff said.
I was born in the late-late ’70s but I have always been weirdly nostalgic for the early to mid ’60s. Maybe it is my affinity for mid-century modern/Danish modern furniture and style, who knows. Visually, I just love the way movies like “Moon Zero Two”, “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”, or “Santa Claus” looks. (Incidentally I noticed that in the credits for “Santa Claus Conquers…” that the “Martian furniture” was provided by Fritz Hansen which is actually still a fairly well known Danish furniture company. Sorry, I am a bit of a design nerd!)
My first would have to be the 50’s. Giant bugs/creatures, stick a horn on it and call it an alien, “teenagers”, cardboard rockets and robots covered with duct tape, strings everywhere… The 50’s were the best. Any kid with a video camera could do a 50’s style film today.
80’s come up second. I grew up in the 80’s so it will always have a special place in my heart. It’s like the 50’s in psychedelic colors and lots of explosions.
For movies in general, the 1930’s. But MST3K didn’t do many from that era, aside from a handful of serials and such.
So, the 60’s. It was such a bizarre time in pop culture, a weird collision of square people trying desperately to seem hip and hip people who nowadays seem hopelessly square, with a smattering of people so burned out on whatever they were smoking it’s impossible to tell WHAT they were thought they were doing.
Any decade BUT the 80’s. My choice would be the 50’s and 60’s for the “classic” cheesy Sci-Fi and giant monster movies.
By FAR the 80s movies. I also love, love, love every one of the few 90s movies that they did.
I have nothing against the classic black and white movies, but at a certain point they basically become interchangeable. The 80s and 90s movies are capable of sucking in completely bizarre and surprising ways. No 50s-era movie could ever be as jaw droppingly insane as Overdrawn at the Memory Bank.
80s and 90s for sure. “Zombie Nightmare” and “Werewolf” are two great examples. “The Final Sacrifice” and “Hobgoblins” are two others.
found this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBY1XQvd5S4
also found this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJo1dGZoY2k
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIah_5GxeZY
I’m a huge fan of all the horror that came out from the thirties to the sixties. Any one of them could’ve ended up on MST but, as most fans of the show see old films, is part of their appeal.
I gotta go with the 50’s, stiff wooden sets and even more wooden acting – special effect that aren’t that special – and story lines straight off a Captain Crunch box….gotta love it!
90’s movies hit the spot!! Future war, Quest of the delta Knights and The Final sacrifice!! 90′ pretentiousness combined with 90′ hubris is always fun to see get squired!! I wish mst3k could have gotten bigger 90’s films!! and more of them!! I would love to see Rifftrax/Mst3k rip apart Forest Gump or Titanic!!!
I’ve contemplated this precise question before myself. By an edge, I do seem drawn to that sense the “genre” filmmakers of the 1960s just weren’t trying as hard or as well as in the 1950s, although I’m sure that admitting to enjoying movies like “The Creeping Terror” and the Coleman Francis trio says something about me. At the same time, I can also get a kick out of the gratuitous unhappy endings of some of the 1970s movies in Mystery Science Theater canon and the gratuitous happy endings of the 1980s movies with their certain subtle sense of “cashing in on bigger names.”
As a teenager in the 80’s, some of the horrible stuff they’ve riffed on I’ve actually watched back in the day. I actually rented Space Mutiny on VHS. I remember complaining about how they ripped off the effects from Battlestar Galatica to my friends. I also hated it then. When it came on MST3K, I was so happy to see it get it’s due. So yeah, 80’s movies bring me the most laughs. I do very much enjoy the better quality cheesy 50’s Sci-Fi movies,(No boring crap like Monster A-Go-Go, or anything Coleman Francis) It Conquered the World, Horror of Party Beach, ect. are always great laughs.
70s, due to the mastery of headache inducing gems like
Parts: The Clonus Horror
Code Name: Diamond Head
Laserblast
The Incredible Melting Man
Track Of The Moon Beast
I was able to settle on one decade because a certain Canadian mayor broke into my home and is holding a Laserblast weapon to my head.