With the usual caveat that even the worst MST3K episodes are better than most of what is on TV, I would have to pick “Radar Secret Service,” the episode that puts me to sleep every time (despite the great short).
Your pick?
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Weekend Discussion Thread: “If I Had Seen This One First…”One of our alert regulars notes that, in a comment thread, pete_plums_drivers_license “had a good suggestion for a future WDT: ‘If I’d seen this MST3K episode the first time I tuned in, I probably never would have come back.'”
75 Replies to “Weekend Discussion Thread: “If I Had Seen This One First…””Commenting at Satellite News
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Radar Men From the Moon
Any episode. I must admit I skip over (in the old days fast forward through) these old shorts whenever I re-watch a show with one of them.
This is easy. First spaceship to Venus. The movie was slow and uninteresting. The riffs were not that funny and the host segments were awful.
The Incredible Melting Man. The sight of the titular creature makes me want to blow chunks. The host segments are also a loss, since I find most therapeutic writing to be tedious in the extreme. Robert Holmes is the only writer I’ve encountered who could convert his personal traumas into solid entertainment.
Sidehackers. It was the first episode I turned off. I looked it up just to see the “For those of you playing along at home” riff, then turned it off. Made a notation in my MST watching log: “Slimy, soul destroying. No reason to watch this.” It took about six months before my cerebral callouses got thick enough to go back and try it again.
Hamlet probably would have worked, too.
‘Wild Rebels’. The characters were so unpleasant that even the riffing didn’t alleviate my disdain for them. Personally, I’m glad they didn’t do too many biker films.
The Girl in Lovers Lane.
One and Done!
There’s no episode that would have put me off the show entirely, but if Kitten with a Whip, The Girl in Lovers Lane, and The Painted Hills were shown one after the other, I definitely would have thought that maybe the show wasn’t for me. Such serious, depressing movies, done in 5 shades of gray, were never quite as much fun for me anyhow, and probably wouldn’t have encouraged me to sit down and pay attention to the show itself.
Jungle Goddess. I’ve tried watching it several times, and even though no episode is completely without merit, it might have set me back on being the fan that I am today.
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank.
I hate that “movie” like I hate having to think about prostate cancer.
I hate that “movie” like I hate the stupid reverse-slanted “H” that Hyundai uses for a logo.
I hate that “movie” like I hate the kid who slipped a used Stridex pad in my sandwich at lunch in the eighth grade.
GUNSLINGER
Beverly Garland, Allison Hayes, Jonathan Haze, Bruno Ve Sota are all icons to Mysties. How could this movie fail us all?! The movie was not cheesy but just a really sloppy movie that bogged down the riffing. Daddy-O’s provides insight why these great actors (including John Ireland) were so bad;
“Trivia: The seven day shooting schedule for this movie was laden with accidents. JOHN IRELAND and BEVERLY GARLAND were attacked by red ants during their romantic tree-sitting scene. In another accident, Beverly Garland’s ankle became so swollen after she twisted it that her boot had to be cut off. ALLISON HAYES broke her arm after falling off a horse.”
Seven days of accidents, horse riding and insect attacks no wonder the movie is so bad. Kudos to the actors who were in this mess. Not only does is this one a snoozer, the J Haze character was extremely annoying.
“The Dead Talk Back” — had I seen that one first I probably would have thought it was a good concept for a show that failed miserably. So boring.
Also “The Starfighters,” although I know many love that one, so no doubt “Sampo’s Theorem” will be on fine display in this WDT. I think “Radar Secret Service” is pretty darn good, although I do want to shout at my TV any time one of the “radar” pictures is shown, “That’s not how it [radar] works! That’s not how any of this works!!” Of course, “Security Cameras Posted Everywhere Secret Service” wouldn’t have been as catchy a title.
“Spock’s Brain” Oh..sorry- wrong show.
Definitely “Sidehackers”, and probably “I Accuse My Parents” and “Kitten with a Whip”. I dislike those movies so much that even the riffing can’t save them for me.
As I mentioned in the last WDT, Season 1 would have slowed my MSTification, although I think the format would have intrigued me enough to give the show another chance. As for later eps . . . I don’t know. There are plenty of flat ones, but overall the writing is sharper and the performances more polished, so again the format would probably have carried the day. The ones I have the most problems with are the boring-as-heck ones (“Stranded in Space” comes to mind), where the flatness of the film leads to flatness of the riffing; and, of course, the dreaded Not Even the Riffing Could Save It ones. Would I have still become a MSTie if the first ep I had seen was “Hobgoblins”? We’ll never know . . .
Here’s an interesting question: If the first MST3K episode you saw was from Season 11 or 12, would you have become a MSTie? THAT is a bit more problematic for me: One of the things I love about the original show is the rough-hewn quality of the sets and “special” effects; the added polish of the Netflix seasons, plus the fact that the movies are so god-awful, might have made the whole concept less appealing than it was in the CC/Sci-Fi years. But again, thankfully, we shall never know . . . !
Hamlet. It feels like it’s moving at half speed.
And as much as I love it now, Manos. I didn’t get through it the first two times I tried to watch it but I was well into the show by then so I stuck with it.
The first season in general is rough but if I had started watching then I’d still have become a fan since there was nothing else like it on tv. It’s only seeing what the show became that those episodes leave something to be desired.
The only episode I haven’t watched over and over is Hamlet.
Also, it’s funny to see the episodes people can’t stand are some of my favorites! There is no accounting for taste :)
How true! I scratch my head whenever I see that Pod People and Hobgoblins are fan favorites! Also true, though, is the fact that MY tastes have changed through the years: I hated The Starfighters the first time through, for example, but now it is a go-to fave. Soooo, who knows how you really would have reacted at the time if the eps you list in this WDT were the first you saw??!?
I’d think it’d be harder to get into MST3K from the KTMA episodes, especially the earlier ones, than season 1. Season 1 does get closer to definitive MST3K to me plus more true B movies b&w monster movies, etc. That would be the whole show making me wonder if this was a show I could get into.
If the movie was what’d put me off of seeing more episodes, it would be “The Incredible Melting Man”, making me think that they did more gory-type movies than they do.
Overall, though, I think a show like this would be a new favorite regardless.
I’m starting to feel like a broken record…
The Sidehackers
The Girl in Lover’s Lane
High School Big Shot
All three of these movies are morbidly depressing and have zero redeeming qualities. Sure, there are plenty of “worse” movies out there like Red Zone Cuba, Monster A Go-Go, and Attack of the the Eye Creatures, but those movies are enjoyably bad. Those three above just make me want to kill myself, even with the MST treatment. You also have so-called “movies” like Ring of Terror and The Starfighters, but even still those aren’t nearly as depressing, just stupid.
I’d have to say Mad Monster, King Dinosaur, or The She Creature would have made me not want to watch the show again. Those are episodes I really don’t care for.
From what I’ve seen of the KTMA episodes, it’s always amazed me that the show ever caught on. And most of the Season One eps still bore me. So for me the show didn’t really “begin” until Season Two.
From that point on I don’t think there are any that would have completely kept me from getting hooked, but there are a couple that are so dull and painful they might have delayed my addiction if I’d seen them first. “Castle of Fu Manchu” tops that short list. The riffing is subpar, and the movie is so incredibly dull, the plot so pointless and incomprehensible, it drags down even the few good riffs.
“Mighty Jack” and “Stranded In Space” are two more episodes where the movie is a slog and the riffs aren’t quite good enough to get me through them. The only thing I can say for those two are that they are still far, far, better than “Castle of Fu Manchu”.
To quote Dr. F: “Turn it off! Turn it off!!”
Mad Monster is so bleak that it’s one of the few MSTs that I actively forget about. None of the oldest B&W episodes hold up that well, IMHO, but Mad Monster is deeply depressing.
In fact, this whole topic is deeply depressing. Who came up with this stupid idea in the first place?
I knew it was going to come up sooner or later, last week, but reiterate it: There are folks here who started with “Mitchell”, and think baby-oil-and-beer jokes are THE quintessential soul and spirit of the show…Mystery and science in the not-too-distant future, don’tcha know. Oh, and Gypsy shouting her head off, and somebody they didn’t know leaving forever.
And while “Sidehackers” seems to be getting a consensus, is it actually worse in the Crown Pictures Motorcycle-Sleaze Trilogy than “Hellcats” OR “Wild Rebels”? (Well, okay, Hellcats at least had the “Best of” host-segment flashbacks, which even the Brains’ own newsletter apologized for to fans at the time.)
Different strokes for different folks; I love the Radar Secret Service episode.
Were I to pick one of the later episodes in which the movie was SO uninteresting that the riffs couldn’t save it, it’s Laserblast. Hell, even the stop-motion turtle aliens can’t keep me invested in that mess. It’s sprinkled with sci-fi elements to try to hide the fact that it’s nothing but a padded-out shooting massacre; the “Garbage Day!” scene from Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 drawn out to just over an hour, only completely devoid of character.
Woah! There is some serious hate for some of my favorite episodes! This site is not kind to eps where they riff depressing films. “The Girl in Lovers Lane”, “Incredible Melting Man” and “Overdrawn” are peak MST3K.
The first episode I ever caught on TV was “Escape 2000”, which I dislike strongly to this day. But it was the concept that wooed me, not the episode’s hilarity factor, so I doubt an episode would have made me not want to return.
That said, the worst MST3K episodes of all time are “Stranded in Space”, “Castle of Fu Manchu”, “Indestructible Man”, “Beginning of the End” and “The She Creature” so any of those would have been a bad start.
I agree about “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank”. That movie would put an incurable insomniac that hadn’t had a good nights sleep in 30 years into a coma.
Also guys come on, “High School Big Shot” is hysterical.
I’m just curious, why does it bother you so much when others like the things you don’t? Are you one of those people who think that everyone has to like the same things they do? Or is it something else?
And please don’t bother to answer if you’re just going to give a smart-alecky answer like you usually do when I ask you something. Thanks for your time.
Anything from the second half of Season 8, Agent For H.A.R.M. to Overdrawn. Just the pits
Sure, but as we all supposedly learned in Eng 101, that’s anchoring bias. Having gone through the effort, willingly or unwillingly, to learn something new, there’s a huge resistance to going through another learning experience on the same topic.
The way MY grandma made red sauce/tamales/pad thai when I was a little kid is the Authentic Way, all the rest is garbage.
There are professional authors who refuse to compose in anything but WordStar.
And the funniest TV comedy ever written was Your Show of Shows (just ask Mel Brooks).
It’s a problem for shows like MST, of course, because Joel isn’t going to get/keep an audience on Netflix with a show that depends on Kukla, Fran and Ollie or Bob Packwood references. OR goes to great lengths to cater to some septagenarian’s memories of how funny Gypsy was when she was a complete doof.
And there are MSTies who Just. Don’t. Want. To. Hear. That.
[Sidehackers v. Wild Rebels: both DISTRIBUTED by Crown, but Wild Rebels had a killer cast and a godly director. Sidehackers and the other POS had Ross Hagen. Jeff Gillen, in Wild Rebels, is in my Thank God for IMDB Biographies Top Five. Also, if you want to hate Ross Hagen even more, get a copy of Mini-Skirt Mob.]
It’s something else. When you hear TV trivia fans talk about “Jumping the Shark”, it’s not that they’re anal-retentively bothered that Cousin Oliver showed up at the Brady house, or that Roseanne won the lottery and wasn’t a trailer-park mom anymore, or that there was no point to “Moonlighting” if Bruce & Cybil were going to argue about their relationships and not solve funny mysteries anymore.
It’s the frustrated feeling that the TONE of the show had changed, and fell so far from its original concept that it couldn’t find the way back with a compass, a GPS and a St. Bernard, and network cancellation at this point would be an act of mercy. A “Jumped Shark” usually means the show has only one season left before the ratings plunge and/or the networks step in, and with the Mike era and SciFi series, that happened twice. (“But there are just as many episodes now!”–Yes, and twice as many network cancellations.)
Go through the traditional reasons for a Jumped Shark, and see if any sound familiar: Original star/creator leaving series? Internal squabbles? More cast departures? Changing setting/backstory? Adding new unnecessary running story-arc to a previous anthology-format show? New writers not capturing the appeal of the old episodes? Good thing none of those ever happened here, it might look as if the show was in trouble. ;)
Now, it’s bad enough HAVING a Jumped-Shark season on the TV boxsets, and not being able to wipe it out of the show’s history. (although Trek:TNG fans are free to skip the season where Worf and Troi were engaged).
Me, I guess I misinterpreted the thread to think, not “What movie was so bad it would drive first-timers off?”, but “What movie and riffing would have driven fans off from first watch?” And if a new fan came on during any show’s Jumped-Shark season, and wondered why the original episodes “weren’t as good”, you could reasonably expect how most of those fan discussions would go on fan fora.
Me, I’m not fond of the riffing on “Invasion of the Neptune Men” either, but I can at least see some new kid tuning in and wondering whether all the movies riffed on were as goofy as the Prince of Space episodes. Watching Mike and MJ attempt to blame all the troubles of “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” on the Evils of the PBS Menace (who didn’t even produce the movie), might leave a more sour after-taste.
yeah, Hellcats is pretty bad but it’s not “I want to kill myself for seeing this” bad.
I also notice a lot of hate for The She-Creature, I think that’s one of their best
From Dr. Carlo Lombardi to Lance “Do Not Act” Fuller, that episode is a greasy, mumbly, hilarious mess
You knew, we all knew that this topic would result in thie current exchange, but let’s move on, please.
It’s not the riffing for me that drags an episode down. In fact, as mentioned by others, I admire the way the Brains attacked the challenges of the worst ones.
That’s another one–thank you, Lord, for letting me live in the time of imdb.
Remember the hilariously unfunny “Swedish” “comedic” husband-and-wife team of servants, Olaf and Marta? That’s El Brendel and his wife, Flo Bert. They were a Big Deal.
Check him out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aJPUbNkvko
Also, it’s a question as to whether ON SOMEONE’S FIRST VIEWING OF ANY MST, the riffing could be SO bad that you’d never come back. Like, what would you have to compare it to?
I’ve tried to watch Yongary twice, and fell asleep both times. Maybe third time’s the charm.
As many of us have pointed out, it’s not the riffing, it’s the movie. If I saw “Sidehackers” first, I would wonder if they riffed other movies like it and if so, I would not have come back. Fortunately for me, my first was a John Agar movie.
Ok I get it.
For me though, I look at the show as having something for everyone. Three different hosts, several Mads, and several bots/bot voices to choose from. Not to mention a variety of movies, as well as shorts. I know the whole idea of “The right people will get it” is pretty elitist, but I think the show benefits from having more fans, not fewer. Because honestly, if the show had ended with Joel’s departure, or with the cancellation from Comedy Channel, would we have all these Rhino/Shout collections, Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax, and a reboot? The SciFi years brought more fans into the fold, making the show successful enough to continue.
Although I had the experience of something to compare it to, and the first few seasons passed the test–
Even if someone doesn’t have a reference point for the show’s humor, it’s the question of whether you’d WANT to come back and spend time with these people. If you were sitting in a real theater and heard most of Joel or Trace-Crow’s silly outbursts a row or two behind you, it would probably improve the movie. If you listened to three crabby guys who didn’t seem to want to be there, harped endlessly about every scene in the movie taking up their valuable time,, and seemed to be crabbing their own issues at the movie as a way for the sake of ganging up on it, let’s face it, you’d turn around and tell these jerks to go take it up with the usher.
It would be just as easy to take your question and say “What if someone had only seen a SciFi or RiffTrax episode after never having heard of movie riffing before in their lives, and thought the yeah-get-mean humor was comic brilliance?” And as we found out last week, some here HAD. Does that make them better authorities on what worked for the show and what didn’t, because their experiences were more recent than 1990?
In the end, it just comes down to Lester’s Rule of comedy: If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not funny.
I’m pretty sure any KTMA episode might qualify, but even there, the premise was (and remains) outside the box enough that I doubt any individual episode on a first viewing would have caused me to not continue to watch.
HOWEVER… besides the KTMAers, other eps which MAY have been “discouraging” include, for me, Hamlet, The Girl In Lovers Lane, Hobgoblins, and The Sidehackers.
mmmm…note that simply the facts of a) somebody running a really bad movie on TV and b) several personages making remarks about it, most of which weren’t all that funny, was enough to give MST enough of an audience to get the attention of Comedy Central, and get the show on national TV. How long did the guys say it took them to figure out they could actually script the riffs?
Season 1’s riffs were better in comparison than Season 0, sure, but, let’s face it, Josh in particular was pretty dam’ raw, especially given his proclivity for trying to push the material over into NSFW territory. Better movies, and MUCH better prints, BTW.
I still say the only thing in the show’s history remotely as impressive as the huge jump in the quality of what the Brains were doing between Season 1 and Season 2 was how much Mary Jo developed as a performer from her hard-to-watch first appearances as Dr. F’s Mom to Pearl, The Lawgiver, in a VERY short period of time.
But now, back to the extended version of Blues Brothers, our first time, and there’s supposed to be fifteen minutes of “new” musical footage coming up.
…pardonnez moi (sobs) pardonnez-moi…
Jay:
I find this week’s WDT to be kind of downbeat, but since I saw you posted here, I wanted to mention something that you posted in another thread, which may be odd out of context.
You sound too young to be the dad of a 33 year old son. :)
I agree! With few exceptions, when she was teamed with Dr. F it was just painful. Not so much a reflection Mary Jo, but rather, what they were trying to do with the character just didn’t work. But in the SciFi era her character became much, much funnier.
I’m sure it’s been mentioned, but I forgot The Castle of Fu Manchu. I think this may be the only episode I’ve never made it through. I’ve tried many times.
I…………just……….can’t……
A lot of this conversation should be placed in the proper time-based context: when you might have *first* encountered the show on KTMA while flipping through the few channels you had out in rural Minnesota, this would have stood out as nothing else on TV.
Obviously, compared to the more streamlined episodes that came later, it would be easy in retrospect to imagine seeing a K or S1 episode and turning your nose up at it, but I for one remember the days of having 4 channels – I would’ve been all over this.
Well then: all that being said – Pod People is crap.
Also, Manos.
Gare
If I may expand on what GareChicago posted, it helps to take the KTMAs in context of time and place. Sure, it could certainly be tough for someone to watch the later seasons and then go back and look at the earliest episodes. But remember that when it debuted in 1988, for local independent station programming the concept as a whole was pretty ambitious. And while MST3K in general is often lumped in with the genre, the KTMA season is one that, to me, particularly evokes the spirit of the local horror hosted programs that were very widespread spread across the US for decades. (They’re still around nowadays, but in a more limited capacity, and even by ’88 they were something of an endangered species.) These shows weren’t JUST about presenting a new old movie to viewers each week, but ALSO about tapping into the local vibes of the viewing area; these were hometown shows made for those hometown people, and from skits to jokes to references (and even just the local advertising during commercial breaks), it all added to that feeling of the proceedings being “theirs.” Make no mistake, that added a lot. I mean, I’m from Northeast Ohio where we’ve had a plethora of horror hosts over the years, some still very much beloved here, but there’s no guarantee that someone coming in from out-of-state would ‘get’ any of them. (Though The Ghoul did find just as big an audience, if not more so, in Detroit.)
So seasons one and beyond, those were made for a wider audience, but KTMA, that was just for the Twin Cities. And regardless of all that, it always takes time for a new show to gain its footing; you saw them becoming progressively better at their craft all throughout that year. By the end, they were clicking pretty well – at points even better than in S1.
I would nominate The Starfighters for this. It is to movies what _London Fields_ by Martin Amis is to literature. NOTHING. HAPPENS.
Also, I’ve only watched The Sidehackers once. Dear God, that was depressing.
And some of the Season 12 movies were, well, not among the best The Day Time Ended, for instance, or Mac and Me. (Ator the Fighting Eagle, OTOH, was a return to form.) I think the best movies in the MST3K canon are the ones like The Final Sacrifice, or The Screaming Skull, where everyone involved was honestly trying to make a good movie; it’s just that they had a budget of $7.43.
(BTW, how about a thread where we suggest movies for Season 13?)
I remember seeing The Dead Talk Back (my first MST experience), and thought MST3K had to be the stupidest show I’ve ever seen. Then, I saw Manos, and realized the classic MST3K truly was.
But if I had followed The Dead Talk Back with The Incredibly Strange Creatures, I probably never would have returned. Not even Mike and the Bots could save THAT monstrosity.
“Robot Vs. The Aztec Mummy”, “Robot Monster”, “Jungle Goddess”, “Colossus and the Headhunters”…