Alert reader Matthew writes:
What is the lamest scientific explanation and/or plot device given in a MST movie?
For me it’s tough to choose, but I think my top three are:
1) Beginning of the End: Peter Graves’ “radiation makes photosynthesis, the growing process, occur day and night.” So be sure to fertilize your plants with lots of uranium!
2) Space Mutiny: David Ryder’s “high-density de-atomizer escape system.” If only it really had pulled apart all his atoms.
3) The Undead: Quentis merging with Diana’s brainwaves to travel back in time, sans clothes. Of course his wristwatch survives the psychic teleport perfectly intact.”
Good one!
I’d have to go with the cheesy “invisible” face shields in “12 to the Moon.” It’s amazing how invisible they are!
What’s your pick?
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Dr. Z and his Lame Dunk Tank.
My favorite:
The idea of the heart being one single cell from “The Amazing Colossal Man”.
First to come to mind: A plutonium bomb causes a man to regenerate and grow. Glen has chest pains because the heart is made of a single cell. An injection into the bone marrow will shrink any living creature. (309-The Amazing Colossal Man)
Time for another by-season list.
1. Women of the Prehistoric Planet – Attempting to use Einstein’s Theory to explain how 3 months will pass on a ship traveling near light-speed while 18 years pass on a planet.
2. Rocketship X-M – A rocket bound for the moon “just happens” to wind up at Mars. Honorable Mention: The physics of Godzilla’s flying kick.
3. The Unearthly – Inserting a breakfast sausage will grant a person eternal life.
4. The Killer Shrews – Shrinking things to combat overpopulation… I think. HM: How every single shrew suddenly because uber-venomous as well.
5. 12 to the Moon – The invisible face shields AND all the steam on the moon. HM: The growing and shrinking without mishap in Village of the Giants.
6. Zombie Nightmare – The explanation that a zombie is invincible until its avenged itself.
7. Night of the Blood Beast – How Steve is able to maintain blood pressure even AFTER HIS HEART HAS STOPPED!
8. Time Chasers – Accelerating/reversing the flow of electrons is the key to time travel.
9. Phantom Planet – Quoth Servo, “So people are just balloons?” HM: Utilizing the “Smell of Fear” (Naked Gun 2 1/2!) to sic bees on people.
10. Squirm – Pouring electricity into the ground turns worms into flesh-eating millipedes. HM: All three of Track of the Moon Beast, It Lives by Night, and Horrors of Spider Island’s monsters.
The first thing that comes to mind is the nuclear security device used to safeguard Mrs. March’s house in “The Atomic Brain.”
The “so cold, it turns invisible” rocket cloaking device from “Manhunt in Space” is fairly dopey, too.
Hypnosis seems to be an incredibly handy scientific tool in many of the features. You can use it alone OR with a chaser (e.g. Scapalomine)
Off the top of me head, THE; Undead, She-Creature, ISCWSLBMUZ, Devil Doll, Robot vs Aztec Mummy,Corpse Vanishes,Operation Double 007, Puma Man, Teenage Werewolf are just a few.
Speaking of Scapalomine I’m probably wrong but I know it was used as a werewolf inducer in TAWW and I think it was also used as a fuel additive/dealy explosive in Riding with Death. If so this is a pretty handy piece of science as well, I guess?
The Atomic Brain: Using atomic energy to transplant a person’s brain from one body to another.
The core problem is that Hollywood writers, being predominently English majors, have a rather poor grasp of science.
Green Switch #5: The first thing that comes to mind is the nuclear security device used to safeguard Mrs. March’s house in “The Atomic Brain.”
That’s not so much lame science as it is a boneheaded security procedure.
I second The Amazing Colossal Man. It is so funny to hear the guy’s reaction to the explanation of why his heart isn’t growing! Especially Servo’s.
How about Teenagers from Outer Space? The Gargon being stunned by the atmosphere, then suddenly thriving, and of course Derek’s plugging a ray gun into the power lines!
A lot of good ones have already been mentioned. Here are a few more:
1) Jet Jaguar growing and shrinking in “Godzilla vs. Megalon”. Did they even bother to explain that one?
2) The Gypsy Moons in “Crash of the Moons”. I seem to recall something about gravity, but not much else.
3) The heart transplant from “Castle of Fu Manchu”. So, as long as the heart is young and healthy, it can be transplanted into anyone, regardless of tissue matches?
4) Pruett’s suicide in “Marooned”. Okay, they’re low on oxygen and someone has to die so the others may live. So, Pruett kills himself by venting a whole lot of breathable air out of the capsule so he can go outside. And there’s still enough left that the others can survive until they’re rescued. Huh?
Oh, and I would appreciate it if no one mentioned that whole done-to-death thing of “no sound in the vacuum of space”. That’s not scientific inaccuracy, that’s dramatic license (like how people apparently have a constant musical background score in movies).
Since we seem to be allowing applied science, I’d have call it a tie between “doppling” in OatMB (imagine, science being able to disembody our minds and force them to voice-over to grainy stock footage!) and the “time machine” in Time Chasers (the universe must be simple if you can control it with a C64!)
My favorite throughout the series’ run is from Terror From the Year 5000. I’m completely enamored of the drill-instructor/curator’s brilliant acting job as he tries to reconcile the existence of an object that carbon dating tells him is from the year 5000 AD!
The writers’ complete and utter failure to understand how carbon dating works even a little bit is one of the most adorable things ever.
Surely, we must not forget the massive benefits of…..
RADAR!
oh, and the instant cake making oven in Design for the Future.
“I call no way!”
SAMPO (not the TC, but the machine forged out of wool and grain that makes gold and salt)
@Not Merritt Stone (#16)
SAMPO isn’t science, it’s magic!
(and so is Sampo!)
Darn, someone already put in my first (single-cell heart) and my second (Jet Jaguar’s growth)… How about how exposure to radiation somehow makes people turn invisible (from both “The Amazing Transparent Man” and “Riding With Death”) or (“Being From Another Planet”)the alien who falls asleep, gets mummified, wakes up some 2000 years later (apparently due to exposure to X-rays) and puts together his, er, radio to contact the mother ship. More than falling asleep for millenia, I find the unbelievable part that his people were still waiting and willing to pick him up. They sum up this concept nicely in TACEG.
I figured it wouldn’t take long for someone to mention the invisible face shields.
The Jet Jaguar thing always annoyed me to; I guess such a lazy explanation serves when your primary audience is children (I’m assuming that this was the target demographic).
#13 nekouken brought up another of my favorites, the carbon-14 test from Terror from the Year 5000, with the museum curator getting a negative rating of carbon-14 decay. Unless the time machine spontaneously converted protons from nitrogen into neutrons to make carbon, this is impossible. Also, as far as I know, carbon-14 dating only works on organic objects. I’m probably vastly overanalyzing this, but it shows that drill-sergeant/curator guy knows as much about “that carbon-14 thing” as his ditzy secretary.
Whether it’s science or magic, it’s still a goofy concoction.
How about the stupid atomic hearing aid that drove the “plot” of Wild World of Batwoman? Or the professor’s happy pills? Or Heathcliff?
Talking motorcycles.
#18 rcfagnan – Even more of a crack-up for me is Ben Murphy’s wristwatch that “stabilizes his DNA.” Invisibility problem solved!
I like the Agent From H.A.R.M. one: The spore gun and its so-called antidote. And the bad guys making their own with all the bags of cinema pop-corn in the back ground. :lol:
Great topic!! It’s a toss-up between the single-celled heart of “The Amazing Colossal Man” and the whole treatment of carbon dating in “Terror from the Year 5000” (radioactive C-14 isotopes from the future decay in reverse, resulting in a negative result; and how do you carbon date inorganic material in the first place?)
Speaking of “The Amazing Colossal Man” I love the way a scientist in that movie says that the scientific evidence leads to “only one conclusion: something out there is beyond the limits of our knowledge.”
I always wanted to try that one in a meeting…
The apocalypses (acpocalypsii?) of Warrior of the Lost World and City Limits, where despite devastating nuclear war, it looks like it’s just a quieter-than-usual summer.
The so called ‘time machine’ in Time Chasers.
It was just a Commodore 64 with a disc drive and a floppy.
It seems to me that the lamest science is the artificial gravity in movies starting with Moon Zero Two. It’s amazing what these people came up with to justify the fact that faking weightlessness is hard to do on Earth.
Also, the abbreviations used for episodes do little to add to the discussion, except the difficulty in trying to determine what the poster is referencing. After all, there were 176 episodes, including MST3K: The Movie.
And I’ve never understood the premise for Tom Servo’s hoverskirt.
While not in a movie per se, How about Mike and Servo going over to visit Pearl in outer space :mrgreen: (although granted Pearl did have a sweater since it was going to go down to zero degrees at night).
And while Peter Garves explanation in The Beginning of the End was rather dubious, he did take some responsibility for the mutant grasshoppers:
Audrey: Well you’ve done all you can.
PG: In a way I feel responsible, Audrey.
TS: In a way?
P.S. This film is an argument for the excellence of a University of Minnesota
education. Peter Graves obviously received a
fine entymology education.
Prince of Space. Why the hell did weapons not effect him? As far as I understand it, he was just as human as you or me…did the weapons of the Krankor chicken army not effect humans at all? Considering the complete incompetence of the Phantom of Krankor’s invasion, this would not surprise me.
Now…could we consider all these illogical science theories “Mystery” science?
…sorry. :roll:
Relative to the Jet Jaguar growth issue, I remember Goro, JJ’s inventor, explaining at some point that in order to survive JJ simply reprogrammed himself!?
This movie has mondo psuedo science issues. The biggest questions I have is about that kid;
1. His VOICE! Is there any scientific, pseudo or otherwise, for it?
2. His ability to recover from head injuries. He is knocked unconscious first when the Seatopians are in the house after the picnic, they return later capture Goro and the kid and knock them out again(we see them awakening in the steel cargo container), he hits his head again (but not knocked out) when the container is tipped, and finally knocked out again when the roach batted the container a few thousand feet and they gently roll out on to a plush green veldt. How come that pencil neck of his didn’t snap right off!? Where are my meds??
I always laugh when Dr. Miller suggest Egaah! (from the movie of the same name) may be hundreds, nay, thousands of years old because he drinks sulfur-water!! Aquafina has it TOTALLY wrong it seems…
Re: #25 RPG- don’t forget “Robot Holocaust”, where the grass in Central Park was freshly mowed and the New York skyline was still intact.
I can forgive the laughable use of fuel in “Rocketship X-M”, since it was made in 1950 and space travel was years away. But in “The Incredible Melting Man”, a flight to Saturn takes no time. The fact that it was set in the present day makes this particularly jarring. And the comment about seeing the sun through Saturn’s rings is absurd since the sun would just be a bright star out there. That’s basic astronomy.
Boggy Creek II The fact that the Bearded Egg has a machine that can determine WEIGHT drives me absolutely CRAZY!!! How do you create such a that can differentiate between animals and trees and such? What kind of sensors do you use?
Thanks a lot Chuck B. Pierce.
1st Choice:
Dr. Bryant Lockhart, professor of Anthropology from the University of Arkansas and his crack team of research assistants. When they finally get to meet the creature, no one attempts to document their find–no camcorder or photos–and the good doctor proceeds to shoot the long-sought creature with a Shaefer pen/tranquilizer dart.
Runner-up:
Dr. Jenny Langer, smoker, coffee-drinker and Dr. J.R. Vance from NASA. They failed to explain how tarantulas are connected to Black Holes.
We probably shouldn’t allow the ironic bad science from the host segments, but I’ve never been able to figure out how lowering Crow’s core temperature to absolute zero could “cause a chain reaction and kill us all!”
As for movies, I’d like to add the wonky physics exhibited by the grenade explosion inside Club Scum from HOBGOBLINS.
Oh, and any reference to biology from CATCHING TROUBLE….
There’s certainly more ludicrous science in other experiments, but the doctor turning his gardener into the Mad Monster apparently just by injecting him with wolf blood straight from the tap is the lamest; lame science, and lame in that the writers weren’t even trying to come up with something wacky enough to be memorable.
I’m glad so many mentioned Phantom Planet’s premise that air pressure can instantly alter our size. Whouldn’t that make people who live in Tibet and other high altitudes slightly bigger than the rest of us? Maybe the idea was inspired by the fact that astronauts grow an inch or two in zero-g, then shrink after returning to Earth. I hope that didn’t inspire the whole “melting” idea though…
And if someone who really understands the pitfalls of the reverse-carbon-14-dating thing from TFTY5000 could clear something up for me: Even if we give the movie the benefit of doubt and assume this time machine somehow overloaded the statue with more neutrons than the norm for carbon-14, wouldn’t taking it out of the chamber have been like setting off a neutron bomb and wiped out all life on the island in a matter of minutes? Yes, I too graduated with honors in english while flunking physics, but if this was one case where even if we play along, the science STILL falls apart, we may have an actual winner in this category.
In The Movie, when the scientist’s hands stick to the metal rails and the aliens are like “They’re magnatized.”
And if your hands were metal, that would mean something.
#36 – I may be reaching, but I always thought that perhaps Joel’s “absolute zero chain reaction” might be a reference to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Cat’s Cradle.” The plot involves a compound called “ice nine” which makes a small patch of water freeze at room temperature. The apocalyptic ending involves a chain reaction where all of the world’s oceans freeze. Given Kevin Murphy’s professed love of Vonnegut’s works, I thought this might be the source of that line.
I personally have never been a fan of Vonnegut, mostly because his works over-moralize about the dangers of science while it’s clear that he doesn’t properly understand a lot of it. Ironically, the same is true of the writers of most movies featured in MST3K!
Brain that Wouldn’t Die – Jan in the pan can talk? Without lungs to move the air past vocal cords?
All movies with giant insects and spiders – Their exoskeletons could not support their viscera and their lack of lungs and the use of spiracles to supply oxygen would be untenable. Furthermore, the weight of a giant flying mantis in relation to the density of air would preclude its flight via the mechanics depicted… I could go on…
As to the OP – radiation DOES facilitate photosynthesis. Plants use most frequencies in the UV range (except green). Graves didn’t elaborate on the type of radiation used because (if I remember correctly) he was making the point that radiation, per se, is not necessarily bad.
Great topic! Now I’m going to be preoccupied all weekend with visions of boring old guys in labcoats dancing in my head. Two that strike me right off:
The Brain(head) that Wouldn’t Die : Dr. Bill playing football with his fiance’s head before putting her in a pan of neck juice…
The Mole People : Perhaps my favorite old guy explaining the “DOWN,DOWN…” theory of “DOWN,DOWN…”
Plan 9 from Outer Space : I know it’s Rifftrax, but C’MON! The theory that the earth is a ball soaked in gasoline is pure GENIOUS. It’s hard to top Ed Wood!!!
Oh yeah, I always lose it when Jet Jaguar’s creator just guesses that he programmed himself to get larger when necessary. As much as I love any giant japanese robot, wacky super-robots got some much-needed improvements after Gundam gave us more down-to-earth mecha concepts and they stopped always looking like they could just be a guy in a spandex and cardboard suit. Still, there is something magical about the idea that a 9-year-old in hot pants could make his pet robot do absolutely anything he ordered it to.
“Cure cancer now, Giant Robo!” “OURAGHHHH!”
Overdrawn At the Memory Bank – I’d like someone to explain the science behind inserting someone’s essence in a computer. And how was Fingel able to control the weather in Nirvana Village while trapped inside the computer! And!… And!… Did they really need to saw the top of the guy’s head off to install a dopple plug?
My business degree has left me severely unprepared to understand or enjoy this film.
It’s the invisible face shields in 12 to the Moon, hands down. The stiff line reading, as if the actor isn’t buying it himself, puts it over the top.
It doesn’t really have any bearing on the plot, but I’m also a big fan of the “ant” trapped in amber in “The Deadly Mantis”.
“So it turned into a beetle!”
Man, I guess I’m still half asleep; I forgot the most essential absurdity of Godzilla vs. Megalon: Couldn’t Jet Jaguar have just “programmed himself” to grow 20X bigger than Megalon, skooshed him like an actual roach, and ended the movie halfway through?
Oh yeah, and in Riding with Death: knocking over a beaker full of nitroglicerine-esque tripolodine, which would connect hard enough to produce a “clink”, isn’t enough of an impact to make it explode…but tossing a kleenex soaked with it into a wastebasket is? What, did it destabilize that much in the 2 minutes it took Abby to call Switzerland?
#37 The Bolem – While we’re probably giving the movie far more credit than it deserves, I suppose if we play along we might be able to cobble together a marginally plausible mechanism for the negative 14C idea. Bear with me, cause I only took “physics for biology majors” so most real physicists would probably laugh at me. I do think that adding neutrons to the carbon in the (presumably) steel statue would do it. I would guess that crew-cut curator guy was comparing the 14C content of the statue to other archeological samples and realizing that the statue had more 14C than any of them.
14C decays by releasing beta particles, converting its neutrons into protons. I don’t know if the reverse, infusing the protons with beta energy to make them neutrons, is possible. I guess maybe bombarding the object with neutrons would do it, but I think that this is only possible in particle accelerators or nuclear reactors. While maybe not quite the “neutron bomb” you propose, this could account for the radiation coming off of the statue, if the neutron bombardment created other unstable isotopes in the metal (phosphorous-32 for instance). 14C by itself isn’t very energetic. I’m guessing any stray neutrons in the chamber would probably bombard the scientists when they opened it, but this would probably just give them cancer by creating unstable isotopes in their bodies. I don’t think an explosion would occur unless there was uranium or plutonium in the lab to cause a chain reaction of decay.
This is probably all impossible. At this point I’m clearly massively over-rationalizing, and defeating my own topic by attempting to defend the science in a MST3K film.
Any real physicists out there want to dignify this absurdity with a response? I’ll understand if you don’t.
#40 BotSnak – Very good points! Not only are spiracles a problem, but the open circulatory systems of insects requires thin layers of cells so that oxygen can diffuse directly into them without the need for blood vessels going into deep tissue layers.
As far as the photosynthesis, obviously electromagnetic radiation in the visible light spectra (not UV though) are used by plants, but I’m pretty certain that the film’s premise is that Graves is using shortwave radiation (presumably gamma ray emmitters) to do the same. Otherwise why would his research be flagged as requiring special radioactive materials? This is what sends the reporter to see him in the first place. Otherwise, his amazing research simply consists of leaving the greenhouse lights on all night. A lot of people try that, but it messes up the photoperiod of the plant and they often don’t bear fruit.
It also is pretty unlikely that, even were Graves somehow concentrating visible light energy on his plants, that this would have the effect of causing insects to grow larger. Of course, if he was supposed to be using uranium or some other gamma-ray emitter, no plant in the world would be adapted to absorb that energy (for obvious reasons).
Hope no one’s OD-ing on the science yet!
Good choice. Here’s mine:
Getting Cut/Bitten = Turning Into What Bit You.
examples:
Werewolf.
It Lives By Night.
Of the two, Werewolf is the lamer science. How does a scratch from a werewolf’s skull, probably dead for at least 100 years, turn a person into a werewolf. (Even worse, how does that werewolf then turn a woman into a werewolf by way of sexual intercourse?)
Just what was in Krankor’s Caustic Vapors? Vicks Vapo-Rub? Bean burritos?