Movie: (1966) A Russian version of the Cinderella story includes a mushroom sprite, a bear-headed hero and house with legs.
First shown: 7/12/97
Opening: Mike Nelson IS Lord of the Dance!
Intro: Mike mediates a squabble between Bobo and Brain Guy
Host segment 1: Crow hires a Russian expert
Host segment 2: Crow’s a bear, while Bobo and Brain Guy find common ground
Host segment 3: Crow hires another Russian expert–or someone like him
End: Tom fails in his attempt to be cute; Bobo and Brain Guy discuss ape movies, but Pearl returns to settle the matter
Stinger: “Bring on my fiancee!”
(285 votes, average: 4.65 out of 5)
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• For the longest time, there was the “Russo-Finnish troika” of “Day the Earth Froze,” “Sinbad” and “Sword and the Dragon.” The Sci-Fi era needed one too, I guess, so now it’s a quartet, and wow, is this one ever out there. It’s not directed by Aleksandr Ptushko, as they other ones were, but it definitely has that weird vibe that gives them plenty of riffing fodder, and they do a great job with it. Some of the host segments are great, others don’t do much for me.
• Check out Mary Jo’s take on this episode here.
• This episode was included on Shout!Factory’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection: Vol. XVIII.
• To start things off, we get one of the host segment highlights of the season as Mike parodies human peacock Michael Flatley, especially his deeply self-satisfied, nose-breathing smirk.
• Mike almost puts one over on Brain Guy, who is almost sucked into the theater, but not quite.
• Obscure reference: Hildegard von Bingen. Even I needed to look that one up. The next time somebody tries to tell you all MST3K does is fart jokes, remind them of THIS.
• The segment where Crow becomes a bear is another gem, a great example of Bill’s slightly demented Crow, very different from Trace’s Crow but very funny. Grr!
• Crow is still a bear when he returns to the theater.
• That’s Patrick as Yakov Smirnoff; and that’s Paul as Earl Torgeson. Both the “Crow hires an expert” segments didn’t do much for me. Yakov’s standup act wasn’t quite as lame as they make it out to be, and the second bit just sort of wanders off without a real payoff.
• In the comments, a number of readers have noted that by about eight episodes in, Bobo’s character had totally, well, devolved. When we first met him at the beginning of the season, he was a sophisticated gentleman and scientist. Slowly but surely the writers changed him into the happy-go-lucky, termite-eating dimwit who so exasperates Brain Guy and Pearl. Not really a criticism. Just an observation.
• Dalesim: As thug smells his hand, Mike: “Hm. I thought I was Dale!”
• Cast roundup: Georgiy Millyar and Valentin Bryleyev were both in “The Day the Earth Froze.” That’s it.
• CreditsWatch: Kevin again gets the “Produced & Directed” credit. Following this episode, Grip Mike Parker takes two episodes off. And this was the last episode interns Tamara Melloy and Randy Smith worked on.
• Fave line: “Apparently there’s no Finnish word for ‘subtle.’ ” Honorable mention: “I thought Jerry Garcia was Father Mushroom.”
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Definitely one of the best episodes of this era. The “Lord of the Dance” opening is great, the riffing is fine, and the movie itself is actually pretty good. And Nastinka is utterly adorable.
My favorite riff is when we see the gray-bearded bandits and Crow says, “It’s a bunch of Michael Palin impersonators.” Followed later by a chorus of, “It’s…”
Looking forward to seeing this episode, sounds like it’s a winner.
Can you put my entrails back in, Mike?
I’ll go a scant 4 stars on this one.
The subject film itself is soooo watchable, actually rather charming. It is imaginative and colorful and there is a lot of ( very odd ) stuff going on. The witch lives in a house with legs. I may dress up as that next halloween.
The humor that MST brings is less about the ineptitude of the film. and more about the over the top visuals, performances and plot line.
As such it is not quite as intensly funny as when they have a really bad amateurish film to work with. This film and their kin are the anti-Coleman Francis, and it shows in the riffing, which is funny but just adequate and necessarily a little ( too ) good-natured.
The host segments left me cold. But I liked the ‘Simian Adams’ longnecks they were knocking back.
As for Bobo’s devolving, we saw that early on, when he and his associates got in touch with their true ape-nature ( wearing diapers, smoking cigars, riding trikes etc ). This is simply a continuation of that process.
What we have here is a model that goes back to Von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel and earlier, where a great teacher, helped along by an evil woman, is reduced to a pathetic clown.
Boy, did I loathe this episode when it debuted. Now I merely avoid it at almost any cost.
It wasn’t the host segments, though they weren’t stellar material. It was the movie. I know the movies are, by design of the premise, awful, but this one…hoo boy. This one takes the cake. It’s so goofy that it renders the entire affair virtually unwatchable.
Put another way: I would sooner watch Prince of Space on an uninterrupted 72-hour loop than watch Jack Frost more than once a year.
This is another one of those “not bad, just strange” films. I noticed that places like IMDB have people defending it quite often: usually people who saw it in the original language.
My favorite riffs are around the time the ugly step-sister is getting dolled up. I don’t know the culture, but I’m still trying to figure out how turning your kid into a clown is a good idea.
What a great episode. It is just nutty as all get-out, that’s for sure.
An the girl is as sugary sweet as they come. I don’t think a sweeter and nicer character has ever been featured. But boy, talk about blindly following orders!
I can only assume she has some type of magical powers that she seems unaware of. I mean, she’s talking to roosters, and the sun, and gets a dead stump to bloom, and then talks to the flowers there. She’s the Chauncie Gardner of Karelia.
Some crazy stuff.
I always loved this experiment. Every scene is a bizarre treat for the eyes and ears.
The witch is the Baba Yaga, who did indeed live in a hut with chicken legs and flys about in a giant mortar. As for Ivan, if you don’t mind my getting all Campbellian, he’s the Slavic version of the Fool archetype.
One of the best of the Sci-Fi era. The movie, the riffing, the host segments, all great.
This film is like Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs gone horribly wrong. The incredibly exaggerated performances make it all the funnier before the riffing is accounted for.
I’m also fond of the ending with Pearl threatening Mike in his face and Mike’s slightly disturbed reaction.
Definitely my 2nd favorite Russo-Finnish film from the MST3K library(The Sword and the Dragon being #1). My only complaints about this episode is the host segments involving Crow’s hiring of supposed “experts” to help explain the movie and the debate on the best ape movie. I say you absolutely cannot debate the qualities of 2 movies in the same series like Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can. I thank Pearl for putting an end to the matter.
(Near the beginning I sure hope she said
“Give me a little time, please,” and not
“Give me a little tongue, please.”)
Some good riffs:
“So the first plot point involves knitting socks. I think we’re in for quite a ride, guys!”
“This is the sun. Your call is very important to us, but due to unusually high call volume…”
Nastenka: “Thank you, Rosie Colored Dawn”
R.C.D.: “Some day you’ll return the favor.”
(So the girl’s an undertaker?)
“She’s RETAINING a lot of water! You see…”
and
“You know, making her empty the river is just busy work.”
“Everytime I meet a man he’s either gay or a bear.”
(for bird watchers)
“Wow! Bottom line, don’t mess with Jack Frost.”
I wonder if Bobo ever got his ointment application…Nevermind, the riffing during Ivan’s ‘bear’episode was some of the funniest in the Sci Fi era for me. the human schnauzers were as horrible as the townsfolk. and nastynka was as cute as they come. siiigh adorablity overload. now excuse me i have to go find the mushroom guy.
“I’m dowling!” is still a catchphrase around our house.
Another of those “What were they thinking??” movies. Even accepting that it’s another culture, and made for children, still .. what were they thinking!??
Mike Nelson has the strangest repetoire of impressions I’ve ever seen — Lord of the Dance, James Lipton, Torgo, Andy Rooney….
A funny, funny episode. Nastinka is so overwhelmingly cute she makes Lupita look like a crack whore. Another crack at Tom Petty’s appearance. Crow hotgluing fur to himself and deciding he’s a bear. The Bobo-Observer relationship, which got funnier every episode. The “Jerry Garcia” crack.
Great stuff.
Oops, I forgot another enduring catchphrase:
After Ivan thows the bandits’ clubs into orbit, one of them looks at the camera and says, “That’s oddddddddddd.”
This is one of my all-time favorite episodes. The movie was just perfect riffing fodder for MST. But the reason they did a 4th Russo-Finnish film was so that in the future, when the episodes were coming out in 4-episode sets, there could be one whole box dedicated entirely to Russo-Finnish movies. See? They were thinking ahead! :mrgreen:
PS-
By the way, Shout! Factory- HINT HINT
@Sitting Duck:
In _Fortune’s Fool_, by Mercedes Lackey, Babayaga makes an appearance. Ms. Lackey seems to go out of her way to explain that yes, a hunchbacked witch with patchwork clothing riding around in a mortar and living in a house with chicken legs may seem silly, but really, she’s actually quite menacing. Really!
It made me wonder if she’d seen this episode. *grin*
Good, if not great, episode. The guy who does the dubbing for Jack (or Grandfather…. whatever) Frost sounds like Digger Smolken. Just a random observation
This isn’t much of a favorite anymore, mostly because I tend to get ill at the opening sequence with the hideous stepsister and can’t continue. (“She should take that mouse out of her mouth.”
But the whole bear transformation thing is quite funny, and the idea that Baba Yaga sent a cat to somehow get Nastya to touch the scepter is pretty bizarre as well, though, yes, not the most bizarre part of the movie. (“Score! I thought it was gonna take weeks to
do that!”)
Why did the dubbers decide on “Hunchback Fairy”? Did they think that Americans couldn’t understand a simple name of four syllables?
The movie also has one of those moments where the movie was being slyer than the Brains, which might be another Weekend Project to list. There’s a bit where the blind, legless beggar spots Ivan, turned into a bear, and panics and flees.
The Brains mock this, telling him to regain his sight and regrow his leg and run off into the hills. Yet it’s hard to see how the movie was trying to do anything other than toss in a standard-issue but durable joke about beggars who feign disabilities to improve their pity factor. I don’t get the sense that the Brains were riffing on that.
Really, though, is there a better go-to genre for a movie that makes for good riffing and yet has that core watchability than the slightly-demented Kids’ Movie? Whether Ruso-Finnish coproduction or oddball take on Santa Claus or … whatever the other example was … there’s usually this steady blend of whimsy and earnestness that keeps the goofy charm coming.
If I had a tree, I’d keep it in the yard.
Religious Riff: – Peter must be walkin’ around denying EVERYONE this morning.
I LOVE this movie! It’s by far the nuttiest Russo-Finnish movie Mst3k did which makes it great fun! I honestly wasn’t too sure if Mst3k would ever do another movie like this with the transition to the Sci Fi channel, but thank goodness they did! The Brains really had their stuff together for this stretch of the series.
Niceness is fun!
Medium #4 – The humor that MST brings is less about the ineptitude of the film. and more about the over the top visuals, performances and plot line.
Amen, and when they do that, it’s actually more enjoyable for me; they’re not so much laughing AT the movie as WITH it.
Trilaan (#10): “I say you absolutely cannot debate the qualities of 2 movies in the same series like Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can.”
Tell that to Star Trek fans. Or Bond fans.
Or do you mean specifically series with apes in them? To which I can only say, “King Kong” and “Son of Kong.” One’s an all-time classic, one is decidedly… not.
This one is probably my second favorite they did in this particular genre. The Day the Earth Froze just nudges it out due to the short in front of it.
“Jack Frost” is the episode that brought be back to watching the Sci-fi Channel episodes. Granted I saw it on video after it aired, and went back and caught a lot of the episodes I ended up missing., I have to say it was this episode that made me feel like I was missing out on some great stuff, and to give the Sci-fi episodes another try.
First off it’s one of my favorite types of film for MST3K treatment – fantasy. I love fantasy films in general and as a kid I watched a ton of them. So watching them always brings me some kind of nostalgic fun. Then add the goofy visuals and adventurous storylines and most fantasy films seem perfect for MST3K treatment. On top of that, it’s a dubbed foreign film. And for the most part, I always enjoy the dubbed foreign film treatment. So right away the movie grabbed my attention. Prior to this, I had only seen the first 20 minutes or so of “The Magic Voyage of Sinbad”, but I loved it. And as “Jack Frost” started I felt that this had the same vibe as the Russo-Finnish films that the ACEG talked about.
The movie itself is a charming fairy tale. It’s adapted from a very simple story about a peasent girl meeting Father Frost. Obviously they added all kinds of other elements to the story, but kept the entire fairy tale feel for the script. This means that there are all kinds of colorful and bizarre characters from the gang of robbers to my favorite Father Mushroom. Each of these chracters has a key part to play in the story, usually pointing the viewer toward along the moral or morals of the story. Then there are the visuals, which capture that feeling of a real fairy tale – a dream like mixture of the beautiful and the bizarre. Now that I’ve seen the “The Day the Earth Froze” and all of “The Magic Voyage of Sinbad”, “Jack Frost” is the lightest and most fun of them all. It’s not an epic adventure, and so the images don’t have to have the feeling of dread or darkness. This is really just a nice light film. “Jack Frost” really reminds me of the Grimm versions of fairy tales, but with the edge softened just a touch.
Not to say that it’s not completely bonkers. While I do appreciate the idea behind the film and even the execution – something gets lost in the translation. I’m sure the same could be said for our typical Western Fairy tales. Grab a movie based on those, edit and dub it and I’m sure it will play out just like a fever dream. The dub is pretty aweful and feels like actors playing down with the material. This makes everyone sound stupid, vapid, insane or a combination of the three. I don’t know how much material was edited, but I get the feeling that the movie might have made a bit more sense in the original version. Then there is simple culture gap. Not only is this a Russian fairy tale, but it is one filmed through a Soviet filter. I’m guessing things that connected with the audience at the time are just going to come across as bizzare to a modern Western audience.
So much to work with and Mike and the bots do not dissapoint. Everything is fare game and they take it all on, seeming to relish the complete fantasy of the film and the limitless visuals and characters to pick from. Seriously this ends up being nearly solid laughs from opening scene to closing scene. I can’t even name a favorite sequence because I end up enjoying them all.
As Kevin mentioned in the ACEG, these types of movies were really easy to write host segments for, because all you had to do was dress like the characters and just go. Crow becomes a bear and utters the immortal phrase “Nope, I’m a bear.” And Tom becomes adough-able, or is that endowable? But I do agree with Sampo that the “Crow Brings in an Expert” sketchs weren’t all that funny.
“Jack Frost” is one of my favorites, a solid knock out of the park and maybe my favorite Sci-Fi era episode. Although we’ve got some great episodes coming up. Still Grandfather Mushroom would be dissapointed if I gave this anything less than five full stars.
#24 Steve Pop
I think its very easy to argue the merits of filsm in any series. You usually have a different crew and cast for these films and that has to result in a difference is execution.
On top of that there is the fact that these movies have different stories, and some stories are just going to be better than others.
Then you add the viewers, some have a certain set of expectations when it comes to the series and others have a different set. So these two types of viewers will always argue of what movie or episode captured what they enjoyed about the series concept.
James Bond is the perfect example. Some people love thier Bond movies funny and fun, other like them deadly serious and thrilling. Both fans will find different movies to apprieciate and will spend untold hours trying to convince the other. Remember “fan” is short for “fanatic”. :-)… I write on a MST3K fan site :roll:
I like this episode but, heaven help me, it’s a little hard to watch evil stepmom. Sure, she doesn’t get away with it forever, since this is a fairy-story and not an Ibsen play, but still, I hate to see her push her husband and Nastinka around. The movie picks up whenever she’s offscreen. Overall The Day the Earth Froze is much the more satisfying.
As for Ivan, if you don’t mind my getting all Campbellian, he’s the Slavic version of the Fool archetype.
Eh, I kind of mind. Just because Campbell saw fit to cram all the world’s storytelling into his rigid scheme of “archetypes” doesn’t mean that such archetypes actually exist except in the vaguest way.
A good one. The Russo-Finnish films are always a lot of fun and they do well with this one. Host segments are good.
Traive @18. I was thinking the same thing myself.
When I first saw this episode back in 1998, Ivan’s voice changing when he became a bear creeped me out for some reason. You don’t expectit, and I’m surprised M&TB didn’t riff on that.
“Paul Williams!” That riff always stuck with me. Even though I think Father Mushroom actually resembles Bob Hoskins in the movie Hook, than Paul Williams.
Definitely not as good as “The Day the Earth Froze” or “Sinbad” but much better than “The Sword and the Dragon”. Definitely a four out of five rating for this and yet another solid effort by the Brains. Once again the host segments sparkle, especially the “Lord of the Dance” parody. And the tree witch in this episode was played by the same actress (“a woman? Yes, a woman”) who played the wicked witch in “Day the Earth Froze” and was just as bizarre!
I either never taped this, or I taped over it. Aaaarrrrghhhh!!!! :mad:
As I recall this episode was right about the same time as Denis Leary’s “Lock N Load.” Both Mike Nelson and Denis Leary had great takes on Michael Flatley
I personnally appreciated watching Bobo devolve over the episodes into a dim-witted simian. My favorie Bobo moment (although not in this episode) is when Bobo tries to prove his intelligence by stacking boxes. He is later disappointed when there are no bananas for a reward. Classic!
Dumb Bobo = Funny Bobo.
I’ve been waiting for this episode to come up. It’s my younger sister’s favorite episode and so a few years ago for her birthday, I bought her the original version of the movie, Father Frost or Morozko, on DVD. I can really see this movie being made in the states, possibly in the late 70s or 80s and there is a little more to it than in the episode.
Around the same time that I got that dvd, my manager was a Russian in his mid-twenties. One day he was telling me about movies he liked back home so I started describing Jack Frost to him to see if her recognized it. His eyes lit up! He was so excited because Morozko was his favorite movie as a child growing up. It was something he watched every year. So I let him borrow a copy of Jack Frost. The next day he came in to work looking very broken. He told me he hated what I had done to his beloved childhood memory. He called me a bad person (jokingly) after that until we stopped working together. My favorite line to repeat to him was “I’ve never sat on a shovel before. At least not the flat part.” That would always make him sad. haha
Who is this “Dale” that M&TB refer to? Is it from a previous episode?
tsmelker @37. I thought YOU were dale.
“Dog and Bear” is one of my all time favorite host segments. Crow’s description of what happened is one of Bill’s finest hours.
“…and then Servo took it too far!!”
Tim–“Dog and Bear” is coming up in 816- PRINCE OF SPACE
Tsmelker–From the FAQ:
Q: In many of the season eight episodes, when a character’s hand was shown or focused on, Mike or one of the bots say “I thought you were Dale!” or some variation on that phrase. Who is Dale, and what is that a reference to?
A: Actually, these references are all based on a mistake by Best Brains. Here’s the whole story. Back in the 1970s, there was a series of commercials for Ivory dishwashing liquid, in which mothers were mistaken for their daughters–because the Mom used Ivory and so her hands were young-looking. At around the same time, there was also a commercial for Grape Nuts, in which a teenage boy mistakes teenage girl Dale’s mother for Dale and utters the deathless line: “I thought you were Dale!” Best Brains only vaguely remembered these two commericials, and apparently mixed them up in their minds. There were apparently never any Ivory Liquid commercials in which a character said “I thought you were Dale!” And the Grape Nuts commercial in which that line was spoken had nothing to do with hands. So basically they goofed. But the writers thought they were making a reference to the Ivory Liquid commericals.
My favorite episode, hands down. A perfect storm of host segments, goofy movie, and riffing. LOVED when the mushroom was running around: “Tom bom jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!” This was the FIRST SciFi ep I had seen (in a motel on a vacation, as we didn’t get the network where I lived) in the summer of ’97. I fell in love with the show all over again. I think if I had started with 801 and gone in order, I probably would have lost interest in the show. And, Shinola, it proves Sampo’s Theorem that one person’s least favorite is another person’s favorite. And I actually loved the “Crow hires an expert” segments. Mike really needs to hide his credit cards better.
I love this episode – it’s easily one of the best of a very solid season. But then, I’ve always had a weakness for the episodes where they riffed fantasy films – something about them just brings out the best in the BB crew.
I also have to agree with Mary Jo in the S8 ACEG – there’s something oddly endearing about the awful stepmother & especially the sister, which makes the whole matchmaker subplot, as well as the bit where the stepsister assaults Jack Frost especially funny to me.
I’ve also been known to sing Tom’s translation of Jack’s song (“It’s colder than a bucket of penguin poop, it’s colder than a polar bear’s butt, the dogs are sticking to the fire hyrdrants…”) in the winter, especially these last two awful ones.
This is the episode that got me to watch MST3K. :grin: My mom’s house didn’t have Comedy Central during the CC years and didn’t get Sci-Fi for awhile. I happened to catch Jack Frost at my dad’s house–it seemed like for awhile they kept showing it over and over again and I was really curious about the show based on its channel guide description. It kind of blew my mind when I first saw MST3K and I was instantly hooked. I blamed Father Mushroom and Ivanushka.
I was so happy when my mom’s house finally got Sci-Fi so I could see MST3K regularly.
This episode is my top 5, without a doubt. The film itself is delightfully wacky and fun to watch, and I think the riffing is top notch. I don’t actually love the host segments, but it doesn’t even matter I think the movie is so funny.
Fav riff: “It’s Levon Helm!”
This one gives me a dull headache just thinking about it. It’s not that it isn’t funny or entertaining, but the over-exposed dayglo coloring hurts my eyes, the obnoxious voice work hurts my ears, and watching the ugly stepsister eat a lollipop in her sleep makes my teeth hurt (although the Tom Petty riffs are right on!). I do like the dog and the old father, though. But not Father Frost. He can rot along with the little mushroom jerk.
Question: In Pearl’s absence, Brain-Guy was responsabile for Bobo maintanence. Does this mean that when Pearl is present, SHE herself actually takes care of all that stuff ?
You guys don’t know how lucky you are. I saw this movie in all it’s unriffed glory at a kiddie matinee back in the 70’s!
There was a good ten minutes of blank screen when one of the reels ran out. Guess the projectionist was out having a smoke?
I had a case of deja-vu years later when Baba Yaga turns up in the first Quest for Glory PC game! When MST finally did the movie, all the repressed memories came back. :mrgreen:
It would be hard to think Pearl would do it, doesn’t it, medium. I can’t see her getting within 20 yards of Bobo’s nether regions, but then who would.
Monoceros #28
Now now don’t be too hard on Campbell. The Hero’s Journey idea and the archetypes that go along with it are really handy tools. Campbell had some very good ideas and synthasized a lot more into his overall examination of stories.
But I do agree that these tools can be abused and over-relied on. Part of that is Campbell (but he was trying to sell his idea) but the other part is people who end up using it for everything or seeing these tropes in everything.
I do agree that Ivan would fit into the classic “Fool” mode. Since this is based on a fairy tale, it’s not too surprising. :wink:
What the — another great episode!!!
Sounds like John Phillip Law doing the voice of Bear Ivan.