I’ve seen every episode from Season 1-10 at least once and there are many that I re-watch on a regular basis, so of course I hear the same riffs many times. Sometimes, there are just certain ones that I remember hearing that I suddenly begin laughing at much harder than I ever had before, even if it isn’t an obscure reference that I realized.
My example comes from The Starfighters during the first refueling scene where Servo quips, “I’m going over to this plane, they got chocolate gas! Um-num-num-num!”
That one never stuck out much until a recent viewing and it ended up getting my biggest laugh of the night.
Have at it!
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Servo losing control at the end of Batwoman. “End!!!!!!!!!”
Not really a Riff but every time one of the cast breaks into an “Asia” or “Journey” song I crack up. Mostly due to the fact that I owned & listened to all of that stuff back in my misspent youth. My favorite is at the end of “Escape 2000” when Tom morphs the “Leave the Bronx” song into “Separate ways”. Ahh…good times.
So many ones. These few get funnier with each viewing:
Diabolik (hero, cornered by the police chief, pulls out a tablet which Servo declares as being a suppository) Mike declares “Maybe I can run up real fast and push it into him”
Night of Blood Beast
“We’re switching all power to the radio”
“Had to snap him in two like a frozen dog”
“Snarf farms?”
“He bought a canal?”
Manos
“Want to try some of that kissing…?”
“Creamsicle?”
Wife’s disappearing head scarf
Girl in Gold Boots
Diner teleportation “I’m back!”
Yusef Lateef Isef Lateef let’s call the whole thing off. I laughed out loud at the record store when I saw one of his albums.
First, this happens often and one of the things I like about the show.
In Time Chasers, the Time Machine plane is coasting in the airfield when Mike quips,
“The plane looks like it can’t think of anything to say”
I must have seen this episode 15 times, and then one viewing it clicked and I lost it completely, because it does look that way.
I have two.
In Prince of Space when one child says to the another on PoS’s first appearance: “is that a man?” and Crow fires off “yeah, believe it or not”. Gets me every time.
And in the Mole People when one scientist falls and Agar (I think) says “we gotta get down” and Mike says “we gotta get funky!” I chuckle just writing that.
I don’t know how I missed it for so long but the “I’m back!” when the guy “teleports” into the scene at the diner in Girl in Gold Boots. Didn’t notice it until a couple of years ago and now I laugh until I cry when I see it.
Quest of the Delta Knights: POTS! Pots to throw pee at your neighbors with!
Hobgoblins: Pee Wee Herman casual wear.
It’s not a riff, but I was watching “The Mole People” again after I hadn’t seen it for a while, and I found the astoundingly silly movie itself made me laugh more than it ever has. Prof. Gesture is rapidly becoming a household name around here.
When The Giant Spider Invasion first aired I was living in western New York. Thirteen years later my wife’s job took us to Dodgeville, Wisconsin. Suddenly all of the Wisconsin jokes made perfect sense. Our favorite was the one referencing the “Tommy Bartlett Show”. We lived very near a road running north to the Dells and there were numerous Tommy Bartlett Show billboards. Now whenever my kids and I watch The Giant Spider Invasion we laugh pretty hard at that riff. We also yell “Packers Won the Superbowl” at the end of most major televised sports events. That’s a bit awkward as we now live in Würzburg, Germany. At the end of a soccer, sorry fussball, game at a local sports bar the locals cheered and without thinking my daughter and I yelled “Packers Won the Superbowl!!” We got a lot of odd looks that day.
“Hercules” after our hero kills a lion with his bare hands, some soldiers come down the road… Joel says,”Hi,we came to pick up Fluffy…OH MY GOD!”
I’ve seen every episode at least twice — and many of them countless times — and I estimate I’ve seen Wild Rebels at least a million billion zillion crapdillion times, but somehow it wasn’t until one day last week when I was watching it, when they get to that part of the race scene where the wheel comes off that one car, and Crow blurts out “Hey, the wheel’s winning! Get back on the track!” — and I’m suddenly laughing so hard I nearly wet myself.
Maybe it was just the moment, maybe just my mood at the time. All those other times, that riff kinda slid on by, perhaps getting a smirk or a giggle out of me, but last week, after all these years, I heard Crow throw that riff down and I busted out howling like a lunatic.
King Dinosaur became an instant favorite the first time I ever saw it, and I’ve seen it even more times than Wild Rebels, but it wasn’t until just a few months ago, when I’d hooked up some new speakers and had tweaked the EQ a bit that I could hear — during that one camp meal scene, right after Joel and Servo make cracks about the lemur tasting gamey and stringy — Crow sort of moaning in a low, quiet, despairing voice, “They ate the lemur…!” Oh, man, I damn’ near died.
In fact, there’ve been a number of quiet, subtle Crow riffs that I’ve finally been able to hear clearly now that I’ve got some decent speakers — like that scene in Rocketship XM where the characters are discussing the consequences of a misjudged landing approach to Mars and Joel & Servo toss off a couple of loud, clear riffs, followed by Crow quietly adding, “sss-sssPLAT…!”
I just watched “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die” (#513), newly re-leased on DVD by Shout! with the pups. Maybe I’m easily amused, but “Hey, you’re not my dad — you’re Hitler!” always brings a laugh out of me. But it’s that way with almost all episodes and why, after MST3K has been off the air almost 20 years, I still watch and still buy Shout!’s releases as soon as they are announced.
In Riding with Death, after the truck explodes, when Ben makes himself invisible in front of the bad guy (which can’t BEEEEE?), the guy fires randomly a bunch of times, and Servo gives a little “ow. ow. ow. ow.” Like Ben stupidly didn’t move after becoming invisible. Easy to miss the first hundred times, but now it’s one of my favorite riffs in the episode.
I was fast forwarding through a VHS tape recently, radomly hit play, and “Boggy Creek II” came up, specifically the scene where the less enthusiastic lab assistant was hunched over a computer keyboard. When Crow chimed in with “Viv Savage, Research Assistant!” I laughed for about five minutes.
I can’t remember which episode, but as a police car comes to a stop and the wailing siren slowly descends in pitch, Servo mimics the siren with “Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww, that’s too bad.”
It didn’t get more than a chuckle the first several viewings but suddenly it was the funniest thing I ever heard. Now, every single time I hear it out on the street I feel oddly comforted by the Incredibly Empathetic Descending Siren.
KidOCD says:
January 29, 2014 at 11:39 am
I just watched “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die” (#513), newly re-leased on DVD by Shout! with the pups. Maybe I’m easily amused, but “Hey, you’re not my dad — you’re Hitler!” always brings a laugh out of me…
After many years of digging Brain That Wouldn’t Die, I suddenly found myself cracking up at a couple of quick, almost throwaway riffs in the strip club scene… when that blonde dancer in the feather boa is working her shoulders and the Bots start clucking like chickens, and later in the same scene when they cut to a close-up of the dark-haired dancer and Servo blurts out “Rocky Graziano!”
I grew up a Moody Blues fan. So when the knight on the horse goes by in “The Undead”, and Servo quips “Me in White Satin”, i just lose it.
Oh so many, but the few that come to mind immediately are—of course—the barrage of nicknames for the hero in Space Mutiny, especially “Big McLargehuge!” Also, the shot of the character Calgon in the final stinger where Tom says, “Me…take Me away.”
Also, in I Accuse My Parents, when the kid is acquitted at the end, Joel blurts out, “THANK GOD I’M WHITE!”
The graveyard scuffle between Hamlet and Laertes: “Craplet!” “Losertes!”
And finally, in San Francisco International, when one of the leading ladies is being held hostage by a guy disguised as a priest who keeps calling her “sweetheart”: “I’m beginning to think you’re not a priest.”