All too often, the films shown on MST3K rely quite a bit on padding to get up to feature length. Frequently the padding has no perceivable relevance to the plot. So which occasions of non sequitur padding do you find particularly egregious? My top pick is the scene with Ike the Security Guard in The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman. A very close second would be the Fish Argument Theater from Gamera Vs. Zigra.
Gonna have to go with The endless traveling scenes in King Dinosaur. Completely useless to the plot.
What’s your pick?
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Any of the “exhibition” films could qualify for a list like this: Sidehackers, Skydivers, Starfighters, etc. Movies meant to show a certain activity, but they shoehorn a movie onto it. Or vice versa.
Did we need an ENTIRE BACKSTORY ruefully criticizing America for complacently ignoring the coming WWII in Europe, just to explain how Greta had a plane crash and became a Jungle Goddess? Were we that critical of ourselves in postwar 1948?
The horror increases when you realize that many of the movies mentioned had been trimmed to fit into MST3K’s timeslot.
The all time winner here is of course Invasion of the Neptune Men which I have only seen maybe twice and will never watch again because that last 30 mins of missle launches is just excruciating and unwatchable. However, after watching Time Chasers again recently at Rifftrax Live I was just thinking about how they could have showed a lot less of the revolutionary war recreation scene. We could have seen several minutes less of that…
Re: Racket Girls. Sadly, the endless wrestling was NOT padding. It was the reason they made the film. Some people were into that sort of thing.
As for worst padding, I would have to say the endless drinking and talking and drinking and talking in KILLER SHREWS. If they took all that out, it’d be a ten minute short.
And I love Crow’s riff on the sudden flood of previous-movie recap footage in “Cave Dwellers”:
“This is the part of the movie we like to call, ‘She HAD To Ask…'”
“Future War”
The scene where the Runaway is in prison. It’s one of those rare movies that has a work out montage of scenes that occurred earlier in the film… and it all leads up to him going to sleep on his bunk.
I’m going with Manos. Pretty much all of it.
On the one hand, using shorts to make up for the shorter movies in MST3K episodes can be considered show padding; on the other hand, short riffing is as vital to the show as riffing the full-length movies. But, in the case of Commando Cody… that quickly became padding to the Brains, themselves – BIG time!
Also, in a sense, is not the time period of 2000-2015 the ultimate example of padding in MST3K (Not counting the offshoots, of course)?
All of the open stage performers in “incedibly strange creatures…”
In Outlaw, Cabot wandering in the desert as Watney barks “Cabot! Cabot! Cabot!”
Not actually that long, but felt like years.
any movie that has that is padding the film. also The Hellcats host segments are padding (the flashback parts).
not MST3K but:
would parts of The African Queen count (the parts in which Humphrey Bogart is pulling the boat down the river). would also say a large part of Lawrence of Arabia count too. not that they are bad films but there are some slow parts in both films.
would also say most if not all of Gone with the Wind is just padding (the only good part is this)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLnTWxpTQt4
frankly i don’t give a damn about the rest of the film (with maybe the exception of the burning of Atlanta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0_f5fkrCTA
Indeed.
Any monster movie where the monster only shows up for the last ten minutes of the movie.
Space Travelers is Marooned after “the Film Ventures treatment,” as Dr. F put it. Marooned’s original length is comfortably over two hours long. And yet they still resorted to stock footage! Much padding must have been left on the editing room floors at Film Ventures and Best Brains.
No one’s mentioned yet Horrors of Spider Island (I think) where the guy goes up from the boat to the ladies’ house and we see Every. Single. Step.
And, of course, Rock Climbing was the first thing I thought of. :-)
The Screaming Skull. Good for a foam peanut, maybe two…..
I was watching The Creeping Terror a couple nights ago. There was like 20 minutes of dancing to really bad music.
And then intercut in between the dancing, was a fist fight.
And then there was 10 minutes of the hero and his deputy friend sneaking into his house to surprise his wife.
And then, one of the first victims, you have her taking her baby’s temperature.
The Deadly Mantis uses a lot of stock footage of planes. Often not matching. “Highway to the cheap stock footage zone!”
#64 I thought I was the only one who thinks that movie is bloated and over-rated! Bless you! Can you imagine the Riffapalooza that could be done on THAT movie?!
@70
would also include Citizen Kane. i have been both that and Gone with the Wind just to say i have seen them. tried to go back and watch them and didn’t make it past 30 minutes. never seen The Godfather from start to finish, but it seems like there is a lot of padding (from parts i have seen).
would love to see RIfftrax (mainly Bridget and Mary Jo) take on the film.
Pah. How about one where the monster doesn’t show up at all?
(as already mentioned by scarecrow)
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2016/07/23/netflix-lands-crowd-funded-reboot-of-mystery-science-theater-3000/
All of the poacher scenes in Pod People.
I have to go with the various musical numbers in The Incredibly Strange Creatures… they’re not just dull and pointless, but aggressively unpleasant. What’s the opposite of “exotic” dancing? Domestic dancing?
Rock climbing.
Any thing with Coleman Francis. Isn’t he just a fat padded pillow stuffed with shi..ah bunting?
I know what you mean. Gots to get me some Peaches! :laugh:
I love this episode, but how about all of the children from different countries singing at the beginning of Santa Claus?
Has anyone mentioned Jessica’s bra from The Thing That Couldn’t Die?
jayne mansfield?!? ;) (“sorry, couldn’t let that one pass by…” “right, crow…”)
Rock Climbing Joel, Rock Climbing. Also honorable mentions to Mighty Jack (Slow the plot down) , Side Hackers, The Sky Divers, and of course the unforgettable Star Fighters, a film comprised of roughly 67% air refueling scenes
Rock Climbing Joel, Rock Climbing. Also honorable mentions to Mighty Jack (Slow the plot down) the Side Hackers, the Sky Divers, and of course the unforgettable Star Fighters, a film comprised of roughly 67% air refueling scenes
My vote for worst padding goes not to a specific movie, but to a form of padding that was used in a lot of diverse MST-fodder: Dancing girls.
Outlaw, Gunslinger, Firemaidens, the Mole People, the Hercules movies and various Herc-wannabes — these were just a few of the films burdened with dull, interpretive dance numbers that did nothing but stop the plot dead in its tracks. They weren’t even titillating. They were such blatant padding you could stuff a mattress with them.
How about Robot vs the Aztec Mummy? Half of the film comprised of scenes from the previous two Aztec Mummy films, and the other half was waiting for the robot to show up. And then the robot did diddly! The ENTIRE film was egregious padding!
Hey, Joel? Can you guys do the second Aztec Mummy film? For some reason, in that one, the stupidest character turned out to be a masked wrestling superhero, never referred to again as such, of course, except for a stupid line in Robot that everyone missed because they never saw the second film. And a superhero who did less against the Bat character than the stupid robot did! Santo (er, Samson) did more against the bad guys than that sorry excuse for a superhero.
Woops, sorry for the padding there. :-)
The entire public service announcement at the beginning of The Deadly Mantis is long, boring, pointless, and obviously a military promo that was stuck in the film to pad it out.
The repetitive space battle near the end of Invasion of the Neptune Men that is the visual equivalent of listening to a skipping record for half an hour is possibly the most painful.
And Roger Corman had the ability to pad out anything with anything.
@ Cornjob #87: The radar spiel was more clumsy exposition than actual padding.
#88: But can’t clumsy exposition be padding? Okay, now I’m getting confused, but while I’m here I have to say that the last ten minutes or so of Deadly Mantis take FOREVER. It really shouldn’t take them that long to find a GIANT BUG (as Crow points out).
Well, obviously the two clowns in ‘Here Comes The Circus’….
Oh. Worst PADDING in a movie….
The family in The Deadly Bees probably served the worst pudding…
And you couldn’t even have any until you found the dog’s meat.
Egregious padding? Oh, Village of the Giants definite-oh, oh!!
I agree with one above, about ‘Robot vs The Aztec Mummy.’ The film is 70% previous film information! And the way the doctor tells his associates about it, wouldn’t they know all this previously?
The rasslin’ scenes in that movie are hypnotic. Really bad too – the Lucha in Samson is so much more exciting but sadly we get way less of it.
Probably the much-less-talented James Arness once again sabotaging his bro’s career.
It let’s me see myself as a horror movie hero though. Save the town? Nah, gonna drive around and sight see instead.
Kenotic:
“I think about 1/3rd of Horror of Party Beach was the Del-Aires playing. It was also the best part of the movie (and the band was actually pretty good and fun to watch), so maybe this is reverse-padding?
Runner up is the endless Traveling to get Sodium scenes in the same film, which were much less fun.”
Horror of Party Beach was one of the most poorly edited movies on MST3K. I have seen this movie many times over the years before this episode and they cut some of the best scenes from the film. Sure it isn’t an Academy Award winner but it’s a lot better little horror film than this badly done version would suggest.
Two that instantaneously came to mind: “sand storm, sand storm…” and of course ROCK CLIMBING.
Let’s not forget the capper to that trilogy, “Hypno Helio Static Stasis”