Movie: (1958) A scientist builds a time machine, allowing a scary woman from the future to appear.
First shown: 3/15/97
Opening: Tom “comfort rates” everything
Intro: The Observers make Pearl and Bobo fight, but the M&TB aren’t getting the message
Host segment 1: The Observers offer their superior food
Host segment 2: Mike sends Crow back in time, but soon regrets it
Host segment 3: The Observers croon “When I Held Your Brain in My Arms”
End: Mike sets Crow up with a blind date from the year 5000, while Pearl declares her humanity
Stinger: Observers
(228 votes, average: 4.26 out of 5)
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• Get Kevin’s take here.
• This ranks up there as one of the most incompetent movies they’ve ever done and, as you know, that’s saying something. An amateur cast playing unlikeable characters, a glacial pace to a plot that makes zero sense. Laughable special effects and a story with no payoff. Bleah. The segments are all pretty good, especially the song, but I think the riffing is a bit sub-par this time. There are still plenty of great riffs, but they seem a little thinner than usual. All in all a fair-to-good outing.
• This episode has not yet been released on DVD.
• This was the seventh new show in seven weeks. I remember the incredible feeling of being overwhelmed with new MST3K episodes with barely enough time to assimilate it all (a little like getting 14 new episodes at once). I was almost happy to have the two-week break that followed this show, just so I could catch my breath (figuratively speaking).
• Daleism: As the nurse/alien takes off her gloves, moist guy says “Your hands!” and of course the riff is: “I thought you were Dale!”
• For those who want a full list of the colors of Mike, Ward E has it.
• Mike once again channels “The Frugal Gourmet” Jeff Smith. Last time was in episode 608- CODE NAME: DIAMOND HEAD.
• Then-current riff: “I’m Jaye Davidson.” Davidson was still being talked about for his performance in “The Crying Game” five years earlier. “Suddenly Susan” then a popular sitcom starring Brooke Shields.
• Obscure references: The short-lived 1995 series “The Single Guy,” Mrs. Pynchon, a character in the TV series “Lou Grant.” Also: Servo sings the jingle for the long-defunct Northwest Orient airlines. Also: Nice obscure Beatles reference: “He’s a clean old man.” Classical music fans probably enjoyed the reference to the Brodski Quartet, a British classical string ensemble.
• Several Jimmy Carter references in this one, since the handyman vaguely resembles him. Of course, Carter’s administration was decades ago now. To a lot of this show’s young fans, they may as well be making Chester A. Arthur references.
• Kevin breaks out his great Flash Bazbo impression. The character was a creation of Chris Guest back when he was making records (and I do mean records, not CDs) for National Lampoon. “Hellooo?…Hellooo?”
• That’s Beez as the sparkly “Terror.” Not sure how I feel about uglying her up (if such a thing is even possible).
• “When I Held Your Brain in My Arms” was an immediate hit and the channel was nice enough to put the entire song on their web site. It was the first song since Trace bid farewell to Frank, and it really brightens up an otherwise rugged episode. Note that Mike lip synchs to Kevin’s vocals but Bill lip synchs himself.
• Annoying commercial: The special message from America Online boss Steve Case. To refresh your memory, AOL went to a flat-rate, unlimited-use pricing structure and, naturally, usage skyrocketed. Problem was: AOL’s system wasn’t ready to handle the jump in usage. For a couple of months, connecting (for you kids, we used to have to connect to the internet via telephone lines … and we liked it that way! We liked it just fine! Now get off my lawn!) was hit-and-miss at best and busy signals were the order of the day. Anyway, in this commercial Case strolls through what is ostensibly an AOL customer service call center and apologizes for failing to remember the first day of Business 101, when they explained that when you cut the price of something, there’s more demand for it.
• This is another movie in which all the sets seem to have filth covering the walls. Weird.
• For non-Trekkies, Pearl’s little speech about the nature of humanity is the sort of thing Captain Kirk would spout about once every third or fourth episode, usually after refusing to take part in some staged fight.
• The Observers steal the stinger again. What would you have picked? I think I would have gone with a shot of Angelo enjoying his magazines in his shack.
• Cast and crew roundup: No need to go through the Arkoff/Nicholson litany again. Producer/director/scriptwriter Robert J. Gurney Jr. (the guy you can blame for this mess) also wrote the script (i.e. ripped off somebody else’s script) for “Attack of the the Eye Creatures.” Production coordinator Mark Hanna also worked on “Gunslinger” and “The Undead” and wrote the script for “The Amazing Colossal Man.” In front of the camera, Ward Costello was also in “Code Name: Diamond Head.” Frederic Downs was also in “The Hellcats,” “The Skydivers” and “Red Zone Cuba.”
• CreditsWatch: Jim gets the produced and directed by credit. Kevin is associate producer. As noted last time, Lane Stiller and Steve Zocklein were interns for only two episodes, the last one and this one.
• Fave riff: Of all the plot holes to fill, they choose the scuba gear plot hole!” Honorable mention: “Do you have cartoon music playing in your head, too?” and “They are implying: POOM!”
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I don’t understand why you old people think all of us young people have aboslutely NO clue about anything to do with modern history. For Pete’s sake, if we’re on this site, we’re watching MST3K! Even that’s pretty old now!
I thought this was a fun episode.
Funny that a movie about breaking the time barrier would feature a background clock that never moved past “ten to three”!
LOL moment for me has always been the all to brief appearance of the goosestepping terror!
Genericboardname @ 51-I will not speak for anyone but myself at age 56. Yes there are some folks who post that have generation gap on their mind all the time. I can not tell the age of most folks unless they indicate it somehow and I agree with what you said. I think that we are so used to the young asking us ‘What are you talkin bout grandpa?’ or more usually smirks and outright laughter. Many sort of expect to be treated like that so they strike first. Point is respect should be given to both young and old and the first step is to try to understand the other persons perspective. Hope this helps.
mikek #50. Are you suggesting that yesteryear’s transformers fans actually grew up and met, spoke with, dated, mated and spawned with females ?
There seems to be a lot of hate for the B&W. This has been mentioned before but it seems to be cropping up a little more than usual this week. Maybe the cumulative effect of a long string of B&W films…
But I can’t understand it. Are there people who believe that Terror or Undead or Creature would have somehow been better or more watchable had they been in color? Does B&W fill them with anxiety and loathing for the scary primitive past? Do they feel cheated not knowing the precise skin tone of some oily man or harsh angular heroine ? Is it some kind of neurological disorder ?
But then, in their defense, I wonder how the rest of us would respond to the riffing of a silent movie. Which is an interesting idea.
Would they hold up cards with the riffs on them ? This is too academic an exercise for Mike & Rifftrax, but it might appeal to the more philosophical Joel and his Tits.
Re #45 The Bolem —
At the time Terror Sure To Arrive By The Year 5000 was released, the idea of radiocarbon dating was only nine years away from its original invention. While it was starting to revolutionize archeology by making it possible to reasonably accurately date past events independently of any historical record, it was only just beginning.
So, vague an idea as most people have about science things today, they’d justifiably have a vaguer idea about it back then. And, of course, the use of carbon-14 dating is just the supplementary material to a plot point: they need to establish that these artefacts are from The Future and it’s not important to the movie how. Carbon-14 dating, misunderstood as it was, seemed to offer a way to date the origin of something, so the scriptwriter took that.
Very few writers let the actual-science-details interfere with the plot point, and even fewer will if they notice that there’s really not a substitute that could be used. Star Trek: Enterprise tried avoiding this for some future-things by introducing “quantum dating”, which to the extent it means anything besides that somebody let the Trek writers hear the word “quantum” only means anything because the audience had heard of Carbon-14 dating and could be trusted to make the leap. Before you can trust the audience to have heard of Carbon-14 dating, you have to take littler leaps.
Medium #55- I’m not sure to the hostility to this string of films is necessarily that they are black and white, but because they are boring and gray in tone. As I mentioned in an earlier thread, you can have a black and white film that is colorful in tone (Ed Wood movies are like this, so is Prince of Space, or- if you like good movies- Casablanca) and color movies that are gray in tone (Manos, Starfighters, etc.). I love black and white films, but have been moderately critical (I hope) of this stretch of movies because they are fairly dull and very gray. IMHO- they would be boring in color, 3-D, or any other format. It’s not because they are in black and white.
Of course, I may be alone on this…
I love your idea for riffing a silent movie! They meet the criteria for a good riff subject (i.e. take themselves seriously), and some of them a quite goofy and or/offensive. Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seems like a goldmine, and the amazingly offensive Birth of a Nation and the vastly overrated Potemkin could be very high risk/high reward if someone had the courage to take them on.
Cliff #57 – I feel the same way you do. I try to avoid using the term “grey” as a description and go for “dreary” instead.
This streatch of movies is just dreary no matter what way you slice it. A little more variety could have helped a great deal. Color movies? Sure, but even something like a goofy black and white fantasy film would have helped.
Anyway, it’s not the black and white I object to, it’s the dreariness. I just seems that Black and White films ends up turing into Grey and Murky when they are filming dreary material.
Weismeyer #57.
I’m thinking… Stroheim !
In addtion to the verbal riffs, visual shadowrama shenanigans and my aforemantined title-card riffs, there could also be music riffs where our brave riffers would play their own choice of music to replace the house organ soundtrack, to great comedic effect.
“There were some mediocre eps like Clonus and Party Beach” (#36)
———————
!?
I’m at a loss for words…(besides those words I just typed)
This movie did teach me one important thing: always dive headfirst into an unfamilliar lake.
I may be in the minority here, but this is one ep I almost never visit. The song is great, but the movie puts me in a coma almost instantly. I just remember by this time I was DYING for anything in color. I watch this one only when it’s up in the rotation and never more.
Hmmm…I like it. Merry-Go-Round would be a good choice- super ditzy leads Norman Kerry and Mary Philbin. A bit unfair to to Stroheim, though, since Rupert Julian (a Francisesque director) finished the movie. One of his WWI propaganda movies would be awesome, but I think they are lost. I have not seen Greed, so can’t comment on that.
I see it as a live show or multicast like Rifftrax’s Plan Nine, do you see it?
To everyone else, sorry for hijacking the thread!
I’m not a medium, I’m a petite says:
September 25th, 2009 at 8:11 am
mikek #50. Are you suggesting that yesteryear’s transformers fans actually grew up and met, spoke with, dated, mated and spawned with females ?
Considering that nearly every American boy, and a lot of Canadians, and British boys watched the show in the ’80s, then it’s obviously possible. :roll:
It’s Transformers, not Star Trek, and not Dungeons and Dragons. :razz:
#45 – Tom had a thing for Creepy Girl in Catalina Caper and the organic (though not exactly human) Tibby in Gamera. I can’t think of any time Crow fell in love with an appliance, but he does love his mother.
I don’t know why, but I found the soft spoken secretary to be incredibly annoying, maybe even runner-up in the most annoying character category behind Tommy from Pod People. She almost had me yelling at the screen as I watched this episode alone in an empty apartment.
There are 2 Wizard of Oz references:
A plane flies across the screen.
Crow: “Surrender Dorothy.”
Flat Top opens the underwater case of dead future cat.
Tom: “It’s one of those ‘fly monkeys, fly’ monkeys.”
The songs in the Sci-Fi years, while more infrequent than during the Comedy Central era, tended to have higher production values. They seemed to put more effort into orchestrating the music and there is more harmony in the vocals as well. Compare “The Godzilla Genealogy Bop” and “Oh, Kim Catrall” to “When I Held Your Brain in My Arms” and “Where, O Werewolf.” While the latter two are not necessarily better songs (every time Ron Pearlman or Kim Catrall are mentioned I think of those first two) but they do have much higher production value. My guess is Mike taking over as host had something to do with it since the songs during the Mike Comedy Central era did see an uptick in production value over the Joel years, especially evidenced in “Merry Christmas, if That’s Okay” and “The United Servo Academy Men’s Chorus.”
Meranalf —
I’m not reacting strictly to production values. “When I Held Your Brain in My Arms” is goldang CLEVER. The lyrics are funny and terrific.
And if “Held Your Brain” had never been produced, then “Godzilla Genealogy Bop” would take its place as my favorite MST3K song in a heartbeat.
In case nobody has mentioned it, this concerns the Mrs. Pynchon of the show ‘Lou Grant’ Reference.
The woman who played Mrs. Pynchon is probably much better known to you modern kids as Tony Soprano’s mother in the ‘The Sopranos’.
And she was just as mean in ‘Lou Grant’!
Another early rock type song is “Sodium”.
I’d be nice if Horror of Party Beach was released-mostly for that song. I mean, the lyrics are almost as intricate and complex as
the Shine Your Love song in Angel’s Revenge.
So according to the rating, readers of this site think Terror from the Year 5000 is better than these episodes:
Kitten with a Whip
Gunslinger
Hercules
Hercules and the Captive Women (Today is dedicated to Uranus!)
Both Rocky Jones movies
and lots of others.
Hmmm…
I like this episode for what it is and the riffs are good,but I wonder who was picking the movies during the sci-fi era?Frank would always get the bottom of the barrel movies,but when MST3K were on the Sci-fi Channel,those type of movies were few and far between.Not really complaining,but I do miss the Red Zone Cuba-Manos-Monster a-Go Go-Wild World of Batwoman type of movies.I will admit,there are some classics ones like Werewolf,Future War and Horror at Party Beach;just to name a few,but that’s about it.I mean,is Quest of the Delta Knights really THAT bad? Cheesy? Yes.Bottom of the barrel? I think not.Still a big fan of the show,don’t get me wrong! Maybe Sci-Fi channel didn’t have a lot to choose from.I’ll stop now…
So does nobody notice that Crow, after already gaining 500 years alone on the SOL, adds another decade or so to his life by living in Wisconsin from 1993 to 2004? I wonder if he ever encountered the Crow from the cheese factory, or even his future self after the SOL crashed to Earth.
Of course, this directly contradicts with his statement that his voice changes every seven years, unless we’re supposed to count Bill’s “Trace-light” approach in early season 8 as the predecessor to the one he uses for the rest of the series.
The host segments of this episode were brilliant, but they mostly felt like they were trying to unload all of these great Observer planet ideas before they blew it up. Maybe they should have stuck around on the planet for a bit longer (I think they were planning on spending four episodes on each planet and concluding the season with Mike’s trial, but then they got the full 22-episode pickup and decided to stretch things out on Camping Planet). I’m actually craving a bowl of those pills right about now.
Finally, does anyone have a complete list of Mike’s ex-flames? We have Ginger in this episode (Ginger snaaaaaaap), but then there’s also the girlfriend mentioned in The Projected Man who died.
Mike in Portland says:
September 25th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
So according to the rating, readers of this site think Terror from the Year 5000 is better than these episodes:
Kitten with a Whip
Gunslinger
Hercules
Hercules and the Captive Women (Today is dedicated to Uranus!)
Both Rocky Jones movies
and lots of others.
Hmmm…
Now that’s unfair. Those Hercules movies are painful to watch. Gunslinger is no prize either.
I actually think that this is one of the better episodes of season 8. Not the best, but definitely in the top five. The movie is so goofy and incompetently made that I can laugh at it even without the riffing (especially at Prof. Earling’s “acting”). With the riffing and the host segments, it’s nearly non-stop amusement.
Also, I’ve always wanted to sing “When I Held Your Brain in My Arms” to a non-MSTie audience who won’t know the context.
@ Fart Bargo
Yeah, I suppose people of all ages can prejudge. Where is the harmony in the world that we all strive for? :cry: :cool:
Regarding silent films that could stand to be riffed, I would like to suggest Nosferatu. Sure it’s regarded by some as a horror classic. But not only is the pacing terrible (the first hour just drags, and then the final three-quarters of the book gets squeezed into twenty minutes), the acting serves as a reminder as to why most of the best remembered silent films are comedies.
Before I give you my rating for “Terror From The Year 5000”, allow me to explain my rating system to everyone:
One star is the best. I urge everyone to watch the movie or show with this rating.
Two stars is pretty good. It’s not a bad way to spend an evening.
Four stars is the worst. I would advise everyone to not waste your time.
Three stars is pretty good, too.
As for “Terror From The Year 5000”, I give it 17 stars!!
This ep is remarkable for two reasons:
I can never remember it afteward. And,no, I’m not talking about the riffing…I can never remember more than one or two riffs (a memory problem) but because I can remember almost nothing about the movie itself (and I have a sharp visual memory). Yeah, there is a catwoman in a sequin Burning Man type outfit, an island of some sorts, and some kind of lab? A heroine who is very passive. That’s it. All I remember a day after watching the thing.
I can’t explain it, as if the film has a black hole in it or something. And the only other ep that does this to me is the second half of Dr. Z. Maybe one other.
There other reason is this one actually grew on me. The first time I saw it I consigned it the bottom ten or twenty of MST. But the last time I saw it thought it was solid, and yes, BETTER than those eps Mike in Portland mentioned. All of them. Go figure.
As for black and white, it never an issue. I think the problem people have with this string of movies is the lack of variety and the fact that the Universal films and those shown with them (all AIP, right?) are in the somewhat competent, mediocre range, rather than being “colorfully” (I’m not talking about color film) bad in the Mansos/Outlaw/Gamera tradition.
Re Medium Petite: Interesting points about silent films have been made in this thread but my problem with silent movies has nothing to do with the sound. It is that they are basically filmed stage plays. Esp in terms of acting. Films in 30’s are hard to watch for the same reason those there is a gradual movement away from the stage with each passing decade. Still, I don’t think I could sit through one riffed.
Does nobody else think “When I Held Your Brain” was hurt by the fact it was lip synced? I always loved the song but when i see it in the actual episode it makes me cringe. At the very least they should have had Mike sing it or not done it at all.
Petite@#54 (loved you in the first Mortal Kombat movie, BTW)
Oh, the Creation Matrix and Vector Sigma provide plenty of other options, but go ahead,
“Cling to your pathetic fable of fluid-exchange!”
-The Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas-Past From the Future, who freakily enough, looked like a descendant of Crow T. Robot and Terminator Endoskeletons.
But your point @55 is a good one that hasn’t been fully addressed since these Season 8 threads started, and if I’ve contributed to any bashing by calling them “The first 9 B&W” over and over, even though I’ve said I’m fine with them, I’ll pose a theory:
The basic flip description of MST3K is “that show where they make fun of dumb monster movies” amongst people who don’t really know much about it. And to Joe-non-movie-geek, dumb monster movies = black-and-white + ’50s, because the only prior monster movies would be the Universal classics, and true ’60s monster fare didn’t start until ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and got so graphic throughout the ’70s and ’80s that they were no longer funny and cheesy. Of course, WE know better, but for those who’ve only heard of the show, that’s ALL MST3K is. When explaining Pod People to someone, even after I’d said it was an E.T./Alien cash-in, they expressed surprise that a stereotypically gay-acting character “appeared in a ’50s movie”. Okay, that particular title might have made them think I meant ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, and I obviously wasn’t explaining it to one of the “right people” who “get it”, but the point is that non-fans have an idea of MST3K being far less diverse than what it actually is.
However, when SciFi Channel first relaunched the show, it seemed that this new incarnation of MST3K was bending over backwards to conform to that non-fan understanding of the show. Sure it was just a 9-ep stretch in hindsight, but for all we knew at the time, that type of movie was all our favorite show would be allowed to do from then on. And there’s no way to more thoroughly defile a beloved story/franchise/concept than luring in more than just “the right people” by sacrificing the very integrity of the “it” that was already being gotten, in order to achieve the almighty “high-concept” that underlies summer blockbusters.
These threads have demonstrated that we share the same wide range of opinions on early season 8 as any other stretch of the show, but as we also dredge up memories of wondering whether MST3K was “going to be O.K.” despite the many changes mandated by SciFi, it’s perfectly understandable that feelings of anti-’50s-B&W sentiment should pop up.
And at the risk of proving that I can’t even go a single long post without making yet another Transformers analogy…I felt the same about Dreamwave when they produced the first new mass market TF comics in nearly a decade in 2002. It seemed like they decided to ignore die-hard Transfans who really appreciated the characters and mythology of the various T.V. series and complex storylines of the Marvel comics in order to dumb it down for fair-weather-fans who remembered 3 or 4 of the earliest cartoons and toy commercials. Dreamwave had to go bankrupt before we saw drastic improvement in that department, which really makes me appreciate that those fears about the bastardization of MST3K were just false alarms.
Yes, I know some of you feel the alarms were largely real, and I don’t want to trade B&W bashing for more SciFi era bashing, but I know you can’t keep all the cans of worms shut all the time…
And I apologize for the Sub-Zero joke at the beginning. I now realize that mostly the wrong people will get that.
Jazz Jazz Jazz…Generic Jazz
I liked this episode alot. It’s in my top 25, definitely.
My favorite riff, in a very good riff-heavy show was Bill’s “Now we’re gonna watch people watching a movie? What’s that about?!”
I think this would be a much higher rated episode, but alot of people have never seen it.
This was one of the shows that Sci-fi lost the rights to early on and they rarely showed it.
Not only did the professor play Tinsley, but he was also the pharmacist who got “lucky”(sort of) in Skydivers. What range.
Frederic Downs ladies and gentlemen, Frederic Downs. (Thunderous Applause)
Not a great episode. Not a bad episode. No episode is going to be very memorable in which the film is black and white, very slow, and the antagonists are a doughy guy and a woman in a disco ball outfit (who only shows up at the very end of the movie).
The only part I truly enjoyed however was the entirely off-topic from the movie host segment where the observers eat bowls of pills.
This is in my middle category, not the best episode or the worst, I enjoy if if I don’t watch it very often. My old tapes have bad audio anyway so it’s not very often. I really don’t think the Jimmy Carter jokes are too obscure, if I’m representative of the fandom, our brains have so much knowledge, trivial or otherwise, inside of them that we get the majority of references. Like “Give ’em hell, Harry!” in Hired!. I probably hadn’t seen the show yet (until Teenage Werewolf) so the string of black & white movies didn’t get me down.
” Bobo “BuckDat” Briggs says:
September 26th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Does nobody else think “When I Held Your Brain” was hurt by the fact it was lip synced? I always loved the song but when i see it in the actual episode it makes me cringe. At the very least they should have had Mike sing it or not done it at all.”
I think you have a point there. I like the song and performance, but it’s hard to ignore that the fact that Mike is not singing; even though Kevin was the better choice to sing that song.
I don’t think any fan, or even just someone who started watching the show and has heard Tom Servo, would think that was Mike singing that song.
Whether a movie is Black & White or in color makes no difference to how well riffed it is.
When I was a kid we didn’t even have a color TV until I was like 12 or 13 (and Jimmy Carter was president, by the way), so color was still a new idea to me. You get used to B&W when you watch it everyday, especially if you know nothing else. I think that’s why I still am fixated on old Star Trek, Emergency, & Adam 12 episodes when I see them nowadays, because they look so weird in color.
Amen, Manny S.
I don’t think it’s merely the black and white that is the problem. It’s the seemingly unending streak of black and white movies in the start of Season 8. They also got progressively worse, culminating in the super-dreary She-Creature. I know that I Was a Teenage Werewolf was after that episode, but at least that was just a Universal B-movie with a well-known TV star.
We’ve probably all heard the phrase, “In glorious black and white,” to describe a black and white movie. No movie of this Sci-Fi era qualifies for that description.
On the other hand, movies in color, like all of those Italian Hercules movies, are equally as painful to watch. San Fransisco International, with it’s muddled, 1970s TV movie color, is terrible as well.
I’d have to say that this was a “bottoming out” episode for me. I’m one of the ones that hated this series of b&w features, and I can truly say that this epiosde epitomizes that feeling best. Unlikeable characters, a storyline that’s confusing from the get-go, and M&tB’s best efforts to make the riffing entertaining wasted. Even though the next two eps are also in black and white, at least I remember She Creature and I Was a Teenage Werewolf as being more enjoyable. The movie just sits on your head and does its best to suffocate. The host segments are the best thing about the whole experience.
I’m experiencing stagflation. Classic.
#86: mikek– yes, it seems so.
Relative to the B & W discussion, Manny S mentions his viewing history so I took a ride on the way back machine myself and remembered that when I was a kid my parents ‘converted’ our 19″ B & W TV to a ‘color’. They did so by purchasing a a 10 cent plastic film that was tinted as follows; blue at the top, red/orange middle and green at the bottom. Now that made all these movies REALLY scary! Anyone else remember what that thing was called?
@ #10: Hollywood’s writers still don’t have a particularly firm grasp of science.
@ #45: As with my response to #10, plus carbon 14 dating was still fairly new when the film was made. So the average joe of the time probably wouldn’t have picked up on how flawed the film’s interpretation was.
Wow–I have to respectfully disagree with Sampo’s harsh view (host segments notwithstanding, of course), because this is one of my favourites. Yes, the movie DOES hurt, but the characters save it for me–Angelo, for example. And who doesn’t like Miss Blake (although she disappears far too soon, it is true)?
I especially enjoy Tom’s mimicking of the voice-over at the beginning of the movie throughout the movie. “Terror is on back order, and for that we apologize.” :)
I wonder what was behind the decision to have Mike lip sync to Kevin’s vocal track on the Observer’s song. Kevin has the best singing voice sure, but it’s not like they others would have embarrassed themselves.
I don’t have much to add here. I did think the host segments while clever were lacking on the funny. Meanwhile the riffing may not have been spectacular but was workmanlike and carried this episode.
Favorite Riffs:
Stock footage is replayed Hanna Barbara style. Mike “All right let’s try this scene again.”
A case is opened revealing a cat. Mike “Hey they wasted Toonces.”
Professor Erling “Think Bob, throughout human history what has the first activity of explorers of any new region?” Crow “genocide” Mike “slavery” Tom “disease blanket spreading?”
Victor adds an antenna to the experiment array. Mike “Blacked out in my area. I don’t think so.”
The boat engine cuts out. Mike “Claire get out and push.”
In one of her first film roles, Salome Jens plays the nurse and the title character, the woman from the future–the terror from the year 5000. She was born on May 8, 1935 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The 5’9” actress was briefly married (1964-1966) to actor Ralph Meeker.
Favorite lines:
Are you ready for terror?!
I realize now I may have oversold the terror at the beginning and for that I apologize.
There seems to be some sort of delay on the terror, I’ll just go in back and check what the problem is.
[Victor/John Stratton] “Look professor, I never pretended to be a scientist.” Or an actor.
And the statue embarks on its triumphant world tour.
“Goodness, did you spend the night here?” Nothing happened, and if it did it was consensual.
Remember, when making a dramatic film: be sure to use genuine actors.
[Car Rental] Well, I’m sorry sir, we only have Bonnie and Clyde’s death car left, but we’ll just charge you for a compact.
[Dr. Hedges/Ward Costello] He’s hover crafting. Martin Borman, stock car racer.
The Terror from the Year 5000 turned out to be a Ford with bad brakes.
All these random scenes simply abut each other to form a movie. It’s not a good movie, but there is plenty of off street parking.
The lab is in a tenement building?
[broken window on time machine] Oh, it’s the front windshield of any 1977 Buick.
He’s in Miss Havisham’s apartment.
He got Noel Coward to punch up his dialog.
[Claire Erling/Joyce Holden] Sorry teenage boys of the 50s, this’ll have to do. She’s all there boys, 100% scrawny spinster.
Swimming bonnet from Amish Beachwear Fashions of Charm, Ohio.
[cat in suitcase] They wacked Toonses. Well, he killed a “made” canary, so they had to do him.
[“Save Us” medallion] It’s a Necco Wafer from the Year 5000.
[Clair’s Bedroom] It’s like she rented the Grandma Room at Fanta Suites.
Folks, I checked the stock and Terror is on backorder.
Augusta National, proud to be restrictive.
The special letterbox edition of static.
[dead Angelo] Just a typical morning for Tom Waits.
[Nurse/Salome Jens] Florence Nightstalker. Did they drop her off in Nicaragua? Sinus pain can feel like a sparkler up your nose. Wow, nurses ruled back then, they would periodically declare Marshall Law.
[time machine explodes] Yes, a tiny sliver of payback from this movie.
“She said every fifth child was being born that way.” Well that explains Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey.
Final Thought: You can’t carbon date metal objects. I give this one 4 out of 5 stars.
i love this episode!
every time i watch it, i experience Stag-flation.
Not one of my favorites. Not a bad ep, just not great. I cringe whenever they even touch the lagoon water, much less go in it…
I did really like the host segments, though I’m apparently the only one who didn’t care for the song. It just didn’t seem comparable to the comedy-gold-standard of every other song they ever did. And technically, wasn’t the country radio sketch in Deadly Mantis a singing sketch?
Sampo, just wanted throw that this ep isn’t on official DVD yet. My OCD noticed that wasn’t on your above synopsis! I am better now.