Movie: (1993) In medieval times, a young boy comes under the protection of a wizard, and they plot against a malevolent ruler.
First shown: 9/26/98
Opening: Crow’s in the shop, but the loaner Crow has a radio!
Intro: Worried about a lack of results in her experiment, Pearl trades places with Mike!
Host segment 1: Pearl completes her observations, while Mike, Bobo and Observer enjoy a guy’s night
Host segment 2: The Sir Thomas “Neville” Servo Consort of the Middle Ages Just After the Plague Singers performs an ancient Air on a Delta Knight
Host segment 3: Leonardo Da Vinci visits, and he’s a good fella
End: The bots mourn the loss of Pearl; the annual Delta Knights pancake breakfast is a success
Stinger: Even his co-star is embarrassed by Mr. “I’m Comeeeng!!”
(234 votes, average: 4.20 out of 5)
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• A pretty good but not great final episode of the season, complete with a switcheroo in the theater, more workmen coming and going as they please, another choral treat from Sir Thomas, an almost TOO goofy movie and solid riffing throughout.
• Paul’s thoughts on this one are here.
• This episode is not yet available on DVD, and Shout officials despair that it ever will.
• Of course, the highlight of this ep is Pearl taking a turn in the theater, where she seems a little more Mary Jo-ish than Pearl-ish. But I think it works better that way. I’m not sure sustaining the Pearl character AND doing a good job riffing could really be pulled off. Yes, Mike did it with Eddie, but even that wore thin after a bit.
• I love the loaner Crow sketch. It may be one of my all-time favorites. Maybe it’s because that’s pretty much how my car runs.
• In the Intro segment, Servo says “No movie, no Mike.” I think he meant that the other way ’round. That was the best take they had? Or did nobody notice? Or am I missing something?
• Nice callback: “My boat.” a reference to a classic bad movie moment from “Waterworld,” referenced in episode 808- The She Creature.
• One drawback of this movie choice is that we get a rare foray into attempted comedy here, especially the scenes with Richard Kind. As expected, the riffing suffers a bit during these moments. Indeed, the whole movie really doesn’t seem to take itself very seriously, pretty much a prerequisite for a great episode.
• Self referential riff: “Later at Castle Forrester…”
• Several LOTR references: Legolas, Bombadil and Gollum.
• The medeival aire (words and lyrics by Kevin) is lots of fun. By the way, you can hear more of the “dirty” song at the end on the “Clowns in the Sky 2” CD.
• Also: Somebody put boobs on one of the Tom Servos! Yikes!
• Bill, in full James Gandolfini mode, is terrific as a mobbed up Leonardo Da Vinci in segment 3. He really sells it. One of the better hexfield viewscreen visits of the later years.
• Obscure reference: “Timothy? Where on Earth did you go?”
• Patrick is again a workman visiting the SOL. This time he’s “Eggs,” the pain leakage repairman.
• Always nice to see the big clown hammer make an appearance.
• For the pancake breakfast scene, the cast and crew pretty much called every relative and friend willing to be on camera. It held the record as the segment with the most number of people, though some of Moon 13 scenes in season 11 may have beaten it. In addition to Paul, they were: Benjamin Bakken, Andrea Jackson DuCane, Ari Hoptman, Katie Johnson, Mikey Johnson, Anne Kleinschmidt, Joe Kleinschmidt, Marie Kleinschmidt, Rick Kleinschmidt, Edna McKeever, Tom McKeever, Rachel Mertz, Dara Moskowitz, Kathleen M. Murphy, Sandy Oian, Gerald A. Pehl, Nick Prueher, David Rudrud, Tom Schufman, Krista Skogland, Lorin Skogland, Anna Stonehouse, Dan Tanz and Marshall Tebben.
• Cast and crew roundup: Nobody who worked on this movie worked on any other MSTed movie.
• CreditsWatch: Directed by Mike. Intern Nick Prueher would be back one more time in season 10 but this was intern Dan Tanz’ last episode.
• Fave riff: Sit outside and pet our millipedes! Honorable mention: Well, the movie lost me. It lost me and it’s trotting off without me.
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Poor David Warner. Long ago he seems to have made it his mission, or perhaps his curse, to add a touch of class to wretched movies like this one, at least until Jeremy Irons was old enough to do it for him. I seriously can’t think of one really good movie Warner I’ve seen Warner in. Straw Dogs?
I prefer the Deathstalker episode, although you have to leave the room during the “Clayton! Clayton!” bits. My favorite bit of this episode is undoubtedly Bill Corbett’s mobbed-up Leonardo. The trend continues of the ‘bots seeming not wanting to accept how good they have it with Mike (I mean, what if he were…a CRASH TEST DUMMY!!) Also as I’ve said before I like how the Sci-Fi episodes developed the idea of doing a routine through the closing credits of the movie and, even though Delta Knights‘s doesn’t exactly measure up to the Final Sacrifice TV series pitch or to the ’80s-hate at the end of Space Mutiny, I do think it’s an amusing interruption.
46-“One riff I can’t seem to place. Pearl’s “Dagnabit Lukie.””
Was that a Walter Brennan “Real McCoys” reference?
While this movie does little for me, the AMC Loaner Crow sketch is one of my absolute favorites. “He’s got a killer radio. COOL!” I think Melissa from the Allman Brothers was a great song choice too. “LATER WE’LL TAKE STUFF AND DO IT RIGHT?” The performances in this movie make me CRINGE. So awful.
@#51 – I think David Warner was good in the Omen. Fantastic death.
TO HAVE SAID GOODBYE TO THINGS!
For the longest time I thought the “loaner Crow” was the KTMA Crow in a cameo appearance… but after rewatching the episode, it clearly is not. Whoops.
Yay. The Brains finally got a Bootsy Collins riff in.
Sampo, how is the “Timothy” riff obscure? A lot of people know about that song! Remember, Timothy was a duck!
Richard Kind is in this movie? I don’t remember that. Hm.
Olivia Hussy is in this though!
“Lucky midget. Midgets get everything!” Yeah, now we’re starting to get into the “vulgar era” of MST3K, when Sci-Fi asked them to do more dirty humor, so they’d have a show like South Park. Obviously MST3K was never a vulgar show, but some of the jokes that we’ll hear in season 10, are quite out there by MST3K standards. Pop in “Horrors of Spider Island” if you don’t believe me.
Only two comments: It’s a shame to see David Warner come to this after Time After Time and The Man With Two Brains.
Second: Richard Kind’s scenes are painful and make me want to tear my hair out.
Did anyone notice, too, that Sarah “Superman II” Douglas gets lead billing and appears for maybe all of five seconds in a walk-on walk-off role?
#51: I seriously can’t think of one really good movie Warner I’ve seen Warner in. Straw Dogs?
I mentioned two of them in #55.
#47 CG
What movie were you watching?
“-So this movie is VERY confusing. The guy at the beginning adopts Tee, and then we find out all along that he was the real father? So…why didn’t he say so?”
He wasn’t Tee’s real father all along they were trying to imply how close they’d become over the years.
“-And why, exactly, is Leonardo da Vinci the biggest jerk in the universe? Not only is he just rude and whiny, but there’s nothing that says “admirable historical figure” like a guy forcefully sleeping with a sex slave. Oh, and constantly trying to sleep with her later, then calling her a filthy whore when she refuses.”
There was never any implication that Leonardo had sex with Athena. Plus paying for sex with a prostitute and forcefully having sex with a prostitute (do note that she did seem very accomodating for a slave) are radically different things. Additionally he only tried to sleep with her once to prove a point to Tee. Granted it was still a horrible character portrayal, I’m just confused by where you got your reasoning.
CG @ 47:
I agree with you. There were a lot of folks on the crew with nicknames. I have to admit I just watched this one for the first time in years and never noticed that before. There are at least 4 that I noticed.
I like this one over all, but I do call this one of my middle-of-the-road episodes. It certainly isn’t bad, but all I usually can say is “meh”. I love the host segments and Pearl in the theatre, but the movie and the riffing kind of slide by act three. Over all this is not by any means a bad episode…just an average one. :???:
David Warner also played Bob Cratchit in the George C. Scott version of “A Christmas Carol.” That was pretty good. But this movie… I like it but, not one of my favorites. I watch it and laugh, but nothing (outside the host segments) really seems to stick and I can’t give you any excuses as to why. Maybe it’s the knowledge that SciFi would rather show movies like this one than MST3K that galls me… Anyway, I always love me a good pancake breakfast!
I really liked David Warner as Klingon Chancellor Gorkon in Trek VI. Not so much as the Terran ambassador guy in Trek V, but maybe it was just the general stink of that particular movie that was tainting his performance.
If we want to talk about historical inaccuracies–wasn’t Leonardo gay?
How are we missing two legendary (to most geeks, anyway) David Warner villain roles, the Evil Genius in Time Bandits, and Dillinger/Sark/the Master Control Program in TRON!
Some other very geeky things he’s been in:
Star Treks 5 and 6
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2
Twin Peaks
Tom Jones (the Kubrick movie, not the Welsh singer)
Cross of Iron
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Airport ’79
The Company of Wolves
Come to think of it, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Tom Jones and Cross of Iron really aren’t “geeky.”
David Warner also appeared in episodes of Tales From The Crypt, The Larry Sanders Show, Babylon 5, Star Trek: TNG, Murder She Wrote and Brisco County Jr. He also did the voice of Ra’s Al-Ghul on the early-90s Batman cartoon.
One Star!
Sorry, I don’t know what came over me. I guess it’s worth about 2.75 stars to me in reality but I was just stunned to see how high it was rating. This is one of the ones I never transferred to DVD because I just couldn’t see putting it in my rotation, ever.
I’m not up on most of his appearances, but IIRC the geeky line I remember Warner best for would have to be “There are five lights.”
One of the most memorable moments of ST: TNG, actually.
I’m with Castle on this one, it’s not good, not good at all. It is better than The Screaming Skull, I’ll give you that.
This has always been one of my favorites, and I’m glad that most posters seem to agree. Just Servo’s “Aire For a Delta Knight” makes this an instant classic for me, plus we have all of the screwy history (and of course the pee-throwing.)
I would put this in my top ten, but with all of the episodes I keep putting in my top ten, there are about 50 in there now.
I’m not sure why people refer to this as a fantasy film when it has no fantasy elements. Everybody’s human, nobody performs magic, and vagueness alone does not a fantasy kingdom make.
Archimedes’s inventions were, by definition, examples of super-advanced SCIENCE, so it’s a science fiction film.
What I want to know is, if it’s generally agreed that the AMC Crow intro is one of the funniest bits of the season, why has it not been put in Ward E.
Random–write it up!
“I’m not sure why people refer to this as a fantasy film when it has no fantasy elements. Everybody’s human, nobody performs magic, and vagueness alone does not a fantasy kingdom make.
Archimedes’s inventions were, by definition, examples of super-advanced SCIENCE, so it’s a science fiction film.”
Ah, but T (and Baydool, seemingly) have a tingly Spider-Sense that kicks in for no rational reason! That’s a fantasy element . . .
I have a friend who goes to Ren Fests, and when Delta Knights was filming near a Ren Fest, she and a big group of other Ren Festers were invited to be extras. Unfortunately the scene she was in was cut in the MST version.
I learned from this episode that my name is gay. And South Park gave a head lice character the name Travis. Are my favorite shows trying to tell me something?
“Get me, I’m Saint Sebastian!”
When Leonardo says he’s from a town called Vinci, the guys scoff, but I can’t tell if they’re scoffing at the notion that Leonardo da Vinci was from Vinci (which is, as was already mentioned, true) or the notion that the filmmakers tried to shoehorn him into their crappy movie. It also occurred to me that if this episode had been made just a few years later, there would have been umpteen jokes about Leonardo looking like Orlando Bloom.
Still, it’s better than The DaVinci Code.
According to ‘kipedia, even the uncut version of the movie never explains why both the villain and the Obi-Wan figure are played by David Warner. My guess is they wanted two good actors to class up their movie a bit, but they couldn’t afford it, so they just had him play both parts. A possible missed riff opportunity when Vultare zaps one of his henchmen: “I would have started with lasers–eight o’ clock, day one!”
jjb3k @ 17:
Good call on the recycled bits being sold to Sci-Fi fans who hadn’t seen the CC eps – you left out the funny names for the hero in “Space Mutiny”, which had been done a few times in the CC era, and the Sci-Fi era fans kept going on and on about as though it hadn’t been done before.
As for this ep – a middling one, but it was a lot of fun to have Mary Jo in the theater. The AMC Crow was also funny.
This Guy @ 76:
Regarding the “Vinci” line, they’re scoffing at the clumsiness of the dialogue – the filmmakers think they’re cleverly slipping the character into the film, but in fact, the audience will immediately get that he’s Leonardo.
Ah, I found the one gem: Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron. I wouldn’t say Straw Dogs is bad exactly…but I can’t say it’s good either. In any case, considering everything else that happens in the movie, it’s easy to forget that David Warner’s even in it. Also I see that Peckinpah earlier cast Warner in The Ballad of Cable Hogue, which I know nothing of.
One of my LEAST FAVORITE eps of all time…right down there with She Creature and Hamlet. Blah…I expect more than chuckles from any ep and there are about ten eps that are only chuckles like this one.
I wonder if putting Pearl in the theater wasn’t an attempt to spice up what they might have realized, in the writing room, was going to be one of their duller eps. Frank and Dr. Forrester’s appearance there also took place during an ep that had some weaker than usual writing (for them), though Gypsy’s appearance doesn’t quite fall in line.
Ah, why couldn’t they have done From Hell it Came?
D
Don’t hold his goofball Delta Knights performance against Richard Kind. He had a great supporting role as a demented genius in last year’s Coen Brothers film A Serious Man. Both funny and profound. Highly recommended to MSTies as it takes place in suburban Minnesota during the 1960’s and has a running gag about “F-Troop.”
@62 Manny…
The 1963 Tom Jones is not by Kubrick but Tony Richardson. Maybe you’re thinking of Barry Lyndon.
I don’t think this has been mentioned yet, but David Warner was also in a two-part episode in A&Es “Horatio Hornblower” series, in which he plays a legendary captain in the British navy who has gone quite mad. Of course, this was about 2001, long after this episode aired, but still—further evidence that he has been in GOOD productions. Kudos to him for having a little campy fun, though.
I like this one a lot. Boobs and all.
What’s with the posting’s saying Timothy’s a duck? Did I miss a reference in the movie?
The song “Timothy” is about 3 miners trapped in a cave-in and only two emerge when rescue comes. The chorus of the song “Timothy” goes something like: “Timothy, Timothy where on Earth did you go? Timothy, Timothy God why don’t I know!”. So the reference in the movie seems to me to clearly be about the song.
Can’t believe we’re talking about David Warner (a pretty good character actor with lots of good and bad movie roles over a lengthy career) and nobody has mentioned that he was Billy Zane’s henchman on 1997’s “Titanic.” That’s the movie that 99% of people would recognize Warner from, and the one where he got to (unlike “Delta Knights”) punch the pretty boy lead actor in the stomach. :twisted:
mjmiller18 @ 84:
At the end of the “Pina Colada Song” sketch from Monster a Go Go, Joel says, “it’s a well-known fact that Timothy was a duck.” In the link I posted @ #29, songwriter Rupert Holmes tells the story that some record industry people tried suggesting that Timothy was a mule in order for the song to become more acceptable, but Rupert refused saying, ‘No, what can I tell you, they ate him.’
This episode has one of my all time favorite riffs.
When Leonardo and T are walking into the cave, Leonard goes off frame, and Mike screams out, “Oh God I’m Dying!” The timing and delivery of the riff are absolutely impeccable.
One thing that never sat right with me was….why was that guy peeing in the house? Granted he was peeing in a pan…but he was going outside to dispose of it….wouldn’t it just make more sense and be more sanitary just to go and pee outside?
At the end of the loaner Crow segment, Crow says that the loaner Crow is needed elsewhere, because someone else’s Crow has broken down. Mike seems puzzled at the idea that someone else out there has a Crow. Perhaps this other Crow is the one left behind in the cheese factory during “Time Chasers”?
Finnias Jones @ 81:
You’re right, and it’s not the first time I’ve made that mistake. I first saw them both around the same time, and I’m pretty sure I was drunk, so there ya go.
dad1153 @ 86:
I think I’ve repressed every moment from Titanic that wasn’t riffed in the Academy of Robots’ Choice Awards Special. “I’m gonna sink this bitch…”
I like this one. Lots of great moments in both the movie and the segments. Big fan of David Warner, particularly his voice over work.
As mentioned, I remember SciFi showing this movie prior to the MST version during their “Sword and Sorcery Week.” I think This very website alerted fans to when the movie was going to air.
REALLY great host segments, and Pearl in the theater is a hoot, but movie-wise, this one grates on my nerves. It seems like it takes FOREVER to get going, and once it does get going, it still just sort of wanders around aimlessly until the last 10-15 minutes or so. I do acknowledge that there are some really memorable riffs…it’s just that they’re extremely few and far between. The most I can go is “maybe” 3 stars, and that’s mostly for the non-movie elements of the episode.
This episode has a line that I still repeat to this day: when Crow is asking Leonardo just where the heck the movie is supposed to be taking place, Leo just shrugs and says, “Hey, it’s a bad movie!” Heck, I’ve said it about five times while typing this out, accent and all.
This is one of MST worst. I don’t laugh very much at all with this one.
This is one of my favorites, but only because it’s the only movie I’ve seen before it was on MST3k.
My 7th grade English teacher made us watch it.
A very good episode. This movie was full of fun, adventure, David Warner, and a supremely annoying kid hero character whose attitude continually makes me want to pummel him.
I’d love to know what possessed that “I’m Comiiiiing” guy to DO that. Definitely the most annoying overblown extra of the Sci-Fi era.
Long live Femme Servo’s breasts!
@33 – My guess would be Wizard of Oz gets referenced the most. There are A LOT during the Joel years, though they become much more infrequent during the Sci-Fi years. I’m currently working on tallying a list of Wizard of Oz references for Ward E.
A friend of mine and I were explaining to another friend the premise of MST3K. After telling him that some of the movies they riffed were some of the worst movies ever made, he responded, “They can’t be worse then the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” We asked him which one it was. “I don’t remember the title, but it had something to do with knights, Leonardo da Vinci was in there for some reason, and one guy played two roles.” My friend and I both cried out, “Quest of the Delta Knights!” and we immediately pulled out his tape of the episode to initiate our friend into the world of MST3K.
David Warner is, by all accounts, a fantastic and warm-hearted guy with a good sense of humour about his profession. He can do the serious stuff very well but has no problem hamming it up in large slices if called upon to do so! He just enjoys being able to perform, whatever way it comes.
As for Delta Knights, I’ve never really got on with it. But looking at these comments, I may well give it another try.
The Servo Choir, as before, is an unqualified joy though.
“Ah, but T (and Baydool, seemingly) have a tingly Spider-Sense that kicks in for no rational reason! That’s a fantasy element . . .”
True. Unless they’re mutants or something scientific like that. ;-)
“True. Unless they’re mutants or something scientific like that.”
Yeah, that’s why the X-Men were on the cover of Science a couple years back. :razz: :mrgreen:
—
“you left out the funny names for the hero in “Space Mutiny”, which had been done a few times in the CC era, and the Sci-Fi era fans kept going on and on about as though it hadn’t been done before.”
I note that it was still more plentiful, better-delivered, and way funnier than any previous attempt (that I’m aware of . . .).