Re-makes are not new to MST, since the Gamera movies were first done on KTMA and CT did their own memorable take on “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”. I’m just wondering which movies would you like to see RT or CT take another crack at. My choice would be “Superdome”, originally done on KTMA. It’s an OK TV movie with a typical “Grand Hotel” multiple-storyline plot and a lot of riffable moments. The problem was that the KTMA version, being ad-libbed, has a fair amount of dead spots. At one point, Joel even says, “I can’t think of anything funny to say.” I think this one would work for a second try. An alternate choice would be “The Green Slime”, though I suppose that one would technically be a first try.
I’m going to go with “Invaders from the Deep.” I think a marionation movie could be very riffable. Which movie would you pick, and why?
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I don’t know, “Starfighters” could REALLY use a redo. With such promising material to work with, and they come up with THAT?!!
#2 pick: “Gorgo.” It starts out so beautifully (“I put the propane tanks on by mistake!”) and it degenerates into crap right after the island forms right next to the “pretty damn sinkable” boat.
Well, then again, “Gorgo” was really too good to be on MST anyway. A much more senseable pick would’ve been “Reptilicus” or “The Giant Claw.” At least with THOSE movies, they would’ve had something to work with.
One of the problems I initially had with CT redoing Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (which might be my favorite MST ever) was I found that I was waiting for or comparing the riffs to the MST episode. I still expect Crow to say to the reporter as Santa when Mrs. Claus is introduced, “Hands off!” The second time around I relaxed and listened to the new riffs and tried not to think of what was said before and wound up enjoying the CT episode a great deal. I still prefer the MST version to CT, but I do love both. However, since there is no repeating of riffs, that could make some episodes difficult to redo. No doubt many episodes could use a little punching up, but an entire redo would be quite the undertaking for either crew and could change the tone we love in some episodes.
Having said all that, I will select Manhunt in Space for CT, I think a 50’s SF adventure is up their alley.
For RT, Mike said in the ACEG, The Slime People would be great to redo. I say go for it, Mike and CO.
I’m going off on kind of a tangent here, but here’re four films I thought were actually pretty decent and didn’t deserve to be riffed:
The aforementioned “Gorgo”
“The Crawling Eye”– some performances are sort of cheesy (the zombified Brett, Hans the bartender, Prof. Crevette) and strings are visible on the Eyes, but they looked too damn cool for me to beg to differ. Kind of a smart tactic not to show the Eyes until the last moments of the film, builds suspense in a “Whodunit?” fashion; NOT a smart tactic to rename the film “The Crawling Eye” from its original title, “The Trollenberg Terror.” Kind of telling us the ending before we see the movie! Plus, Forrest Tucker/Lawrence Payne/Jennifer Jayne’s performances are all great; Tucker’s, especially, a lot better than they give him credit for.
“Village of the Giants”– no one’s going to agree with me on this one, but I like the original film too much, mainly for its’ soundtrack and the good-looking girls.
“The Deadly Mantis”– again, no one’s going to agree with me on this one, but Craig Stevens/Alix Talton/William Hopper’s performances are all pretty good, given the dialogue and subject matter they’re forced to work with. Plus, the mantis was way too damn cool for me to boo-and-hiss.
I’m still waiting for CT or Rifftrax to do “Schindler’s List”.
Cabbage Elvis (#27) no more Hamlet. I’d rather have a papsmear done than go thru that again.
Really I’d like to see any and all redone, just to make them topical.
I agree with a lot of already mentioned nominations. Robot Monster especially, and also all the first season movies, and some of the KTMA movies.
I also like the idea of a re-riff of Manos the Hands of Fate by RT.
It would also be interesting to see how CT would do Plan 9 from Outer Space.
I even like the idea of the Coleman Francis trilogy being re-riffed. I also agree with the poster, that I also loved the original riffings, but that it would be cool to have multiple riffings of them.
I think it’s a bad a Idea to re-riff a film, even if it’s the worst episode. When Santa VS. Martians CT came out I said, “No thanks, You can’t remake a great hit.”
I gotta go with “Robot Monster.” It’s one of the better season one episodes as it is, but if it had been done later, after they’d really hit their groove, it could have been one of the truly great ones. The movie is loaded with so much fodder that it’s ripe for a re-do.
I agree with Robot Holocaust, Robot Monster, Project Moon Base, and Beginning of the End because they are greatly riffable movies that they didn’t do so well with. But I think SST: Death Flight, Untamed Youth, and Moon Zero Two are pretty good already. Phase IV, Hangar 18, and City on Fire are also pretty good already.
BTW, The Green Slime pilot that was shown by Joel and is available on YouTube isn’t complete. I’ve seen screenshots from the movie segments that don’t appear in what was shown (unfortunately from the now-defunct MST3K Picture Archive; maybe they are on the Scrapbook tape). It looks like Joel edited out the movie segments for this showing. Please tell me someone else besides me noticed this.
JimmyBruce(#55) Oh, c’mon. Hamlet couldn’t get any worse…or COULD IT?
Alternately, I think Crawling Hand should be redone without the horrible Fine Young Cannibals impressions.
I’d like to see the supermarionation ones redone. Really, I think it would be a good idea to redo all of the KTMA ones. Well, minus the ones that already have.
Given how poorly Space:1999 has aged, the KTMA “Cosmic Princess” episode could have been done better with scripted jokes, and not just saying “It’s the Dairy Queen planet” over and over… :roll:
#55: “Cabbage Elvis (#27) no more Hamlet. I’d rather have a papsmear done than go thru that again.”
Oh, I don’t know. I’d love to see a riffing of Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet”, as overripe a slice cheese as ever had the name of “Shakespeare” attached.
I think they should play banjos while they riff on movies.
Seriously, though, if they redid The Green Slime, every time the hero comes on screen they could go “JEEERK!”
And they could challenge themselves to redo Manos completely different to see what they could come up with. And I pick Teenager’s from Outer Space because I saw it long before MST3K and always thought it had so much more potential. I thought they barely scratched the surface.
I think RT should redo manos and see what they come up with. Alternatly TISCWSLABMUZ should get a CT treatment. I think that both episodes are fine and really speak the best of their respective seasons and seeing a mostly new set go after them should come up with entirely new takes and good ones I would think. Just to see how bill would take a movie like manos is worth it and to see joel trace and company come up with lyrics to go along with the horrible musical numbers in zombies would be worth the price of admision. Alternatly they could take on the almost sequal at the same time as ray dennis steckler did one before his passing.
I’d like to see RT do The Castle of Fu Manchu. I love that episode, but I’d like to see what Mike and Bill could bring to the table.
Hangar 18!
It would be nice just to have a watchable copy of Hangar 18 but they could definitely do a better job riffing it, today.
How about a Riff-Off between CT and RT on the remake of Manos? Not as a competition, but more of a celebration of all things MST3K.
It’ll make a million, I’m tellin ya…
Absolutely agree with Drunken Fist (#59), Robot Monster is the perfect example of movie cheese. I’d love to see it reriffed.
I want to see Red Zone Cuba redone with Steven Seagal as Griffin.
oops, sorry, I mistook “redone by MST3K” for remake.
If RT or CT had “host segments” like MST, I would like to see them redo Season 2’s “Hellcats”, just so we could get a (hopefully) better set of host segments than the flashbacks employed at the time by MST. But it would also be fun to watch the movie riffs have a do-over too.
Other than that, I could see CT or RT giving a newer treatment to the MST episodes mentioned by everyone above, once in a great while- but since MST was canceled in 1999, there are hundreds of movies released in that time frame (especially the many turds the Sci-Fi channel has offered us on the weekends) that can provide plenty of work for CT and RT (as well as many more from the 50s, 60s etc.- like I remember a made-for-tv movie, releaed in the mid-70s I think, called “Werewolf of Woodstock”, with a werewolf driving a dune buggy over the fields of the old Woodstock site- stuff like that).
Thanks for reading- see ya!
Robot Monster!! I want to see that Automatic Billion Bubble Machine again!
They could also do this one in 3-D, I think.
TomBomb (#75): “Robot Monster!! They could also do this one in 3-D, I think.”
Ya Learn Something New Every Day Dept.: For some reason, I’d thought the 3-D version was lost, but I see on Google that it still gets screened that way occasionally, although it doesn’t seem ever to have been released on DVD in 3-D.
While we’re on the subject of MSTed 3-D films, “Revenge of the Creature” was also in 3D. No real reason to re-riff that one, though, I guess. In the unlikely event that Shout! ever gets the rights to release it, they could potentially upgrade it to 3D by isolating the Shadowramma and dropping it onto the 3D version.
I’ve always though it would be interseting to see Rifftrax do some of the Joel Mst’d movies and vice versa see CT take on some of Mike’s Mst’d movies. That being said I’d like to see rifftrax do “Teenagers From Outerspace” and “Creeping Terror” and CT do “Santa Claus” and “Boggy Creek II: the Legend Continues”. There are many more I’d like to see tackled this exchange but those 4 would be good starts in my view.
#75-#76 – Rhino (I’m 90%) released Robot Monster in 3-D sometime in the mid-90s, before I was really watching MST3k. It is AWFUL. It’s just a blurry, headache-inducing mess. If it wasn’t for the movie being so jaw-droppingly bad and hilarious in it’s own right, I never would have watched it again. A few years later, Image released a version in ASTOUNDING 2-D (I’m quoting the cover). Much less irritating to watch this way.
Know what I’d love to see? CT or RT take on the king of all riffed movies, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. It would definitely test their muster since it’s been riffed and reriffed all over the world for over thirty years. It would really be a challenge to come up with something new.
seconding your tangent #53 and adding to the list ‘the robot vs. the aztec mummy’.
believe it or not, I’ve yet to see the MST version and in preparation to do just that, watched the TCM airing of it and really liked it. I taped it and have watched it a few times and I think it stands alone as a very enjoyable movie watching experience just as it is.
shocking?
Looks like it’s a wash – Robot Monster by a mile.
I’ve been saying for years that they should re-riff this, it’s good to see so many others feel the same.
So what are the two riff-giants waiting for?
It is probably cheap as heck to put together a good episode of this.
Off the subject, I’d like to see some more Bert I Gordon riffings – Empire of the Ants, Food of the Gods, The Cyclops, Attack of the Puppet People…There’s lots of good fodder just waiting to be riffed.
Post 74 Stoneman. Wait! There is a movie called “Werewolf of Woodstock” with a werewolf driving a dune buggy while being cased by Michael Parks? WHY AM I JUST NOW FINDING OUT ABOUT THIS? WHAT ELSE HAVEN’T I BEEN TOLD?
I have to second #17’s nom for SST Death Flight. It’s the one KTMA episode that just about reaches the same level as an average post-KTMA episode. Plus it’s such a goofy, hopelessly dated, and 100% predictable TV movie.
Post 82 Son of Bobo:
I swear to god this is true! Now, it was a long time ago, and the 70s (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean?)- but I have that firm memory of the movie title and that one scene because it was so ridiculous. I haven’t had time to research IMDB or anything to verify this, but if I find out something I will post it (or if anyone else wants to be bothered to do it, that would be great). God, I hope I am right- if not, as Tom Servo declared in “I Was A Teenage Werewolf” (when asked to be captain of the ship), I will be shown not to know the difference between shinola and that other stuff etc.
Thanks for reading- see ya!
Definitely, “Robot Monster.” What it could have been with a full writing staff behind it, the mind reels.
But then, I always thought they should have ended the series with “The Green Slime.” It would have brought the whole experiment full circle.
Pearl did threaten to do a John Agar film festival – there’s so much to choose from.
Post 84 Stoneman
I saw a clip on youtube. I believe Werewolf of Woodstock would be excellent for riffing. Hopefully CT will become aware of it. Thanks.
Post 84 Son of Bobo: No, thank you for letting me know, and maybe we will indeed one day have it riffed.
I’m going to have to say…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ……………..The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy. Just because I thought the movie and short were just fantastic…but the riffing was rather sub-par. Watching “Radar Men from the Moon”, you’ll notice a distinct lack of references. The only one I can name is the joke about the scientist mixing drinks being called “Professor Tom Collins”. Other than that, it was pretty dry. Although, there were a few good ones in the movie (most notably Cambot’s tricks: the singer getting muted and the men peeing on the ground) it still isn’t a classic. So I recommend it for Cinematic Titanic, just because I think it would be better for the people who did it to look back on it, not just ones who wrote it or saw it.
The Green Slime that is viewable on Youtube is as complete as it can be. The host segments were really the only part done for that ‘pilot’ such as it was. There is only one ‘riff’ that I remember and it’s said as Joel is leaving the theater. So, what you are seeing is what there is to see. Trust me, we dragged Joel over the coals about this and that’s all there is.
On topic though, Robot Monster would be great to revisit. It’s one of the best of season 1, but honestly…that ain’t saying a whole lot.
All the creepier movies should be the do overs. Manos, Santa Claus, Merlin’s shop of mystical wonders, Wild World of Batwoman (Sheesh, we missed the Professor G. Octavius Neon as Clayton Forester twin). The host segments with Dr. Forester should have been great. Torgo’s pizza delivery can’t be redone though.
Some like Phantom Planet are lovely as is, the comments on the unguarded disintegrator plate are wonderful.
Finally, before anything, they need to do “Alone in the Dark (2005)” or Blair Witch Project(1999). “Alone” especially, I always wanted to see Mike take a collect call from Cthulhu. But with Blair we’d have the visuals of a flashlight on Tom Servo’s dome. The mind reelz.
cambottalks #89: Really? I thought RvsAM was a pretty strong episode. Then again, I did come in with low expectations when I first watched it.