What about a thread discussing people’s favorite obscure jokes?
Ooh! Good one! This isn’t normally the way MST3K does things, but in this case I think it’s appropriate: Please explain the riff so everybody gets it. (As usual, if you use more than one link, it may take a bit for your post to appear.)
Also, maybe you could include a word or two about what this riff means to you (since I find that a MSTie’s favorite obscure riff usually speaks to who that person is).
It’s hard to pick an all-time favorite, but one I dearly love is from episode 508- Operation Double 007:
[In the voice of KITT from “Knight Rider”] “Michael, I want all the episodes of ‘Captain Nice’ burned.”
Captain Nice was an INCREDIBLY forgettable 1967 one-season loser starring William Daniels, the voice of KITT. Similar to the “Addams Family”/”The Munsters” competition, it had a competing show (another one-season loser) called “Mr. Terrific“…but I digress.
I think I love this riff because I was 10 years old when these shows came out and it seemed like TV was talking right to me, and I never forgot that feeling.
What’s your pick?
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Admittedly, it’s probably not obscure to anyone who’s studied music, but the riff in Century 21 Calling where the narrator says “presto!” and Mike responds with “Well, andante, really” gave me a good chuckle once I learned what andante means.
Re: #46 (Brandon)
‘Another obscure riff would have to be “THE KINGDOME!!!!” from MST3K: The Movie, when the rubble lands on top of the bug mutant… Everytime I’ve shown MST3K: The Movie to someone, they think Servo is referencing the Seattle Kingdome getting demolished, and I inform them, “This movie was made in 1995. The Seattle kingdome didn’t come down until, years later.”’
I believe this is a reference to the 1994 incident in the Seattle Kingdome when a portion of the ceiling collapsed into the seats shortly before a game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdome#1994_ceiling_collapse
When Greta picks up the porn magazine from Mitchell’s couch (in “Mitchell”), Joels says (in the chubby blue line’s voice) that there’s a Kilgore Trout piece in it. I never got that reference, but because it’s from my favorite episode, I remembered it. And then when I finally read my first Kurt Vonnegut novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five”, I figured it out. A great joke: literate and relevant, but hidden away just so it made sense to only those who got it.
This is a fun topic. May I suggest a follow-up Weekend Discussion Thread of those riffs that are so obscure or odd that fans have never figured out. Sort of a wiki approach to deciphering those truly mysterious riffs.
Back in the early nineties, there was a commercial for AT&T that had the line “You’re not dealing with AT&T”. It must have been played over a million times over about a hundred different stations. For those of you who don’t remember, you can find it on YouTube. Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WySB7je2x54
Anyway, in the commercial, there’s a man in a phone booth trying to call someone and he keeps getting the same guy that says something like “coma-cama-bee-side”. That same line was used in “Pod People” when Rick is trying call for help on a telephone but can’t get through. Tom Servo mutters that same “coma-cama-bee-side” line a couple of times as Rick and Uncle Bill try to make a call. When I first watched this episode in 1991, it just blew me away that MST3k would reach for such an obscure but still somewhat memorable quote from a commercial of that same time period.
Today, that commercial is long forgotten to most folks, but whenever I put the “Pod People” DVD in the player, that line still makes me laugh.
By the way, Crow quoted the line “You’re not dealing with AT&T” in “Stranded in Space”.
Oh, and another one – in “Devil Doll”, when Vorelli is arguing with Hugo about ham and wine, he asks “A puppet? Drinking wine?” Crow immediately adds “Spo-dee-o-dee?” This sounds like a nonsense riff, but it’s a reference to an R&B song by Stick McGhee from 1949, “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee”. (Apparently “spo-de-o-dee” was a placeholder nonsense word substituting for “motherf***er” )
This song apparently inspired a real drink which combined wine, fruit juices, and sometimes hard liquor. Jack Kerouac mentions this concoction frequently in “On the Road.”
I could easily have missed all this, except for the Richard Thompson cover of “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” from “1000 Years of Popular Music.” I’m a big Richard Thompson fan, y’see….
This thread really highlights how one person’s obscure is another person’s common knowledge. In reading all these entries so far, I found I was more interested in the kinds of things people seem to know about than I was in the riffs themselves.
The other thing it reminds me of is how so many of these obscure riffs inspired me to learn what they were talking about so I could at least understand the reference, if not also get the joke. I’m sure I’m not alone in this.
I couldn’t pick a favorite, and like everyone has said, your mileage may vary on how obscure they actually are, but here are two:
I was impressed in The Touch of Satan when they noticed that the dad/grandpa/whatever-he-was looked a lot like Herbert von Karajan, longtime conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. I wish that wasn’t such an obscure reference in pop culture terms, but it’s not at all obscure if you know anything about music.
The other one that always gets me is the series of running priest gags in The Rebel Set when the thief in priest garb is running (running priest gags, get it?) through the train yard, with some very specific church Latin references, culminating for me when he’s hitting the other guy and the riff is I AM IN A STATE OF GRACE! Again, not completely obscure if you know anything about priests and Catholicism, but still pretty arcane stuff. And hilarious.
Good topic!
I’m a bit too young for many of the more obscure references on the show, but here are some obscure (or not?) references that quickly come to mind for me.
First, some video game references. Parts: The Clonus Horror had a running gag where one of the random scientists looked like one of the Super Mario Brothers, even namedropping Yoshi (the series’ dinosaur buddy) in one scene. Someone even decided to hum the original game’s underground theme while characters (I believe) were waiting in an elevator.
Devil Fish had a much newer video game reference – referencing the original PlayStation’s Parappa The Rapper and a memorable line from its first level, “Kick, punch – it’s all in the mind!” You could argue they picked/used that reference because the episode was (likely) around the time the crew shot a promo for Sony’s PlayStation Underground. Tom is notably seen in the promo trying to play Parappa. You can catch the riff in Devil Fish during a scene right after commercial where thugs break into the electrician’s business and rough him up.
Finally, Hobgoblins has a reference to former PGA golfer Casey Martin when the Hobgoblins escape and flee the film studio on a golf cart. Martin sued the PGA Tour over the right to use a golf cart because of a disability, though a quick Wiki search notes that he eventually won the lawsuit in 2001, well after MST3K was over. So now I’m confused!
As a pastor, I’ve always loved the religious references in the show. I think my favorite one is from Fire Maidens from Outer Space. When the Fire Maidens are doing their fertility dance Crow (I think) goes into his Minnesota voice and says, “Gee, liturgical dance sure is strange, but it brings the kids in.” It’s funny because a) what they’re doing DOES look an awful lot like liturgical dance, b) his voice sounds almost exactly like a Lutheran church lady, and c) it’s exactly the thing that a Lutheran church lady (a nice one anyway) would say when confronted with something different in worship. You wouldn’t want to know what the less-than-nice ones would say.
One that hit me was in the short ‘A Date with your family’ – Right at the start, when the eldest son looks in the oven, you hear Mike call ‘Sylvia?’ – Quite a dark reference to Sylvia Plath’s demise, I thought!
Nothing dark about it! Committing suicide is a great career move for a minor poet.
Can’t remember any of the episodes these are from right now, but
“I have feet like Billy Pilgrim” and “Listen,Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.” Are from Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.
Also “The owl footage is not what it seems.”
Is from Twin Peaks.
Wish I could remember what they were from.
#46: Actually, the Seattle Kingdome did have a disastrous and highly-publicized collapse of part of its roof in 1994, which is more likely to have inspired the riff than an obscure European stadium’s woes.
At the start of Catalina Caper, during the teens dancing on the beach at night around bombfires, Joel and the bots begin to chant, “Burn the witch, burn the witch we shall cleanse the earth with fire”…and Crow says rather quietly, “How do you know she’s a witch?” Which is clearly from Monty Python and the Holy Grail”…but I actually believe that it was an ad lib from Trace…it’s too understated and servo’s riff comes right on the heels of it. I look forward to it everytime I watch this episode.
Whoops, someone already responded to that. Nevermind!
I love Crow’s moment of frustration with the talky “hamburgers in the front seat of the car” scene in “Indestructible Man”. He yells “Turn it off! Turn it off!”. That’s a reference to the movie “Hardcore”, and the scene in which George C. Scott is shown a porn movie starring his daughter. Trace’s impersonation is spot on, as usual. I believe he also does the same riff in at least one other movie, but I can’t recall which one.
I always liked how Crow begins his essay on Hercules and his son in Hercules and the Captive Woman when some actual facts like that the Herc was also known as Hera-cles in ancient Greece.
In the Touch of Satan, also, Servo calls our hero a Maverick driving Klutie which is apparently such a obscure reference that Tom immediately explains that Klutie is a old Scotttish word for devil.
OOPS, sorry, didn’t explain the GG reference- GG Allin was a completely insane punk rocker who was prone to hitting himself in the head with his microphone until was bleeding profusely from the face, playing nude in front of his audiences, and flinging his own poo at them. Not kidding. Prolly the most crazy thing I’ve ever seen. Anyhoo, that’s the explanation for the rifftrax reference back at #18.
And Zappa, well, Jimmy Carl Black was the drummer for the original Mothers Of Invention, as explained in the old episode guide, but they’ve made references to other Zappa albums as well, Lumpy Gravy and Weasels Ripped My Flesh come to mind.
Still gotta think about this. I just saw the post on twitter and clicked over!
#64, I might be wrong but I think that Joel says Turn It Off during a plot-point film clip shown in either Amazing Colossal Man or Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Crow then says I feel so dirty. Does that ring a bell with anybody?
In Danger!! Death Ray, Scarface (better known as “Abe Lincoln, TIME COP”) is hiding behind a car and I believe the police come running up to apprehend him. Anyway, while he’s hiding out there, Mike, in a very bland voice, says “Help me, Kirk.” It’s a brilliant riff. They also use it in other episodes, but this is the best usage of it.
To explain, one of the final episodes of the original Star Trek, “The Savage Curtain”, finds Kirk, Spock, Abe Lincoln and Surak (the founder of the Vulcan way of life) in a battle against Kahless (the Klingon version of Surak, I suppose) and some other notorious killers (I think Genghis Khan is one of them as well). It turns out that these aren’t real people but only some sort of simulation being carried out by an alien rock that wants to understand human behavior. At one point in the episode, old Honest Abe is kidnapped and he calls out, “Help me, Kirk!”, but it’s really just Kahless doing Abe’s voice.
So, as a lifelong Trekkie, I thought the nod to such an obscure and bizarre moment in Trek history was hilarious.
In “Village of the Giants”, “Genius” (Ron Howard, aged about 12), is working in his chemistry lab. Something happens, I think perhaps he has created the animal-enlarging “goo” which the pet cat has eaten. The cat grows to huge size.
The camera shows his pet dog rear up on two legs and give a yelp in alarmed reaction.
Crow (Trace), at just that point, says (in a high “doggie” voice:) “Mein Fuhrer!
I can walk! ARF!”
I find this “Dr. Strangelove” reference particularly hilarious.
In #524 “12 to the Moon”, the old guy at the beginning says something like, “May the Lord be with you”, to which Tom responds “And also with you” which is part of the Christian communion liturgy (at least it is in Methodism). You probably don’t know this if you haven’t spent a good deal of time in church, which is why I love this riff so much. Surely, MST3K is a show ordained by the heavens.
Also, in “Jack Frost”, Tom says “Peter must be walking around denying everyone this morning” which refers to the time when Saint Peter denied knowing Jesus after the rooster crowed three times. I love religious riffs that sort of “twist” Bible stories. Fun!
RE #50: I thought the “Adolph Hitler on vibes” line was from the opening scene of “The Rebel Set” in the coffee house run by crime mastermind Edward Platt when the camera pans by the band. (I think the vibist is really Victor Feldman, a great Jazz vibist who did lots of Hollywood studio work and also worked with drummer Shelly Manne and Miles Davis).
910 “And if the women don’t think you’re handsome, atleast you’ll be handy.” A refrence to the handyman corner segments on the Red Green Show. Even if you knew of the show, you would have to be a big fan to know about that line. I remember being amazed when I heard the riff.
I just awoke and my mental filters are off. When I read, “Michael, I want all the episodes of ‘Captain Nice’ burned”, my FIRST thought was “burn” a slew of favorite shows to DVD, thus indicating he liked them. Maybe I’m the only one who thought this, or possibly technology has made the nature of this joke change.
I don’t know how obscure this is, but in Space Mutiny, when they say Kalgan blow me away, the guy kind of looks like the guy in that movie Goodfellas, where he got shot.
Re: Gomez. The Best Brains people have explained they sometimes referred to Gomez DuPre (sp?), a Minneapolis-area wanna-be stand-up comic who did a lot of open-mike nights.
More of its time than obscure, but I think the crew reading letters thing in EEGAH! has a letter-writer saying, “Superman is a comic book, not a graphic novel!” to which Crow replies “Superman’s dead, kid.” I’m pretty sure this is a reference to the then-recent ‘Death Of Superman’ storyline in DC Comics, where Superman died fighting a monstrous alien. (He got better.)
@56: the priest gags in ‘the rebel set’ never fail to crack me up. i love the “father mannix” gag especially.
“duh-duh-duh-duh–amen!”
I’m still getting jokes from MST3K even after all these years. But one of my favorite was in ‘Bride Of The Monster’ when we see Detective Fingerless Bird-Guy and Tom starts having him sing the theme for ‘The New Zoo Review’. Jeez, theres a reference to make you feel old.
@34
It seems like several people here remember the Raceway Park commercials. I’d see them during breaks on “The Uncle Floyd Show” on channel 68. (And, if you’re not from New Jersey, that’s pretty obscure in itself.)
One riff I remember that’s more obscure than you might think: during “Marooned” (a.k.a. “Space Travellers”, there’s the scene where Gregory Peck is kinda-sorta trying to convince one of the ship’s crew to commit suicide to save the others. During his conversation, Peck asks, “Are we talking about the same thing?” and Joel (as Peck) says, “Are you talking to me?”
On the surface, that’s based on the famous scene from “Taxi Driver”. But, actually, it’s a take-off on an SCTV bit about a promo for “Taxi Driver” starring Gregory Peck (as played by Joe Flaherty).
Oh, and say what you will about “Captain Nice”, but it had a catchy theme song.
#11 I remember The Inhumanoids, and that riff knocked me out! Oddly, I played with the toys as a kid, but never knew there was a cartoon until much later.
#72 I love that riff, but it bothered me that Mike got the quote wrong. It’s supposed to be “If the women don’t find you handsome, they can at least find you handy.”
There are probably plenty of obscure riffs I’m forgetting, but these spring to mind:
In Attack of the Giant Leeches, there’s a shot of a dog howling, followed by the closeup of another dog. Joel voices the dog, saying “I know, I know, you saw the best minds of your generation destroyed by madness,” which is a reference to the poem “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg.
In Warrior of the Lost World, Servo points out that a lot of the extras resemble celebrities. One that cracks me up is “René Auberjonois,” because A. the person in question does look just like him and B. almost nobody knows what René Auberjonois looks like because his only well-known role is under heavy makeup.
In Parts, a walkie-talkie makes a sound like one of the electronic sounds in “Fashion” by David Bowie, and Servo starts to sing the song.
This one’s probably obscure outside of the Midwest. Someone (I think it’s Servo again) mimicks Ray the Menard’s Guy, shouting “It’s a giant spider invasion of savings at Menard’s!” One of my all-time favorite riffs.
Hi everyone– I’m a longtime fan of the show but only recently found this site. Fist time posting.
Some of these may not be that obscure, but a couple come to mind from episodes I’ve watched recently. In “Horrors of Spider Island,” when the girls are trapped on the island in a cabin and one of them wanders off and is looking down into a pond, Crow says something like “she’s a sensual Henry David Thoreau.” Thoreau was a poet and author who wrote Walden, detaling the time he spend living apart from society and close to nature in a cabin by a pond.
In “Phantom Planet,” the astronomer guy is being put on trial and one of the alien girls steps forward with a very early-sixties hairstyle. One of the bots says “Laura Petrie, you are convicted of treason!” a reference to Mary Tyler Moore’s character in the early sixties “The Dick Van Dyke Show” who wore a similar hairstyle.
And in “Soultaker,” when the Soultaker is flashing back to riding in a carriage with his girlfriend, Crow starts singing “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” from “Oklahoma”, also about a carriage ride. I’ve always been amazed by how wide and deep the cultural knowledge of the show’s writers was.
From Catalina Caper. At the beginning there are all the lily white people dancing on the beach near a bonfire. Someone (can’t remember who?)says something to the affect of the kids are dancing in the Sartre’s inpenitrable (sp?) void. Mike in a beatnik voice says, “No Exist, baby.”
Jean Paul Sartre was a famous French Exotenolist (crackers! I can’t spell). His philosphy came down to life is meaningless, hence that word I couldn’t spell angst (although that’s a really over simplication of it). No Exist is a name of a major book/play that he wrote. The baby part comes from the fact that beatniks and other hep cats really dug Sartre.
I don’t know if this counts, since it’s also my favorite “naughty” riff, but it is this.
Episode 901: The Projected Man.
“Because I can, if you must know.”
This is in reference to the rat that is about to be “projected” and how he gets a little too close to his “area”. It’s very subtle and I only just got it the last time I watched The Projected Man, which was for the weekly discussion.
Not so sure if mine is that obscure, but it is the line “There was a Pogo’s song on the radio!” from Eegah! and occurs right after Roxy’s first encounter with the desert giant. The Pogo’s had a hit with “Alley Oop,’ based on the comic strip about a caveman. But it’s such a niche song I am sure a lot of younger viewers were scratching their heads and going ‘whaaaa?’
Couple more:
Again, can’t remember the ep but Servo says, when someone is starting
to write, “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan…” which is the first line
of Joyce’s Ulysses.
Another-Arch Hall Jr. in Eegah! is whining out “Roxy”, and they chorus
music and elsewhere. Music is of course Roxy Music (one of my faves) and And elsewhere is a fantastic Zappa/Mothers album which oddly also
has a song called ‘Cheepnis’ which is about low budget horror movies and has a Zappa monologue about It Conquered The World.
Related to
Warewolf which has Yuris’ ever changing hairstyles which they point
out at various times resemble Brian Ferry (Roxy Music), and another time when Servo sings “Ziggggyyyy played…” when his hair did look remarkably like Ziggy era Bowie’s.
And someone mentioned Weasels Ripped My Flesh from Zappa. One of the refrences I actually remember was from Girl’s Town, Chip rips little sis’ dress and Crow says “A weasel ripped my dress, Rrrzzzzz.”
“#64, I might be wrong but I think that Joel says Turn It Off during a plot-point film clip shown in either Amazing Colossal Man or Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Crow then says I feel so dirty. Does that ring a bell with anybody?”
They’ve done the “Turn it off!” riff in a few movies. It’s a reference to the movie “Hardcore”, starring George C. Scott. In the movie, Scott plays a man looking for his runaway daughter. In the beginning of the movie, the private detective he hired to look for her has found out that she is doing porn. When the detective shows Scott the film as proof, he starts bellowing “Turn it off! TURN IT OFF!!!!” when it gets to the explicit part. It’s quite unintentionally funny.
“#46: Actually, the Seattle Kingdome did have a disastrous and highly-publicized collapse of part of its roof in 1994, which is more likely to have inspired the riff than an obscure European stadium’s woes.”
I remember it quite well. Right before a Mariners game in the summer of ’94 the acoustical tiles started falling from the ceiling. The M’s were forced to go on a month long road trip while the roof got repaired. What made that riff even more memorable for me was that the Brains used that riff in the live show version of “This Island Earth” at the ’94 convention just a couple of months later. Being the only Seattleite in attendance, I think I was the only one who got that joke.
My favorite obscure riff is in the episode “King Dinosaur”. In one scene, a scientist loads a flare pistol with a long metal cartridge and Tom says “Now to load up the Steely Dan.” This is a reference to the William Burroughs novel “The Naked Lunch” where one female character owns a chrome sex toy that she nicknamed “Steely Dan”. Steely Dan, the band, was named after said object too.
Timber says:
January 15, 2011 at 8:05 pm
“Not so sure if mine is that obscure, but it is the line “There was a Pogo’s song on the radio!” from Eegah! and occurs right after Roxy’s first encounter with the desert giant. The Pogo’s had a hit with “Alley Oop,’ based on the comic strip about a caveman. But it’s such a niche song I am sure a lot of younger viewers were scratching their heads and going ‘whaaaa?’”
I know the song. I know it because it was used in an episode of “The Super Mario Brothers Super Show”, a cartoon from the late ’80s, based on the video game. It was an episode in which Mario, Luigi, Princess Toadstool and Toad went to a caveman world. The song “Alley Oop” is played during a chase scene.
One more thing. The Super Mario Brothers Super Show is on DVD from Shout! Factory, but they didn’t pay for the song rights, so “Alley Oop” is not in the DVD version of the show.
#74, “Kalgon blow me away” is more likely a reference to the old Calgon bath crystals (fancy perfumed epsom salts I believe) commercial, where the weary young wife/mother sighs, “Calgon, take me away!”
I’m a huge Gary Numan fan and someone on the show must be too because there have been at least a dozen references to him over the years. Two I can remember off the top of my head: from Pod People- “It’s Gary Numan and the Tubeway Army!” (when the wacky music plays during Trumpy’s “magic things!” segment. They also sing “Cars” along to it) and from Terror From The Year 5000- “Gary Numan, scientist” (because the leading man DOES bear an uncanny resemblence to Numan).
Another fave is also from Pod People- “Oh, it’s Laura PALMER!” when they show the character Laura dead in the woods, a reference to David Lynch’s short-lived TV series, “Twin Peaks”.
#
fathermushroom says:
January 15, 2011 at 8:41 pm
#74, “Kalgon blow me away” is more likely a reference to the old Calgon bath crystals (fancy perfumed epsom salts I believe) commercial, where the weary young wife/mother sighs, “Calgon, take me away!”
This is correct.
In the short “Body Care and Grooming,” Joel sings part of a Jethro Tull lyric, from Thick as a Brick: “Your ****’s in the gutter, your love’s in the sink” (although I noticed that Joel glossed over the word “****”). Always liked the Tull references.
There was also a line in Angels Revenge, when Crow, upon seeing the blond pusher go into a phone booth, says, “I’m going to put on the suit that the aliens gave me.” I was thrilled; the pusher looked so much like William Katt, who starred in a 1970s series called The Greatest American Hero. My husband looked a LOT like William Katt, back in the day, and I used to tease him about it.
@Critter
I forgot about that James Joyce reference but yeah it’s a good one. I think it is in Hercules Unchained, when Hercules is running around with Ulysses. Someone says something like “tell me the story, Ulysses” and Servo starts to quote James Joyce.
“Norman the calla lilies are raining lead!!” On Golden Pond reference made with Katharine Hepburn’s unmistakable voice.
It’s two quotes mashed together: Hepburn has the famous “calla lilies” line in “Stage Door” (1937), and “Norman” is her husband in “On Golden Pond” (1981).
I love their film references, which were really great during the years Frank was writing with them. I was tickled that they knew who El Brendel was in “She-Creature.” The riff is something like, “Yeah yeah, yumpin’ yimminy, we know we know.”
Laura Petrie, Dr. Strangelove, Red Green, Star Trek, Monty Python… none of these qualify as obscure, but that’s just my personal opinion, which should not be confused with reality.
We’ve been down this road before, so here is mine again.
817 – Horror of Party Beach –
Eulabelle’s wild-haired voodoo doll. The daughter asks “What’s that Eulabelle?”
Bill Corbett says:
“It’s my Oscar Gamble Doll, okay?!
Google a picture of Oscar Gamble if you don’t know who he is. The picture will explain the joke.
Google the 1976 Topps Traded card, where it says “Yanks take Gamble on Oscar”. Or any of his Cleveland Indians cards.
I collected Baseball cards and was heavy into baseball as a kid in the 70’s.
So I knew every player. (I still know every player).
Gamble wasn’t totally unknown, but he wasn’t a household name for anyone other than possibly a Yankees, Indians, or Whitesox fan in those days.
—
I also throw in Riding With Death when Ben Murphy was daydreaming in his truck and Kevin Murphy said “Oh, Rhoda & Joe – I sure hope they get married”.
I remember vividly when for about 2-3 months in the early-mid 70’s all the gossip talk about Tv was exactly that. Even I said those words. (From the spin-off ‘Rhoda’, from the Mary Tyler Moore Show)
I challenge ANYONE to get the riff where, as the characters are running past the stuffed bears in “Bloodlust”, we hear:
“No cookies, not now, not ever!”
At about 1:19:40 in 321 – Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, while Santa is fiddling with the controls of the Martian toy-making machine, there is this exchange:
Joel: Looks like Santa’s doing sound for Yes, doesn’t it?
Servo: Eddy Offord!
Crow: Yes.
This blew my mind when I first heard it, because only a fellow prog-rock nerd would know who Eddy Offord was and that he was the recording engineer for both Yes and ELP during their heyday (early 1970’s). He is famously pictured at his mixing board alongside photos of the band on the back cover of the Yes album Close to the Edge, and is again shown at the board in the booklet accompanying their live (triple!) album Yessongs. So this reference to Santa attempting to control a giant unwieldy machine is both apt and very specific. I already liked the show, but this moment cemented for me that these Brains were my type of guys.
And like some others here have commented, riffs and references I didn’t get at first led me to explore their various sources. MST turned me on to Firesign Theatre which I now love dearly.
I have to assume this is a fairly obscure riff, depending on one’s knowledge of the development of American heavy metal.
Gotta be from The Final Sacrifice.
Zap: “It’s a cult.”
Tom Servo: “They worship blue oysters.”
Blue Öyster Cult being, of course, an American Metal-Lite group(most often referred to as Hard Rock, though it really is not) best known for 1976’s Don’t Fear the Reaper. They have been touring consistently with mostly the same guys since they first started playing clubs as Soft White Underbelly in 1967. Although they are currently touring with only 2 original members they are, at least, the two responsible for writing/singing their biggest hits.
Blue Öyster Cult: On Tour Forever! http://www.blueoystercult.com
Goddammit, I love BOC. Anyone who has read my posts at the MST Discussion Board will see that I am a “Veteran of the Psychic Wars.” Thanks for that, Trilaan.
And on the CHUD.com message boards I am “O.D’d On Life Itself”. For me their biggest hit is “Seven Screaming Diz-Busters”, or maybe “M.E. 262”.