…things that they missed. The one that comes to mind for me is from Warrior of the Lost World, where the repeatedly referred to Robert Ginty as the “Paper Chase guy,” without ever noting his role in Baa Baa Black Sheep (or doing it so subtly that I missed it). It stands out to me because the show is one of the formative programs of my youth.
Along the same lines, alert reader Glenn chimes in with a suggestion that he says…
…definitely falls into the category of “Monday morning quarterbacking” and in no way is meant as a slight to the quick comic minds that have brought us all such pleasure over the years. But, as Horace reminds us, even the worthy Homer nods (thanks, Wikiquotes!). You might call this “Missed riffs:” Where do you think there is an obvious place for a riff in a MSTed film or short that were left without one, and what riff would you suggest?
What made me think of this is the short “Are You Ready for Marriage?,” which I show every year to students in my first-year seminar. When Larry and his buddy Phil walk into the malt shop after Larry and Sue have decided to get married, Phil says, “Engaged? What are you going to use for money?” Every time I see that scene, I hear in my mind a squeaky adolescent male voice saying, “Bottle caps!” Does this happen to anyone else, or do I have a more deeply-rooted problem?
Well, Glenn, I think I speak for all of us here when I say that the answer to both questions is yes. :-)
So, everybody remembers that nobody mentioned “Battlestar Galactica” in “Space Mutiny” or “Beverly Hillbillies” in “Space Children,” but are there any other riffs or references you think they ought to have done? Let’s hear ’em.
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In “Final Justice”, when Joe Don Baker is chasing after the bad guy, who just put on a monk’s robe. As they’re running through the water front area, I really wish they’d riffed “The Man in Black fled across the boatyard, and the Gunslinger followed”. From the first sentence of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.
In Pod People a character says “it’s been seven hours” and you expect someone to chime in with “and fifteen days”, but they don’t. Odd not only because of the Brains’ love of Prince references, but toward the end of the movie when a “Nothing Compares 2 U”-like synth riff appears on the soundtrack, Tom actually starts singing “it’s been seven hours…”
I always notice that when Peter Graves is on, they don’t do a lot of Mission Impossible riffs – usually they just play on his hosting Biography.
Well, except for “It Conquered the World.”
PAUL: I’ve got people, plenty of people.
SERVO: Barney! Paris! They’ll help me!
(later – I forget the line that leads to it)
SERVO: And the Secretary will disavow your actions…
I don’t remember any Mission riffs in Clonus. But they could have played on bad luck here (like they did with Crow’s “Peter Graves at the University of Minnesota” gag in “Beginning of the End”). On the Agony Booth recap site, the recapper smirks early in the recap: “Oh Peter, from Mission: Impossible to THIS in only five years?” They do it to Dick Sargent, too…
This has happened to me numerous times, though remembering them off the top of my head is near impossible when I’m not watching the episodes in question. Many times I’ve thought of a joke that just seemed irresistible during a certain scene and been surprised that the MST3K writers passed it up.
Here’s one that occurred to me after this topic appeared here so I’ll toss it out there. I was watching Project Moonbase just the other night and the name Jack Seaman appears twice on the credits. Neither time did the writers take advantage of Mr. Seaman’s last name for a joke, either about sailors or anything else that his name might bring to mind. ;) Amazing they let that go by, but it was Season One and I have a feeling in a later season of the show someone would have been all over that with jokes in the writing room.
Hey, I just remembered another one! Sarah Douglas, Ursa in Superman II appears in the opening credits of Delta Knights (cousin of Lord David Warner), but no one picked it up. She even gets credited in the opening but vanishes after the auction.
Don’t know if anyone mentioned it, but in the movie, when they’re in the tubes, I always shout out “Video killed the radio star”. Check out the video by The Buggles if you don’t get it…
Here’s kind of a related category to the overall discussion (which I’m willing to bet someone’s talked about already upthread here) — riffs that seemingly should have been made but, due to that little thing called temporality, could never have been made at the time of the original episode. My classic example:
So in good ol’ Wild Rebels, when Rod and Banjo have their vague ‘Man you’re messing with private stock’ fight and Rod triumphs, gang leader Jeeter says, “Kill him, Rod! Kill him! He’s a loser, baby!” — which inevitably prompts me to sing “So why don’t you kill him?” to myself.
And if the episode had broadcast in 1994 or afterward when Beck first got famousish with “Loser” then I would say it was a missed riff, but Wild Rebels was filmed and broadcast in 1990. So that gets ’em off the hook.
I was Surprised in Parts: The Clonus Horror, it is not mentioned that Tim Donnelly (Richard) Played “Chet” on Emergency!
Just watched the Colossal Man movies again, and I remembered something I shouted out the first time I saw them. When Glenn rushes out to save the pilot of the plane in the first movie, I called out “Gotta go save Rick Jones!” I expected a lot more Hulk jokes. This time around, whenever the doctors approached Glenn, I went “Hey, Glenn, you’re turning green!”
Sometimes I can’t believe Stan-the-Man didn’t have the Colossal Man in mind when he came up with the Hulk. But I think it was a missed opportunity for the Brains. Perhaps, when Glenn starts to go crazy, they could have gone “Hey, look! Isn’t that Lou Ferrigno?”
GLENN SMASH!
:-)
I always thought that in Outlaw, Cabot looked eerily like Jeffrey Dahmer in the Pullman scene.
Assuming anyone is still reading this thread, I was watching Manos last night and thought that the cat on a piano music sounded a lot like the music used on the Buster Keaton film The General. Of course there were no riffs regarding the same.
I was watching Touch of Satan last night and in the opening scene they riff on the farmer’s habit of talking to his cow by saying Hello pile of dung and hello tractor. It would have been a perfect moment to quote a classic line from a old country music song “Hello Walls, I’m going to stare at you awhile.”
They covered Gumby and Peter Gabriel during it, but part of me felt Trumpy’s magic scene in the bedroom also deserved a Jan Svankmajer reference. Though Joel probably had him in mind when he mentioned student films.
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