Having just done “Monster A-Go Go” in this week’s episode guide and “Manos” only a few weeks away (both would have to be included in this list), it definitely seems like a timely topic. I once made the mistake of showing “Manos” to my sister as her very first episode. I guess I thought she could handle it. She couldn’t. Oh well. Lesson learned.
One I would pick is on the most recent set: “Last of the Wild Horses,” featuring a difficult black-and-white movie and host segments you would only really appreciate if you knew the show and the characters very well. But I just love it.
What’s your pick?
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Oh, no thesis is the best part Blast Hardcheese! I can’t write to save my life!!
My pick ? Easy….DEAD TALK BACK, hands down (surprised that only one person mentioned it, almost in passing). No matter how ‘faced’ or ‘max factored’ I get, I can NOT stay awake during this. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve popped it into the infernal machine only to wake up hours later with that idiotic wah-wah guitar riff reverberating in my head….hour after hour after hour !
It’s true that humor is in the eye of the beholder. I have been a fan since season 2 on CC. I would be watching an episode laughing hysterically and my wife would come in and say how stupid it was. Same thing with my daughters twenty years later. I tried a few episodes and they were “meh” but now I catch them singing the Puma Man jingle or yelling “SLEEEEEEEP” at each other. The one thing I realized is that a lot of time has gone by and a lot of the references are hard to get unless you were around when the shows were recorded.
As far as the graduate level stuff I had a hard time with some of the Japanese movies, incomprehensible plots, horrible dubbing and headache inducing editing. Fugitive Alien and Mighty Jack leap to mind. And I disagree with Manos being on any list. A movie that horrendous was why the concept of MST3k was so brilliant. And the Torgo’s Pizza segment at the end makes me laugh just thinking about it.
It is clear from even a cursory scan of this thread – Jess Franco (through the awesome power of Castle of Fu Manchu) out-bads even the very worst directors MST brought to prominence (Francis and Warren).
If you are a lover of outre cinema and you have not sampled other Franco films, you probably ought to in order to experience crap at its most craptastic.
Dark Grandma of Death says:
April 7, 2012 at 9:06 am
I loved Red Zone Cuba right from the first time I saw it, which made my family avoid eye contact with me for a while. It took them another viewing or two to warm up to it; then “YOU shove off” was heard throughout the house…
I loved Red Zone Cuba for no other reason than John Carradine’s cameo in the opening scene, and his zesty rendition of the jaunty, up-tempo theme song. That old guy really could belt ’em.
Stressfactor says:
April 9, 2012 at 8:02 am
I really am stunned that I seem to be the only person who doesn’t think season one is that bad…
I enjoy Season 1 in the same way I enjoy checking out the debut albums by bands who went on to be really huge: it gives you an idea of what their work was like while it was still maturing. Season 1 was still kind of rough in a lot of ways — though positively polished compared to the original KTMA episodes — but there’s some really fun stuff in there, and I’ve got two Season 1 experiments in my regular rotation: The Slime People (108) and Project Moonbase (109). I also got a kick out of that lisping, hair-tossing übermistress — obviously played by a fashion model, not an actress — in Robot Holocaust (110), but it wasn’t quite funny enough to avoid being aced out by The Slime People.
I’m also surprised that Hamlet (1009) was considered one of the weaker episodes; it only took me two viewings to give it a solid spot in my regular rotation; the production is comically dark and grim, and Servo’s riffing on “Night Fever” during the dance scene early in the film totally won me over.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 is probably the first TV show I think of when it comes to the concept of “Your Mileage May Very” on an episode by episode basis. While I was reading through the comments I noticed at least two people mentioned that Pod People wouldn’t be a good episode to show to a newbie. Of course, that’s the episode that made me a fan when I first saw it back in September 1995 on The MST Hour.
Part of the problem is that with most “normal” TV shows, you could just say that it’s best to start at the beginning. However, most MST3K fans (and some of the people who worked on the show) will tell you that since the show gets better as time goes on, it’s better to start with a later episode. Of course there’s a also a lot of callback humor in the show, so if you haven’t seen the earlier episodes you won’t get those references. That said, they also make all sorts of references to random bits of pop culture trivia that the viewer may not get even if they have watched earlier episodes.
Basically I think the show’s humor is so niche that there’s a great potential for it to fall flat no matter where you start them out. It’s a show that rewards viewers for paying attention and having the patience to stay with feature length movies that the characters are watching, even if said movies are particularly bad and it would be much easier for a less patient viewer to “abandon the characters” by changing the channel.
As far as “graduate-level” episodes go, I’d go with the KTMA series. However I wouldn’t refer to them that way for the reasons most fans give. True, they’re nowhere near as great as the made-for-cable series, but I also wouldn’t show them to a newbie because the KTMA episodes have their own built in continuity that doesn’t really have an effect on the over arching plot (such as it is) of the cable series.
Even with the Season One episodes, you could make the argument that showing them to a very patient newbie would be beneficial in the long run because he would appreciate how the show changes over time and get all the callback jokes. However, since the creators of the show pretend that that the events of the KTMA series didn’t occur within the context of the rest of the show’s continuity, there’s no real reason to show them to a newbie or even a casual fan unless you’re a hard core fan of the series interested in the show’s origins.
I think “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” qualifies as a graduate-level MST3K — definitely not for beginners. I personally love it, but I made the mistake of showing it to some friends once who weren’t familiar with the show, and they got so frustrated with it (it does kinda drag on) that they won’t let me show them any more episodes. Oh well — their loss!