Brad Cook reviews Mystery Science Theater 3000 XXXII…
When I wrote for Film Threat, I reviewed every Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVD set released by Shout! Factory, so I was happy to bring my reviews to Flickering Myth and continue the streak. I’ve been a fan of the show since I discovered it in college, back around 1990 or 1991, when finding a blank videotape and programming a VCR was a real pain in the ass. In those days, if you really liked a show, you made sure you were in front of the TV at the appointed day and time.
I never joined MST3K’s “keep circulating the tapes” movement, which exhorted fans to record episodes and pass the videotapes around. That concept, along with fanzines and play-by-mail chess, seems so quaint today, although the last several years of the show’s run coincided with the rise of the Internet, which helped it spread in popularity.
To the uninitiated, the show might seem beyond quaint, with its goofy sets and “the wires are clearly visible” models flying around, but that was the point of a series that was all about skewering movies with equally cheesy effects. The premise was simple: A guy played by comedian Joel Hodgson is sent into space with two robots to endure bad movies so the mad scientists who sent him there can monitor the effects on him.
Mike Nelson eventually replaced Hodgson and the series moved from Comedy Central to Sci-Fi, where the executives insisted that the interstitial sketches have an ongoing storyline. That seemed pointless, but the show never flagged in quality, even when both mad scientists left and were replaced by the mother of one of them. She was joined by a couple dorky sidekicks, the Planet of the Apes-inspired Professor Bobo and Observer, also known as Brain Guy.
Each MST3K set issued by Shout! Factory features four episodes from the series, with different seasons represented, so you can get a taste of how both hosts operated, as well as how the show progressed over the years. This set, Volume 32, features these episodes and bonus features:
• Radar Secret Service, with the short Last Clear Chance: A fifth-season episode that was made not long after Mike Nelson took over as host. As Frank Coniff (TV’s Frank, one of the mad scientists) notes in the introduction, the feature film was so boring that much of the riffing centered around that fact. (For some reason, people thought during the 1950s that radar was some kind of miracle technology that had uses beyond air traffic control and the military. Personally, I wish I had a radar-powered smartphone.)
This disc also includes the 20-minute MST-UK with Trace and Frank featurette, which is the longest bonus feature in this set. It chronicles a trip to England by Coniff and Trace Beaulieu (the other mad scientist), who were sent there thanks to a Kickstarter project. They didn’t just tour London and make snarky remarks about the sights, of course – They were there for a public interview with a British cult movie host.
• Space Travelers: Known as Marooned when it was released in 1969, this film starred Gregory Peck, Gene Hackman, and other well-known actors. As Coniff explains in the introduction, it was redistributed under a new name in 1991 by a low-budget company, and it ended up airing on TV as Space Travelers. MST3K was able to get the rights to it and riff on it, even though it wasn’t typical of the kinds of schlocky low-budget fare that they normally featured.
This was a fourth season episode featuring Joel Hodgson. The disc also features a nearly seven-minute featurette that talks about the film’s place in movie history.
• Hercules: This episode, which was right in the show’s wheelhouse, aired early in the fifth season, when Joel was still the host. (He left partway through that year.) Hercules was the first in a long series of movies made in Italy during the 1950s and 60s. The production values were high, but the stories were silly and the dubbed dialogue gave the films the same air as many Japanese monster movies. Of course, that made those films perfect for riffing, and MST3K featured several Hercules installments during its run.
This disc includes a seven-minute look at producer Joseph E. Levine, who imported Hercules, along with the original Godzilla and other foreign films that appealed to kids. However, as Coniff points out in his introduction, Levine also produced The Graduate and The Producers, so he earned a spot in the industry that other distributors of schlocky films never had. (And the original Godzilla is actually a pretty good movie, particularly the Japanese non-Raymond Burr version.)
• San Francisco International: This sixth season episode, featuring Mike as the host, offers up a 1970 made-for-TV movie about the problems confounding the security team at a major airport. There was nothing unique about it, other than the fact that it was simply bad, but it still offered up plenty of opportunities to crack jokes. The bonus feature on this disc takes a look at a huge MST3K fan who created the Satellite News website that’s pretty much the bible of the series.
That’s it for Volume 32. It’s another solid entry in the series, but it falls short of other volumes in its lack of really meaty bonus materials. Some of the sets have had really nice mini-documentaries that take in-depth looks at various directors, producers, and actors, including interviews with some of them (some people still don’t take kindly to the fact that their work was lampooned on the show). That doesn’t make this set awful; it just makes it a baseline entry, rather than one of the exceptional ones.
In addition, this set sticks to fourth, fifth, and sixth season episodes, rather than giving us a wider representation, but that’s a minor quibble.
Brad Cook
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5&v=pnc360pUDRI
