Conventional Wisdom: 5 Movies I Want To See MST3k Riff Again (Patreon)

Okay, I had a really really REALLY long, rambling introduction for this blog that wove through everything from the repetitive themes in the films of Jess Franco to studio recordings vs. live performance in improvisational Jazz music to the nature of stand-up comedy to the fandom reactions to early Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic… but there’s a limit to how much self-indulgence I can tolerate from myself. So all those paragraphs are gone, and I’m gonna cut right to the chase: I want to see modern day Mystery Science Theater 3000 re-riff some movies from the show’s early days. I mean, they technically already did that by revisiting a few movies from the KTMA days after they’d settled in on Comedy Central. But I want more, dang it! There’s still movies from that original season of MST3k that I’d love to hear a fully scripted, non-dead-air-filled riff for. What’s more, there’s also a number of episodes even from the “real” start of the show that I just feel like could have been done better. That’s not to say I think the current Gizmoplex crew are better than the classic Best Brains gang or anything, but everybody has an off day once and a while, especially when just starting out, and I think a few of them are worth a do-over.

And just for the record: anybody who remembers that blog I did on my least-favorite MST3k episodes does NOT get to skip this one, because there’s actually very little overlap. Most of those episodes are on my bad side due to the film at their foundation, not the riffing. I don’t care how many times you revisit that German version of Hamlet, it’s never gonna be less of a slog. No, here I’m talking about movies that COULD make really excellent episodes, but just didn’t the first time around.

5. Hellcats

Well, I’m a big fat liar, aren’t I? Yeah, Hellcats was VERY MUCH on my list of least favorite episodes, but in this one case I actually would like to see a do-over. To those who haven’t heard the tale, Hellcats was written by pretty much a skeleton crew and really shows it. Infamously, the host skits were a clip show to make writing easier… despite Hellcats being from the second season, and thus not having much of any clips to flashback to. But setting that aside, the riffing in Hellcats is just pretty weak. You can really tell there were fewer people on hand to come up with ideas, because the few they have get stretched out waaaaaaaaaay too far. I swear, something like a quarter of the riff in total are just callbacks to Sidehackers, which is totally justified in small doses, but not THIS much. But the real shame is that Hellcats is a Tony Cardoza production, with an on-screen cameo by the man himself, that was riffed BEFORE the Coleman Francis trilogy, so nobody had any idea who he was! The world DESPERATELY needs a proper, full-powered riff that knows to drop some references to Red Zone Cuba and The Skydivers while Cardoza’s on screen!

4.The Legend of Dinosaurs

Okay, the rest of these aren’t rehashes of the earlier blog, I promise. The Legend of Dinosaurs (and Monster Birds if you wanna get completest about that title) was the very last episode of the KTMA season, but it’s still a KTMA episode. I’ve admitted this before, but I’ve never been able to sit through an entire KTMA episode, because the riffing is just too sparse and unplanned. Good as the Brains could be, they still worked better with some pre-planning rather than just making it all up as they went along. And MAN do I want to hear what would happen if they had time to properly write up some riffs for The Legend of Dinosaurs. I still vividly remember stumbling onto the end of this not-quite-kaiju movie when it aired on SciFi one Saturday, you don’t forget a miss-matched soundtrack like that. Anybody who’s ever watched a Brandon Tenold review where dinosaurs are involved knows I’m not the only one, either. There’s a ton of fun to be had with this one that the KTMA days just weren’t up to yet.

3.Cosmic Princess

And you know what else I vividly remember watching on SciFi when I was a kid? Space: 1999. So you’d better believe I’d love to watch a full-powered MST3k treatment of one of the “movies” created out of editing some episodes of that show together. There’s just something magical about how badly those kinds of mash-up movies turn out (Riding With Death, anyone?), and that’s before you add the Space: 1999 factor. Heck, Cosmic Princess is even cobbled together out of season TWO episodes, the point at which the series really went hilariously crap. Season one takes itself so seriously that a riffing attempt of that material could be pretty hit or miss, there’s only so many jokes a person can make about Martin Landau somberly staring out into space. But season two? That’s where Space: 1999 gave up all dignity, cranked up the color to eleven, and went for pure pulp trash. There’s a LOT of material to work with here… but alas, this was another KTMA episode, so far too much of that potential went untapped. And as if that wasn’t enough of a shameful neglect shown towards campy British weirdness happening on the moon…

2. Moon Zero Two

Okay, I’m done picking on KTMA. Now it’s time to pick on the first year on The Comedy Channel, because that wasn’t perfect either. Moon Zero Two is an episode I really REALLY want to like more than I do, thanks mostly to gloriously Sixties production design. I love me some ridiculously garish Technicolor space suits, man. And there’s go-go dancers! Literal go-go dancers on the moon! That sounds like the title to some parody joke trailer that’d turn up in a “real” movie, not something that actually for real happens! Sadly, however, I just don’t think the season one riffing does the material justice. I mean, yeah, it’s still a really bad movie, but it’s the good kind of bad that USUALLY brings out the best in the riffer, just not here. If this episode were written only a year later, it probably would have been a standout of that season, and maybe a second take would finally be able to get Moon Zero Two up where it belongs. And on that note…

1. Robot Monster

Wow, if you really want a prime example of how far the riffing still had to go in season one, there’s possibly no better example than Robot Monster. Not because it’s a terrible episode or anything, it’s probably one of the stronger installments of the first season. But… COME ON! This is Robot frickin Monster we’re talking about here! It’s Mystery Science Theater doing that movie with the space gorilla robot in a cave with the bubble machine! This ought to be an absolute CLASSIC! We should be mentioning this episode in the same breath as Manos, for crying out loud! But instead, amongst the whole of the series, Robot Monster only ranks as… okay. I’ve heard the Brains were a bit apprehensive to even do this episode, thanks to its legendary bad movie status (apparently, that’s the same reason why they didn’t do Plan 9 from Outer Space during the show’s run) so maybe that timidity hamstrung their efforts a bit. Still, looking at how shaky the riffing across the rest of the first season can be, I’m still inclined to blame a lack of experience. I one hundred percent believe that a second take of Robot Monster would be better than the first, and the world deserves better Ro-Man jokes.

So those are the ones that stand out the most to me. You’ll notice that, once again, I’ve refrained from even mentioning anything from the Netflix revival. This is mostly because I still haven’t seen any of those episodes anywhere near as many times as the original series, so I feel more confident in passing judgment on those. But also, it’d just be a cop out of me to just say “Re-do the entire first Netflix season with actual pauses between the lines and an audible distinction between the riffers’ voices” …and that’s absolutely the kind of thing I’d say if somebody gave me the chance.