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Best (i.e. funniest) MST3K episodes

Started by The Mollusk, November 01, 2020, 05:34:46 PM

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The Mollusk

My partner and I couldn't settle on watching a genuinely good horror film last night after the shite lockdown news, so we opted for something stupid: "Manos": The Hands of Fate. I've seen it a bunch of times before but I just had to see it again. This is because of two factors: Firstly, it makes me laugh harder than most other things I've seen (honestly, I have tears in my eyes for most of it, especially Torgo's lines), and secondly, because the MST3K archive is so vast that I'm intimidated by where to go next. I have a strong distrust for anthology list websites and it's harder for me to invest my time on a random choice of episode of something when said episode is around 90 mins long.

I'm pretty sure I've only ever seen Joel episodes as a "stick with who you know" logic, and so I really need my horizons broadening with the show, because this format of comedy is incredible when it's done right and I currently have woefully little of it in my life. Fortunately, it seems like most of it is freely available on YouTube, so if you lovely folk could point me in the direction of the primo shit-hot material (that is, the funniest episodes, not the shittiest movies being riffed on) I'd greatly appreciate it!

Immediately watch:

Mitchell! (perhaps my personal favourite)

Space Mutiny

The Final Sacrifice

Lemming

Time of the Apes is my fav episode of all time. I generally like the Joel era more, thought the later Mike seasons are probably the funniest.

Good Mike episodes:

Red Zone Cuba
Prince of Space
Space Mutiny (must-watch)
Time Chasers
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank
Pumaman (must-watch)
Werewolf
The Final Sacrifice
Final Justice (must-watch)

The new ones on Netflix are good as well. In particular:
Reptilicus
The Beast of Hollow Mountain
Atlantic Rim
Lords of the Deep
The Day Time Ended

Povidone

I still have a lot of time for MST3K The Movie which is basically just an extended Mike episode doing This Island Earth. My first and only experience for quite some time with the series as they used to show it late on ITV.

Has some great moments,
Spoiler alert
NORMAL VIEW!
[close]
Spoiler alert
I'm not an alien
[close]
and everything to do with the weedy sidekick character immediately spring to mind.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: Povidone on November 01, 2020, 06:47:25 PM
MST3K The Movie which is basically just an extended Mike episode
MST3K pedant: the movie is actually shorter than a normal episode of the show

Lemming's list is solid, to which I'd add "Starfighters", the all-time non-classic "Monster-a-Go-Go", "Cave Dwellers" and maybe "The Incredibly Strange Creatures..."

I find that I prefer Mike's episodes these days, not because I think he's funnier, but because he tended to pick more modern movies, with a bit more life to them. Some of Joel's episodes are on a loser from the beginning because the base material is so damn dull ("I Accuse My Parents", "Rocket Attack USA", etc.)

Most / all the episodes are available via Facebook Watch, and a group called "The Riffing Room", if they're not on Youtube.

petercussing

I accuse my parents is ace, one of my favs. I love those 50s morality films

imitationleather

I also must chime in and say: I Accuse My Parents is one of my favourite ever episodes.

Might have to stick it on again later.

imitationleather

By the way, I get why it's such a well-known episode but I actually find Manos: The Hands of Fate hard-going. It's just too bad.

lazarou

Monster a Go-Go might be even worse on that front, it really is punishingly bad and lacks even the strangely endearing otherworldliness of Manos to soften the blow a bit.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: lazarou on November 01, 2020, 10:15:31 PM
Monster a Go-Go might be even worse on that front, it really is punishingly bad and lacks even the strangely endearing otherworldliness of Manos to soften the blow a bit.
I think Monster-A-Go-Go might be the worst movie they ever covered. But I've seen both it and Manos so many times I can't really judge fairly.

Fair fucks to everyone who likes "I Accuse My Parents", I just find some of the clunkier movies Joel covered to be really tough going, because there's just nothing when the riffs aren't landing.

Also, if you're in the mood, "Brain Of Blood" (Joel, Frank, Trace, J Elvis and Mary Jo under the Cinematic Titanic moniker) is pretty damn good. In fact, Cinematic Titanic had a very high hit-rate too.

Lemming

Another vote for I Accuse My Parents. There are a lot of slow, droning 50s morality movies in the Joel series, but I Accuse My Parents goes off in such a weird direction that it sets itself out from the pack.

Seconding the Cinematic Titanic recommendation, it's great. So is RiffTrax - on the ones where they feel like they're actually trying, at least. Which, to be fair, is most of them. Mary Jo and Bridget have been riffing the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films for RiffTrax and they're universally great, definitely worth a look for anyone who's not seen them. Those movies are just begging to have the piss taken, and their riffing style feels closer to Joel than to the usual RiffTrax style, which is a great change of pace.

kngen

Quote from: Lemming on November 01, 2020, 05:51:06 PM
Good Mike episodes:

Red Zone Cuba
Prince of Space
Space Mutiny (must-watch)
Time Chasers
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank
Pumaman (must-watch)
Werewolf
The Final Sacrifice
Final Justice (must-watch)


Great list. If you added Girl in the Golden Boots and Riding With Death to that list, you've pretty much got all my favourite MST3K eps there (with the exception of the last three, which I haven't seen, but will have to address that immediately given the exalted company they are keeping).

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Is the Netflix series considered sub par? It is all I've seen of the show and it was colossally underwhelming. It was almost Nostalgia Critic level stuff.

famethrowa

Definitely The Final Sacrifice first place for me, followed by Space Mutiny.

Two lines that just kill me in TFS, total throwaways but I love em:

- the bad guy gets out of a car and you just see his boots, the guys say "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Alan Jackson!"

- the kid looks at some old drawings and the guys say "It's a treasury of Sergio Aragones cartoons!"

Also in Space Mutiny, the guys' reaction to the
Spoiler alert
dead girl's reappearance
[close]
is a joy.

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on November 02, 2020, 12:14:25 AM
Is the Netflix series considered sub par? It is all I've seen of the show and it was colossally underwhelming. It was almost Nostalgia Critic level stuff.

To me it was (though I didn't hate it), but I may be biased because the original series, both with Joel and Mike, has such a strong nostalgia factor for me. I can't even really enjoy RiffTrax or Cinematic Titanic because everything just feels slightly off.

(If you're brand new to the show I would also give a generic disclaimer not to judge it by the interstitial skits.)

Quote from: famethrowa on November 02, 2020, 12:16:38 AM
Definitely The Final Sacrifice first place for me, followed by Space Mutiny.

Two lines that just kill me in TFS, total throwaways but I love em:

- the bad guy gets out of a car and you just see his boots, the guys say "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Alan Jackson!"

- the kid looks at some old drawings and the guys say "It's a treasury of Sergio Aragones cartoons!"

Also in Space Mutiny, the guys' reaction to the
Spoiler alert
dead girl's reappearance
[close]
is a joy.

Zap Rowsdower is definitely the greatest character in the MST3K pantheon.

famethrowa

Quote from: Pearly-Dewdrops Drops on November 02, 2020, 12:22:41 AM
Zap Rowsdower is definitely the greatest character in the MST3K pantheon.

Rowsdower? Is that a ..... stupid name?


Lemming

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on November 02, 2020, 12:14:25 AM
Is the Netflix series considered sub par? It is all I've seen of the show and it was colossally underwhelming. It was almost Nostalgia Critic level stuff.

I liked it overall, but apparently I'm in the minority. Markedly different feel from either incarnation of the original.

If you've never seen the original MST3k then give it a shot. Time of the Apes is a great starter because the "movie" (actually a TV series badly and nonsensically stitched together with a terrible English dub) is brilliant on its own, so it's a bonus that the commentary is absolutely on fire too.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

I assumed the new ones must be quite severely substandard. The way the original is always talked about, I got the impression that it's held in the same regard as Monty Python, or classic Simpsons. That's a pedigree which the Netflix ones didn't come within miles of. I got more laughs from the films themselves than anything the silhouettes said. I can see how that would have found a niche in pre-Internet times, but it seems a bit pointless now.

Also, Joel Hodgson convincingly played a dickhead on Freaks and Geeks, which may have prejudiced my opinion to some extent.

Rev+

The new ones aren't written or performed by anyone involved with the originals, outside of some cameos, so the comparison should be to a version of Monty Python that was revived without Cleese, Palin, et al.  Not substandard, just different people wearing the same clothes and playing a bit of a different tune.

There have been many great recommendations in this thread, and I'll add my support for Pumaman.  He has all the powers of a puma, which is why he can fly.

It's not a top-tier episode but it is well worth a look, so it's worth mentioning the Brute Man for this one lovely moment:  the rare actual crack-up in which Mike still manages to do what the script demands.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Df3j9vCcIM




Mr Banlon

Teenage Strangler
Mitchell !
Village of the Giants

Attila

Long time MST3K fan here (I was living in Mpls when it started, huzzah!) (& I still have loads of the old MST3K Info Club newsletters, which didn't get printed often, but were silly surreal nonsense). A little corner of my library are various books about and published by various people who worked on the show.

So many good ones here -- Manos is the most infamous, but as noted above, it's not the best one to start with.

Head's up: Final Sacrifice is getting harder and harder to find online as the guy who wrote/directed it is laying claim to the MST'd version of the show, and having it scrubbed off the usual places. Rifftrax, which sells a lot of the original episodes, has also pulled it from their catalog because of this guy's complaints.

I was gutted that GaryinMotion's gorgeours cinematic versions were all removed from YouTube and that over the summer, after someone interviewed him about how he put them together. I regret that we didn't capture any of them before they were summarily disappeared, as we'd been slowly working our way through them.

Mr Attila's gateway episode was Riding with Death.

Another overlooked gem is Teenaged Crimewave -- perfect for Thanksgiving. 'He'll never touch you, Terry, you're dirt.' [Really Old]Teenagers from Outer Space is another corker.

Brute Man is wonderful, especially when Mike breaks character and can't stop laughing. So is Overdrawn at the Memory Bank and San Francisco International.


Phil_A

Quote from: Rev+ on November 02, 2020, 02:42:44 AM
The new ones aren't written or performed by anyone involved with the originals, outside of some cameos, so the comparison should be to a version of Monty Python that was revived without Cleese, Palin, et al.  Not substandard, just different people wearing the same clothes and playing a bit of a different tune.


It should also be pointed out the way the show is written and performed is very different in the Netflix seasons. What used to happen was the performers would spend ages work on the script together with the other writers, and they'd record the riffs together "as live" on the theatre set. Whereas now the performers don't write any of the lines, they record their parts separately and the riffs are just put together in the edit.

Basically, I think it's lost the sense of camaraderie where you knew these guys had suffered through these terrible films multiple times in order to try and mine gold out of shit. That's obviously never going to feel the same when the actors are just reading from a script in a recording booth, and you'd never get the little moments in the old show when the cast would go off-script or something unexpected would happen, like Kevin Murphy losing his mind during "Wild, Wild World Of Batwoman" and screaming "EEEEEEEEEND! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEND!"

Shit Good Nose

As I've mentioned on here numerous times over the years, MST has a very very special place in my heart as it was one of the very few things that kept me going during a particularly difficult period in my life.


Quote from: Phil_A on November 02, 2020, 09:13:33 AM
Kevin Murphy losing his mind during "Wild, Wild World Of Batwoman" and screaming "EEEEEEEEEND! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEND!"

One of my favourite moments in the entire history.

Loads of good episodes mentioned so far.  The only thing I would say is to avoid the VERY early ones (or, at least, intersperse them with later ones) - most of the KTMA era (known as season 0) and a chunk of season 1 - they tended to riff live as they were watching the film and there are lots of LONG stretches of silence.  A couple of episodes from that era are good - City On Fire and Moon Zero Two - but it's not really until Kevin Murphy joins in series 3 that it REALLY starts to get good.

As for the new iteration - I enjoyed it for what it was and I liked that it had the same happy vibe about it, but most of them don't have the rewatch value and, as I said in the specific thread for the Netflix one, you REALLY notice that Kevin Murphy is missing

Attila

Quote from: Shit Good Nose on November 02, 2020, 01:51:40 PM
As I've mentioned on here numerous times over the years, MST has a very very special place in my heart as it was one of the very few things that kept me going during a particularly difficult period in my life.



I understand and emphathise with this, MST3K being one of the very few television programmes I watched/will still watch, and its role as a lifesaver -- so here is a present for you: two new shorts  released last week as part of an arts fundraiser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3JzMk4ThJg

Shit Good Nose

Thanks for that, will give it a proper watch at some point.

Nice to have Bill back as Crow - I first got into it on the Sci Fi channel, which of course was Mike and Bill, so I have a lot of time for him.  Surprised to see J Elvis back as Tom, but once again, whilst every comedian playing Crow has brought their own to the role, in my opinion the only Tom is Kevin Murphy.  J Elvis never had enough range for me, and he still sounds completely bored in the few minutes I watched.

Also Jonah Ray has shifted a fair amount of terry by the looks of it.

Rolf Lundgren

Put me down as a "MST3K saved my life" member. I remembering it being on Sci-Fi channel at 12pm on Sunday afternoons, accidentally stumbling across it and falling head over heels in love. For that reason, seasons 8 and 9 are some of the best for me with episodes like Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, Space Mutiny and probably my favourite if forced Time Chasers.

Quote from: Shit Good Nose on November 02, 2020, 10:21:24 PM
Surprised to see J Elvis back as Tom, but once again, whilst every comedian playing Crow has brought their own to the role, in my opinion the only Tom is Kevin Murphy.  J Elvis never had enough range for me, and he still sounds completely bored in the few minutes I watched.

Kevin Murphy is awesome and for a while was that constant thread running throughout all the series. It definitely loses something with his absence. Also recommend his book A Year at the Movies in which he goes to the cinema every day for a year.

colacentral

#28
I tend to like the most painfully boring films: monster a-go-go, red zone Cuba, etc. Something about the maddening quality of it, or just that anyone made films like that, really tickles me. I also find it funny imagining the writers having to watch these films where nothing happens a dozen times or more.

On a technical level I find these sorts of films work better because they leave space for the riffs. In contrast, I find the most frustrating episodes to watch are the spate of Italian and Finnish films from seasons 4 and 5 - your Hercules Unchained, Sinbad etc - as there's so much irritating audio information for the riffs to compete with - the obnoxious music; the loud, annoying dubbing; the terrible overall quality of the sound itself. I gather that the writers loved to do these films but I'd guess it was more enjoyable for them to watch as a break from the truly turgid films rather than because they made great episodes. I'm half way through a rewatch of the whole series now and I found these episodes really difficult to get through.

An underrated episode is Stranded in Space - a failed TV pilot, about a guy who travels to a parallel universe where the main difference is that most people are left-handed. Again, like Monster A-Go-Go etc, the mundanity and lack of imagination is so funny to me. The flatter the better.

Godzilla vs Megalon is an early classic, maybe the first truly brilliant episode.

It Conquered the World is another essential; easily a top 10 episode for me.

I'm also partial to the films with nihilistic endings - The Sidehackers and The Beatniks spring to mind.

Invasion USA is another underrated one.

Fuck it, just watch them all.

famethrowa

Don't forget the evergreen Mr B. Natural. Just bizarre all around, from that strange era when trumpet making was a worldwide mega-industry, and the school band was king.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAKentKiGOY