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mst3kproject · 7 years

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Short: A Case of Spring Fever

MST3K featured a number of movies, such as The Starfighters and last week's Squirm, that were simply not memorable. They also did a number of movies and shorts that were deeply memorable, but for all the wrongest possible reasons. Mr. B Natural was one of those, and A Case of Spring Fever is another. Both were intended to be whimsical and each, in its own way, ended up being fucking terrifying instead.

The point of A Case of Spring Fever is to explain how springs work and how essential they are to daily life – particularly to automobiles. Our hero, I guess, is Gilbert, a man whose wife wants him to fix the couch before he goes golfing. When he complains that he never wants to see another spring again, a cartoon imp called Coily the Spring Sprite appears and grants his wish. Gilbert quickly realizes that things like his watch and car won't work without springs, and begs Coily to restore them. He then becomes a sort of spring evangelist, and spends the entirety of his golfing trip prostelytizing to his increasingly annoyed friends about how useful springs are until they never want to see another spring again!

The film is meant to be light-hearted and educational, and possibly to sell us cars, but it lends itself immediately to dark and horrible interpretations. Mike and the Bots spend the short and the subsequent skit about Mikey the Mike Sprite wondering how the rules of this universe work. Does every man-made object have a little pixie waiting to snatch it away from us? Have such creatures existed from the dawn of time, anticipating that they will someday be discovered, or did Coily (I'm so sorry) spring into being with the invention of the first spring? Was it only Gilbert who was suddenly spring-less, or did everybody else, too, find their watches stopped and their mattresses bounce-less with no explanation? If it was everybody, was that everybody on Earth, or did it extend to aliens who could theoretically visit us and bring their springs with them? Would it be possible to make another spring after Coily took them away, or would any new spring vanish as soon as it was finished? What happened to the Law of Conservation of Mass as all spring-shaped matter just vanished from the universe?

People would think of questions like these no matter whether the short itself were successful in entertaining and educating us, but the fact that we dwell on them illustrates that it is in fact a failure. Did anybody spend The Lord of the Rings wondering whether Saruman used to be gray and had to be killed by a Balrog before coming back as Saruman the White? Well, actually, yeah, I'm sure somebody did (it may have been me), but those people's friends probably (definitely) told them to shut up and watch the damn movie. The film itself was more interesting and entertaining than such questions. In A Case of Spring Fever, the questions distract us because the short can't hold our attention.

(I do know how the Maiar work, by the way. Please don't feel like you have to explain it to me.)

But that doesn't tell us why A Case of Spring Fever is so memorably distressing. I've seen weirder stuff on TV than Coily the Spring Sprite and it didn't stick in my mind like this short does – and some of that was supposed to be messed-up. What is going on here?

The most obvious thing is Coily himself. You don't forget Coily. He appears as a little cartoon helix with curly lines for arms and legs and a head that looks like it belongs to a bad-tempered Christmas elf. When he speaks, it's in a squeaky, grating old man voice. Every time Gilbert realizes some springless device won't work, Coily appears and shrieks “no spriiiings!” in a mocking tone before vanishing again, until our hapless protagonist is forced to take back his wish or go insane.

Coily is neither well-animated nor appealing in appearance. His gestures are repetitive and he never really looks like he's part of the environment – perhaps he's not supposed to, since he does represent an outside, supernatural force, but it's more likely that the animation was just cheap and primitive. At least some effort was made to make sure the actor playing Gilbert looks in the right direction. I think Coily was meant to be cute, but his long nose, pointed ears, buck teeth, and spiteful expression are almost demonic, and his attitude definitely so. There's something downright nightmarish about the way he pops up to mock as Gilbert grows ever more frustrated. He is literally torturing his victim into compliance.

As Crow observes when he asks how this all fits into 'God's plan for us', Coily is also a very pagan little bugger. In ancient Greece and Rome, people believed that both natural and man-made objects had their own guardian gods or spirits. Iuturna, for example, was the Roman goddess of fountains, and Ianus the god of doors and gates (Wikipedia lists Fons as the god of springs, but they mean the water type). One of the ways early Christianity tried to discourage worship of these gods was by portraying them as demons. Coily, a spirit with a restricted area of responsibility, who must be appeased with devotion or else will lash out and punish people, is just such an entity.

Scholars in the Middle Ages wrote books about the complex hierarchy among the legions of hell. I wonder where Coily fits into those.

Even more disturbing is how the encounter with Coily changes Gilbert. We don't get to know Gilbert very well, but the brief glimpse we have of him is of somebody impatient and a bit lazy, eager for an excuse to avoid his chores and go play golf. When he takes back his wish for no more springs, the film cuts abruptly from Gilbert in the car to Gilbert under the sofa again, which could be interpreted to mean that the last few minutes were only a dream... but then we find Gilbert utterly transformed. Rather than relaxing and enjoying the golf game, he spends the entire afternoon telling his friends about springs, giving even more examples of their ubiquity and usefulness than we already got from Coily. He doesn't act like somebody who just woke from a nightmare. Instead, the nightmare seems to intensify as Gilbert loses his own personality and identity, leaving only an obsession with springs! It seems that Coily has brainwashed Gilbert, or perhaps even possesses his body. That would explain why he suddenly knows so much about how springs work and the many other areas of life they are important to. He has become a puppet under Coily's control, spreading the cult of springs for some dark purpose.

I'm kidding. I think.

Another source of unintentional horror is how A Case of Spring Fever reminds us that our society takes a lot of important things for granted. The lives of first-world urbanites revolve around a number of services that could theoretically be pulled out from under us at any moment. Running water is a good example – when I was younger, the water main on the street where I lived broke, and my family had to get our water from a tank truck at the end of the street for a few days while they fixed it. During that time basic things like cooking, washing, and even using the toilet were of course far more inconvenient and time-consuming than we were used to and you can bet it made us appreciate how much we take water for granted... until about an hour and a half after it came back on. Electricity is probably an even better illustration: we don't realize just how much our lives depend on it until the power goes out and we're left not knowing what to do with ourselves until it comes back on.

It's not possible for every single spring on the planet to suddenly evaporate, but things like electricity and water can. A large solar flare could theoretically kill the power grid over huge areas and the damage might take weeks or months to repair (as those who survived Hurricane Sandy can attest). There are places even in North America where infrastructure problems have left people without clean water for years – Flint, Michigan is only the most famous example. Not to mention those of us who are dependent on medications or some other survival aid that makes contemplating the zombie apocalypse way less fun. The world humans have built for ourselves is fragile, and we don't like being reminded of that.

A Case of Spring Fever is something the Brains had kicking around for quite a long time before they found an opportunity to use it – they referenced it in both Viking Women and the Sea Serpent and Bride of the Monster. These skits couldn't have made much sense to the viewers who hadn't yet seen the short, but the host sketches often didn't make much sense anyway – it must have been a relevation when A Case of Spring Fever finally aired. I suspect they put it in front of Squirm because they knew they were being cancelled and this was their last chance to get it on the show. I'm glad they did.

I can think of a few other shorts that manage to be fucked-up and fascinating enough that I'll probably end up reviewing them. Days of Our Years (appearing before The Amazing Transparent Man) comes to mind, as does Design for Dreaming (from Twelve to the Moon). I may even try to track down the entire runs of things like Radar Men from the Moon and Undersea Kingdom, though I'll probably be sorry I did. Wish me luck.

#mst3k #reviews #a case of spring fever #40s

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