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pipermca · 6 years

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Lost and Found Again - Part 5

It was still very early. But ‘very early’ was the perfect time to grab some energon from the mess hall and get it to Prowl, before the mech got too involved in his work.

Jazz walked past the door to the rec room, paused, and then took two steps back, peering through the doorway.

The lights were off, but the television set was on. There was a test pattern on the screen, and no sound came from the set’s speakers.

Shaking his helm, Jazz detoured into the rec room with the intention of turning off the set. He would have to send around yet another reminder that when mechs were done watching the television, they were supposed to turn it off. Last time, it was the Protectobots who had stayed up late watching a Herbie the Love Bug marathon, and just left the set on when they were done.

But as he approached the corner where all the chairs and couches had been arranged around the television, he saw the tip of a door wing poking above the back of the largest, plushiest couch. Jazz crept forward and peered over the edge of the couch.

Hound was slouched down in the cushions of the couch. His helm was rocked back, his optics were closed, and his mouth hung open. Curled up at his side, his helm in Hound’s lap, was Bluestreak. One of Hound’s hands rested on Bluestreak’s waist.

Both mechs were deep in recharge.

Well, well, Jazz thought. The two mechs had been dancing around each other for months... Ever since they’d had that run-in with the two seekers in the mountains. Jazz figured all Hound and Bluestreak needed were a few well-placed nudges to see that they were both interested in each other.

And Jazz knew what he could do to give one of those nudges.

Smiling, Jazz stealthily came around the couch and turned the television set off. Then he retreated from the room, closing the door silently behind him.

::Hey, Prowler.:: Jazz knew the tactician was up, since he’d been gone already when Jazz had come out of recharge. ::What duty shifts are Bluestreak and Hound scheduled for today?::

Prowl responded immediately. ::Hound has the day off. Bluestreak has patrol at 1300 local. Why?::

Perfect, Jazz thought. He made sure to tag his reply with a glyph of innocence. ::Just wonderin’! Thanks!:: He closed the comm link before Prowl could reply, then opened a second link to another officer he knew was always awake at this hour.

::Hey, Red! Can ya do me a favour? Can ya keep mechs outta the rec room until 1100 local? If anyone asks just say it’s for maintenance.::

Jazz could practically hear Red Alert’s frown over the comm. ::Why? I see that Hound and Bluestreak are in there.::

Jazz gave the most innocent and truthful response he could think of. He knew that Red Alert would figure it out sooner or later anyway, just like Prowl would, but there was no reason to tip his hand so soon. ::Ya. They’re both out hard, and I wanna give them some more time to recharge without bein’ disturbed. Please, Red? I promise to tell ya the next time I hear about the twins settin’ up for a prank!::

Red Alert’s response carried a glyph of reluctance, but Jazz smiled when he received it. ::All right. Fine. Just this once.::

Jazz heard the door lock, and he grinned. Success! Jazz carried on down the hallway, quietly singing a snippet of a tune he’d heard on the humans’ radio the day before.

Wake me up before you go go, ‘Cause I’m not planning on going solo. Wake me up before you go go, Take me dancing tonight.

Bluestreak was pleasantly warm. He snuggled down into the soft surface he was laying on, his hands curled up against his chest.

The pillow under his helm moved slightly.

“Nooo…” Bluestreak mumbled, his hand coming up to readjust the pillow. His hand slid along warm metal, and he opened his optics blearily. “What…?”

“Good morning, Blue.”

Rolling his helm, Bluestreak looked up. Hound’s cheerful optics looked down at him. “…Good morning,” Bluestreak replied, his tone thick with confusion. He struggled to sit up, and looked around the darkened room. “Did we… I guess we fell into recharge watching the movie last night.” Checking his chronometer, he frowned. “It’s so late. Are we the only ones in here? Why didn’t anyone wake us up?” he asked.

Hound jerked a thumb back towards the door of the rec room. “The door’s closed. I woke up a few kliks ago, and Red Alert commed me. He said we had until 1100 local before he let anyone in.” Lifting his helm slightly, Hound said, “Teletraan, rec room lights at 50%, please.” The lights flickered on and rose to the requested brightness.

Bluestreak lifted his door wings slightly. “Why did Red keep everyone out? I mean, I’m not complaining,” he said, stretching to work a kink out of one of his neck cables. “I think that was the best recharge I’ve gotten in a while, curled up next to you.” Hound’s optics brightened slightly, and Bluestreak froze, suddenly realizing what he’d said. “Err, that is… You make a really nice pillow?” He snapped his mouth shut to prevent himself from digging the hole any deeper.

“I didn’t mind being your pillow, Blue,” Hound said with a smile. “Last night was fun. It was nice just to hang out here, to relax and watch some movies, even after everyone else decided to go back to their quarters.”

Latching on to the topic of the movies, Bluestreak said, “That was fun! And I’m glad that Spike explained to me that the ‘Saturday Night Creature Feature’ wasn’t a wildlife documentary. Although, you’d probably like that,” he added, his door wings tipping down for a moment. “I don’t think Groove knew what to make of the first movie, though.”

Hound laughed. “Yeah. He said he was going to ask Grimlock whether he’d ever met Mechagodzilla. Did he miss the beginning of the movie? Because he seemed to think it was a news broadcast.”

Bluestreak’s spark spun happily at the sound of Hound’s laughter. It sounded just like how Hound acted: friendly, kind, and cheerful. “Yeah, I think he came in late. That might explain his confusion.” He paused. “What was the next movie after that one? Something about a bomb...”

“It was The Beast of Yucca Flats,” Hound said. “It was terrible.”

His wings dipping again, Bluestreak said, “I must have fallen into recharge during that one. I hardly remember anything about it.”

“Yeah, you barely lasted past the first two scenes,” Hound said. With an effort, he heaved himself out of the soft couch cushions, and stretched once he got to his pedes. “You really didn’t miss much. It was hard to follow, and barely made sense. I don’t think radiation really works like that on humans.”

Bluestreak watched the Jeep as he stretched and flared his plating, catching sight of cables and wires between the gaps in his armor that were normally hidden. He looked away before Hound could notice him staring, and stood up next to the green mech. “I’m sorry I fell into recharge and missed it, anyway. And... I’m sorry for falling into recharge on you. You could have woken me up to get me to move so you could go back to your own berth,” Bluestreak said. He turned and began refluffing the cushions where they had been sitting, so as to avoid meeting Hound’s optics.

“I didn’t mind, Blue,” Hound said. Bluestreak glanced up and saw Hound smiling at him. “I was fine where I was, and you looked so comfortable. It seemed a shame to wake you up. And besides,” he said, looking around the empty rec room. “I think I probably recharged longer here than I would have in my quarters. Trailbreaker had a shift early this morning, and he would have woken me up on his way out. I don’t think he’s capable of being quiet.”

“Still... I wonder why they let us recharge so late in the morning?” Bluestreak asked. “Why did Red Alert keep everyone out so they wouldn’t wake us up?”

Hound shrugged and then smiled again. “I don’t know. But I’m not going to look a souvenir pony in the intake.”

Originally posted on Archive of Our Own as “Sleeping In.“

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

#lost and found again #bluestreak #hound #bluehound #tf bluestreak #tf hound #fanfic #maccadam #my fic

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mst3kproject · 7 years

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The Giant Claw

This is exactly the kind of movie that makes MSTies think fondly of our favourite show. It’s got Jeff Morrow from This Island Earth, Mara Corday from The Black Scorpion, Morris Ankrum from Rocketship XM, Robert Shayne from The Indestructible Man, a Portentious 50's Narrator who likes to ramble, and a monster you won't believe even after you've seen it. I was hoping it would be picked up for Season 11... maybe it'll make Season 12. I can just hear the guys singing the title along to the opening music sting, or whining but I made sandwiches! on behalf of the female lead.

Some object as big as a battleship is buzzing around North America, destroying airplanes wherever it goes! First it's a search plane over the Arctic, then a transport on its way to New York, then a plane full of men who attempt to parachute to safety, but don't quite make it. Whatever it is it can be glimpsed as it passes, but doesn't show up on radar. Talk of flying saucers abounds, but eventually engineer Mitch MacAfee and mathematician Sally Caldwell discover the horrible truth: it's a giant anti-matter bird from another galaxy! Even worse, it has come to Earth to nest – we must destroy it before its eggs can hatch, but how do we do that when its antimatter shield annihilates any bullets, rockets, or missiles we can fire at it?

You will find quite a few reviews of this movie online and nearly all of them will focus on the same thing: the monster. And I will admit up front, The Giant Claw's monster deserves every word of incredulous derision that has ever been heaped on it. It is ridiculous. Imagine The Muppet Show doing a sketch involving a none-too-bright vulture. Picture what the vulture puppet would look like. That is the monster from The Giant Claw. Godzilla would have laughed at it. It has bulging eyes and a tuft of hair on the top of its head. It has a ridge down its back like a dragon and I think its call is just somebody yelling “squaaawwwwk!” into a microphone. It has teeth. Its feathers look like the whole puppet was shipped across the country in a box full of newspaper and nobody bothered to straighten up its plumage.

In short, it looks like this:

Where was that bad boy in your Gargantuan Panoply, eh, Jonah?

You may have heard the story about how the company originally contracted to do the effects just pocketed the money and ran off, leaving the production company to buy themselves a bird from a shady company in Mexico for whatever they could scrounge from their couch cushions. You may have heard that the actors had no idea what the monster looked like until they saw the movie for themselves at the premiere, whereupon they snuck out of the theatre and went to go drink the humiliation away. I have no idea if any of these things are true, but they're such well-trodden ground that I don't feel like going over them again. Instead I will talk about the non-monster parts – because frankly, those are pretty hilarious, too.

For starters, there's another thing a lot of reviews talk about: the narrator. Like The Beast of Yucca Flats or The Atomic Brain, The Giant Claw has an intermittent narrator who doesn't always make a whole lot of sense. In fact, the opening scene, in which Mitch becomes the first to sight the bird during a test flight, only to be accused of playing a practical joke when it doesn't show up on any radar, is entirely narrated. This is very odd, since this is the part of the movie where we ought to be meeting the characters and establishing the conflict. You would expect it to be the part where it's most important to show us things rather than telling us – telling can happen later when we have some frame of reference for what we've been told.

I can't imagine any halfway-capable writer doing this intentionally, and the writers of The Giant Claw (Paul Gangelin and Samuel Newman) do seem to have been at least halfway-capable. They both had fairly long careers, Newman writing for television and Gangelin penning, among other things, one of the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies. The dialogue in The Giant Claw is awful, including such fantastical down points as 'follow the pattern', the mesonic atom, and 'get me my pants, will you, General?', but the story is linear enough and follows the standard monster-movie beats: first sighting, rising action, supersitious yokel connects the creature with some local legend, the military is useless, all-out destruction, and finally the world is saved by technobabble bullshit. It's never great (in fact it's barely mediocre), but it's functional – except for that truly abysmal beginning. I can only imagine that something must have happened, like they ran out of time or money and simply could not shoot the opening of the movie properly.

The narrator also has a favourite word, which quickly becomes the whole movie's favourite word: battleship. I think The Giant Claw uses the word battleship more than the actual movie Battleship. Whenever the narrator wants to tell us that the bird is big, he calls it as big as a battleship. Mitch MacAfee describes it as big as a battleship. Sally and the skeptical military brass derisively call it his flying battleship. The word is used so many times, it actually starts to do that thing where it stops meaning anything and becomes a mere noise. Az bigazza baddle shipp.

When the movie tries to talk about science, what comes out of the characters' mouths is very nearly complete gobbledegook, with a few physics words thrown in to try to sound plausible. It rarely even reaches a Star Trek level of scientific accuracy, except in one notable case, where it is very much better than Star Trek. Remember the episode The Alternative Factor, in which a guy is travelling between matter and anti-matter universes? Spock does explain that when matter and anti-matter meet, they annihilate each other, but the writers totally failed to understand how this works. They seemed to think that a person must meet his or her own duplicate in order to annihilate, whereas in the real universe any proton can annihilate with any anti-proton, any electron with any positron. This is how it works in The Giant Claw, as the bird's antimatter force field destroys all the matter it encounters.

The movie also throws a couple of surprising bones to the idea of the bird as an alien. Talking about the feather he's examined, staff scientist Dr. Noymann notes that he calls it a feather because it looks like one and appears to be functionally analagous, but this is not strictly accurate, any more than it would be accurate to call a pterosaur’s pycnofibres 'hair' just because they serve the same insulating purpose. There is also a scene in which Sally and Mitch discuss whether the bird eats, and conclude that it somehow draws energy from the vehicles it destroys, but not through internal digestion. When so many films assume that extraterrestrial life will both look and function like Earth life, it's nice to see even a bad movie note that we can't take this for granted.

Although there are exceptions, like Reptilicus or Starcrash, I've generally found that the best bad movies are those that really are earnestly trying to say something even if they don't succeed. A lot of reviewers seem to think The Giant Claw is a fairly empty movie as well as a hilariously terrible one, but I'm not so sure that's the case. Rather than just being about a giant buzzard and some extremely crummy models, this is a movie about science, about seeking a rational explanation, about eliminating the impossible to settle on the merely improbable, and about how when things don't make sense it probably means you're on the verge of an important discovery.

When the bird is first sighted, people try to write it off as a practical joke on Mitch's part, because who ever heard of a bird az bigazza baddle shipp that doesn't show up on radar? Even when it's clear something weird is going on, people complain it doesn't make sense: Sally lists possible alternate causes for the airplane accidents that keep happening but dismisses them all, and one of the military men grouses that MacAfee might as well tell him that 'black is white and two plus two equals six'. The characters make progress not by dismissing the events, or by blaming paranormal phenomena like flying saucers, but by studying the evidence. The photos from Sally's weather balloons and the shed feather tell Dr. Noymann that it is a bird, that it comes from space, and that it uses anti-matter for defense.

Never mind that these conclusions are way sillier than flying saucers and that the 'science' that supports them is bullshit. The point is that you need to have the facts before you can move from them to how to deal with the situation. Once they know what the bird is and what it's made of, things like the ineffectiveness of traditional weapons and the radar invisibility make sense (at least in the world of the movie) and Mitch and Sally can use their knowledge of physics and mathematics to come up with a plan that works.

In the real world, a lot of scientific progress happens when things don't seem to make sense. Einstein couldn't reconcile the speed of light predicted by Maxwell's equations with the structure of space as predicted by Newton, and out of this seeming contradiction came relativity. Nowadays science has a similar problem with the incompatibility of relativity and quantum mechanics, but scientists know from experience that this means there's a better theory out there that we just haven't found yet. When the world doesn't seem to make sense, it's actually just telling you to dig a little deeper, because the next layer down will blow your mind.

Not bad for a movie about a giant anti-matter bird from another galaxy.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #the giant claw #50s #magic voice recommends

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thefrightchoice · 3 years

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My Soundtrack to the End of the World

This my soundtrack to the end of the world. This list includes thirteen songs and the reasons on why I chose them. It's not meant to be taken serious. 1. If Tomorrow Ever Comes by Cop Shoot Cop -- Let's say the world has this huge scare and its only a matter of minutes before we are all tiny particles of space dust. Now, think of every thought that would run through your head, think of the people that matter or have mattered in your life, and then think in only moments you and them, and future generations will no longer exist.... If by chance or possibly a miracle, the world is saved. What will tomorrow be like for you? I don't think it will be easy. "Everything was easier when you had your time." 2. Epitaph by King Crimson -- This song is the reason I decided to write this note. This song is the beginning of the end. "Between the iron gates of fate, The seeds of time were sown, And watered by the deeds of those Who know and who are known; Knowledge is a deadly friend When no one sets the rules. The fate of all mankind I see Is in the hands of fools." 3. Mother Earth by Jesu -- The big, somber tones will provide some ambiance to humanity's helplessness. "all we are, we'll never be." 4. Bastard by Devin Townsend (Ocean Machine: Biomech) -- This song makes me think of Time and how there is little of it. Also, it makes me think of how lonely a person can be even if we're near the ones we love (or hate). "Grey people stare at a static sky (as you will) Ours is not to question why." 5. Smokey Mountain Rain by Ronnie Milsap -- Just one of those songs I want to hear before I go. "Smokey Mountain rain keeps on fallin' I keep on callin' her name Smokey Mountain rain I'll keep on searchin' I can't go on hurtin' this way She's somewhere in the Smokey Mountain rain." 6. The More We Live- Let Go by Yes -- Just something about this song makes me want to open my arms and embrace Armageddon. "Cast away our doubt and sorrow (Turning away from the past we know) The Universe at our command (Conserving the fate of the world we grow) Together you and I, we hold the key to all the answers" 7. Skating Away (On The Thin Ice Of A New Day) by Jethro Tull -- A quirky tune I've always liked. This song makes me think that somewhere society missed the boat. We've moved too fast with our heads preoccupied in things that will not matter. But I also think the lyrics are nonsensical and its really just a happy tune, don't know. To me it sounds fitting for the end of the world. "`Cause you were bred for humanity and sold to society --- one day you'll wake up in the Present Day --- a million generations removed from expectations of being who you really want to be." 8. Always Look On The Bright Side of Life by Eric Idle -- Isn't hard to understand why I added this one. "For life is quite absurd And death's the final word You must always face the curtain with a bow. Forget about your sin - give the audience a grin Enjoy it - it's your last chance anyhow. So always look on the bright side of death Just before you draw your terminal breath" 9. The Ghost in You by Psychedelic Furs -- I'd like to hear some Psychedelic Furs before I'm buried into oblivion. "Ain't it just like rain And love - is only heaven away" 10. Diesel Uterus by Mnemic -- Just one incredibly incredible song. The Earth's crust is being ripped away and whatever stands on it is tossed like a child's unwanted toy. "Salvation is only a word." 11. Straws Pulled At Random by Meshuggah -- We're nearing the end of the end. Everything we thought we knew was wrong and any meaning we try to give it is absurd. This is man's creation. His self-fulfilled prophecy (Guessing If the end of the world happens by the nuke or the atom bomb or something else man made). (Note: The way I wrote that reminds me of The Beast of Yucca Flats.) "Denied the self control of fate we flow suspended in semi-life Until the ever imminent day when oblivion

claims our breath." 12. Almost Again by Strapping Young Lad -- All that's left is space. Space for new creation. There are no history books. No Leornardo Da Vinci. No Galileo Galilee. No Founding Fathers. Time is linear and the past does not matter because it does not exist. "So at the speed of sound, I will be found At the speed of light, I will be seen." 13. Fuck Yourself by Steve Vai -- How can we prevent the end of the world? Well, go fuck yourself! "You're the only one that's getting fucked in the end."

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autolenaphilia · 7 years

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I, Robot The Shame of Mystery Science Theater 3000 by Chris Fujiwara

(This article has disappeared from the Internet, though you can find it archived on the Wayback Machine here I find it quite interesting and it articulates some of the concerns I have with MST3K and “bad movie culture” in general, so I’m reposting it here. The article is written by Chris Fujiwara and belongs to him. If he wants me to take it down, I will.)

One sign of the death of the cinema is the zombie-like persistence of the "bad film" cult that rose to public-nuisance status in the late Seventies, feasting noisily on things like the Ed Wood films. From the start, this was just an especially obnoxious manifestation of a general intolerance for films that try to free themselves from the dominant mode of cinematic realism. Thus it's but a short step from sneering at the budgetary deficiencies of Plan 9 from Outer Space to scoffing at, e.g.:

1. Any non-state-of-the-art special effects and visions of the future, even though these things date themselves anyway from period to period, and future generations may find Independence Day less "realistic" (whatever that will mean) than the 1956 aliens-smash-the-state programmer of which it is an unacknowledged remake, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers;

2. Overtly non-realistic visual and acting style used for expressive purposes, as in Soviet master S. M. Eisenstein's outrageous Ivan the Terrible, which uses actors' bodies as components of a delirious architecture;

3. "Implausible" plots like Vertigoas if we're supposed to ignore the holes in the stories Hollywood tells now just because men don't wear ties to walk around the block and no shot lasts longer than 1.4 secondsand "banal" ones like the potboiler-like thriller stories from which Orson Welles made his superb Lady from Shanghai, and Touch of Evilas if Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes working together could have come up with an original story or cared less about it;

4. Mythic dialogue and situations like those in Rebel Without a Cause and Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, and Imitation of Life, whose emotional power intimidates audiences lulled by the rituals of appeasement enacted in nighttime soap operas.

The irrelevant yocks that frequently greet the films just mentioned when they show at a revival house or a college auditorium are the voice of a viewing public paralyzed by fear, desperate for any externalization of a comforting "distance" to protect them from recognizing their own anxieties writ large in the image unspooling from the past not dead enough to suit them.

Such a distance is abundantly provided by the robots on the cable (now also broadcast-syndicated) show Mystery Science Theater 3000, devoted to stomping on "the worst movies ever made." The big gimmick (the "plot" behind which isn't worth explaining) is that these robots are sitting in a mockup of a theater and we the lucky TV audience are watching the films from over their shoulders and ostensibly being entertained by their scornful running commentary. The numbing, irritating effect thus achieved is not unlike watching a Josef vos Sternberg film in the eighth row of the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square the week after midterms. What is most amazing about MST3K (the acronyum preferred by the show's adherents) is that the robots can blather on for an hour without saying anything witty or interestingand people can't get enough of them! (As of this writing, MST3K, which has been in hiatus, is due to be "revived" in new episodes [it wased]; meanwhile, the repeats are still shown contantly on Comedy Central.)

(A similar dead-end sensation can be found by watching what is supposed to pass for heady, unsettling stuff in recent cinema. I refer to the ubiquitous superficial irony that has become the stock-in-trade of Robert Altman, the Coen Brothers, and many less skillful directors, the maddening profusion of brain-eating detail in one of Terry Gilliam's nasty conceits, and the pompous theatricalized events of Peter Greenaway.)

I'd like one of the misties (in-group code for the shows devotees) to explain to me (a letter in care of the editor of this magazine will do, thanks) why if these mechanical creeps are such Oscar Wildes don't they take on something just a bit juicier, a tad more worthy of their withering satire than The Beasts of Yucca Flats. What about, say, Fellini's La Dolce Vita? There's a film that has everything the robots love to disdain: pretentious dialogue, long dull stretches, and people with funny clothes and big asses. Obviously, the contempt for cinema, history, and the audience that fuels the whole robot insanity can be applied to low-budget horror and exploitation filmmaking.

MST3K isn't really about "bad movies" anyway. This is proved by the choice of 1955's This Island Earth as the film basted in Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, the recent theatrical spinoff from the show. In a kinder, gentler era of genre film appreciation (whose tone was set by Forrest J. Ackerman, the benevolent editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland), This Island Earth was regarded as a classic. Whatever you think about the film, to rank it one of "the worst movies ever made" is clearly absurd. Of the 30,000 features released in the United States from 1915 to 1960, This Island Earth is probably in the top 3,000-4,000. Considering that countless films have been made since (most of them bad in ways that could scarcely have been imagined in 1955), I would guess that This Island Earth is sitting comfortably in the top five percent of all films. (That's right, I'm saying that 19 out of every 20 films are worse than This Island Earth. Prove me wrong.) Why pick on This Island Earth? To raise the intellectual stakes a little ? Probably notit's doubtful that many members of the intended audience of MST3K:TM had ever heard of This Island Earth or could distinguish it from Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. Anyway, the level of humor in MST3K:TM is preposterously low: roughly a third of the robots' remarks are alarmed, sniggering references to homosexuality, putdowns of the hero's sidekick's virility, and other manifestations of male adolescent sex-role anxiety. (Another third are mostly farting and toilet jokes, which possibly belong to the same category.) In its treatment of Faith Domergue's sexy scientist, This Island Earth may betray what we now recognize as the sexism of the Fifties, but what are we to make of the fact that the woman aboard the MST3K spacceship is a maternal vacuum cleaner with no arms? MST3K is obsessed with sexuality and afraid of it. The absence of women highlights the show's treehouse psychology.

MST3K's use of robots for heroes is no accident. MST3K's sarcasm at the expense of the past is techno-elitism at its most self-congratulatory, asserting mastery through acts of cultural misrecognition. Perhaps the reason the MST3K people despise so much that they choose to mount an attack on it in the nation's theaters is that they're disturbed by the way the film reduces the unimaginable future of interplanetary communication to the level of an erector set. MST3K's creators, who resemble science nerds using their first grant as an excuse to lord it over their former peers, would probably be thrilled to be drafted for a totalitarian planet's nuclear program (the fate of the protagonists of This Island Earth).

The robots on the bottom of the MST3K screen are scotomas that indicate a more fundamental visual disturbance, the inability to see anything in films except the same things over and over again: hot women, men who match masculine stereotypes either too well or not enough, and supposed defects of representation (too slow, too cheap-looking, not realistic enough, etc.).

Then there's The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide. Just as MST3K represents a depressing low in "golden turkey" television, TMST3KACEG marks a stupefying new milestone in "golden turkey" film books by having no information about any film, apart from short, inaccurate plot summaries. Instead, the book recounts supposed highlights of the robots' parasitic interventions and explains how the robots behind the robots "strived to make [the films] funny." Readers are thus treated to 172 large-format, haute-design pages filled with pointless descriptions of robot skits and unreadable writing-room anecdotes ("I recall this episode as being the first time we decided to write sketches having nothing to do with the movie..." from the section on Monster a-Go-Go). Nauseatingly self-important, TMST3KACEG leaves wide open the door I wish had remained shut; I expect to see a new wave of film books that focus on the writers' bus rides home.

The book exposes the cluelessness behind the smug sensibility evident on the show. MST3K writer Kevin Murphy proclaims reverence for Frank Zappa (and in real goo-talk yet: "When all his tapes are played and his music is studied, I'm guessing he'll go down as one of the finest composers and performers of the century," p. 109) but makes fun of an angry viewer for wanting to hear Eddie Cochran in Untamed Youth without robots talking (p.16). It makes sense that someone who thinks it's cool to put robots in front of The Killer Shrews would have no problem revealing in print that he thinks the composer of "Don't Eat Yellow Snow" and "St. Alphonzo's Pancake Breakfast" is a greater artist than the man who recorded "Something Else" and "Nervous Breakdown."

There's nothing new about MST3Kit's just a tasteless crossbreeding of the tradition of the TV horror host (Zacherle, Ghoulardi, the Ghoul, Elvira) and the "Golden Turkey" way of misreading films that was codified by inane right-wing reviewer Michael Medved and his equally vapid brother, Harry. All this comes indirectly from the surrealists, but the MST3K robots, following their idols the Medveds rather than Andr Breton and Ado Kyrou, deny and trivialize the power of strange films to disturb, confuse, and give hope.

It's time the "bad movies" movement died a quiet death. This goes not just for MST3K-style vendettas against low-budget films but also for the would-be more sophisticated "camp" onslaught against glossy major productions like "Valley of the Dolls" and the Delmer Daves-Troy Donahue cycle (A Summer Place, Susan Slade, etc.). Of the many possible ways of enjoying a film that deviates from standard criteria of adequacy, the least interesting is to treat it as a source of unintentional humor. Robot Monster, The Sinister Urge, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, Hercules and the Captive Women, It Conquered the World, Attack of the Giant Leeches, Aleksandr Ptushko's fantasy films"bad" as some of these films may be (although many of them are, in fact, "good"), all of them will be admired long after their potential for robot humor has been exhausted (i.e., starting right now) for the unique aesthetic experiences , strange personal visions, and precious cultural documentation they offer.

Someone should invent MST3K glasses with the robots printed on the bottoms of the lenses for people to wear to movies, except that it would be unnecessary, since the robots are already built into the cognitive and aesthetic faculties of an entire culture. MST3K assumes its audienes are so impotent that they can't enjoy even "bad" films first hand but can derive pleasure from them only over the shoulders of robots.

#chris fujiwara #mst3k

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