Owning Your Okayness: MST3K The Return: A Review

After a ton of hype and a lot of well-placed promotion, the MST3K Revival season kicked into high gear this past April.  Now that the season’s been binged and with a tour waiting in the wings,  I thought I’d peel back the layers of what’s good, bad, and just plain okay about the new season of MST, as broken down into several different categories.

An Extremely Brief Tribute To The Undertaker

I’ve been an Undertaker fan since I was ten years old.  I suppose that’s a common story.   Many of us saw him for the first time at that age, when he towered over the heads of nearly everyone in the company, accompanied by a mugging Paul Bearer, rolling back his eyes like a zombie in heat. 

No one pretends that the Undertaker was an elegant wrestler.  He could walk the ropes and pull off the whole zombie thing, but he was creaky and imperfect and imprecise.   It took years for him to build up this sort of cool nonchalance, this sort of image that made questioning his skills kind of a moot point.   The Undertaker was just The Undertaker: like a pillar or a supporting wall, he was always there if you were a wrestling fan of a certain age, always solidly available.    Performance over athleticism was his game.  For spectacle he was at the top of his game.

The Not Too Distant Past: The Top Fifteen Best (Slightly) Obscure MST3K Episodes

If you ask someone where you should start a binge watch of Mystery Science Theater 3000, they’ll probably name one of  these episode.  Or, if they have more obscure taste they’ll mention “Hobgoblins” or “The Lost Continent”, or anything that’s gotten some kind of foothold on the fandom or in pop culture because of a meme.  All of those episodes are amazing, don’t get me wrong, but there are some really great

My rules for inclusion on this list are simple: the episode has to be slightly more obscure than the ones usually listed in top twenty or top ten MST episode lists; and they shouldn’t contain a mematic catchphrase.  I have made allowances, however, for episodes that contained a short with memetic features when the episode did not.

Movie Review: Bang Bang Baby: A Sudden and Surprisingly Dark Fable

Bang Bang Baby comes on like a cross between Top Secret!  And Psycho Beach Party at first.  It treats its heroine’s dream to become a teen idol with absolutely sincerity while surrounding her with goofy stock characters: the drunken yet eloquent father, the creepy stalker intended to provide a counterpoint to the dreamy, perfect hero; the scenery-chewing aw-shucks movie hero stuck in a small town; even a folksy moonshine slinger.    

Blood and Circus: A Retrospective of my Time in Wrestling Fandom. Part 2: Running Away

I was fourteen years old by the time I went to my first pay per view.  It was the Royal Rumble, and it opened a  definitive year for some of the worst years the business would ever experience.  The Undertaker was barely a babyface, Vince McMahon couldn’t decide between Bret Hart and Lex Luger for the next Face of the Company, and the steroid trials had barely vindicated the industry.   These were the years I became a huge fan, the years that I spent, well – spending most of my tiny income on pro wrestling. 

I wasn’t inside of course; not yet.

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Blood and Circus: A Retrospective of my Time in Wrestling Fandom. Part 1: In the Beginning

“Would you like to watch WrestleMania?” 

My cousin Kerry was about seven years old, I was just over ten.  We were at her house, and the charm of playing with her tiny turtle and fish had worn off.  The question left me wondering; I knew vaguely what pro wrestling was, having seen well-oiled men yelling from the screen during the business’ boom period during my childhood, but I never sat down to watch it myself. 

Kerry had been a fan for much longer.  “Why don’t we watch WrestleMania 6?”  That sounded fine.  She turned the TV on and The Ultimate Warrior was ranting about the skies and the heavens, and suddenly I was hooked.

Different Shades of Royalty: Five Underrated Bruce Campbell Performances

When you think of Bruce Campbell, what do you imagine?  A working-class shmoe cutting up demons with a chainsaw?  A cowboy-lawyer who talks to his horse?  A mojito drinking former navy SEAL with a loyalty streak a mile wide?  Or an elderly Elvis trying to make one last stand and redeem all of his terrible life choices with a single act that will save the humanity of his fellow rest home citizens? 

Well, here are several little known or overlooked Campbell performances that often get overlooked when people talk about his career.   Get out your Netflix Ques and take a look at this list of semi-obscure look at the best and most unknown of the chin's kingdom.

The Staggering Genius of Mabel Pines: Five Reasons Why Gravity Falls is Amazing And Why It Will Be Sorely Missed

Yesterday, Alex Hirsch announced the conclusion of the Disney show Gravity Falls, to the astonishment of its strong fanbase.   The show has been a popular fixture on Disney’s XD channel for the past year and a half, and the program will conclude with its second season and the last two episodes that will tie up the Weirdmageddon cliffhanger.

Just what’s made Gravity Falls so popular?  There’s a handful of factors operating here, most of them gloriously unique – and they come together to make one heck of a show.

The Rainbow Disconnection: Why Are The Muppets Failing?

It started out in a bubble of goodwill as the most anticipated show of the fall, with a great preview package and gangbuster ratings.  But along the way it seemed to lose its buzz and its ratings, requiring a mid-run EP switch and garnering it bubble status six episodes into its run.  What happened?  How did the good times go so wrong?

The Ten Most Essential Rifftrax of All Time

Over five years ago, Rifftrax was established by Mike Nelson, offering audio commentaries to be played alongside big budget  mainstream motion pictures, In the way they never could due to budget constraints on MST3K.  He was eventually joined by Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, and the business eventually expanded to include downloads for full-length motion pictures and shorts as well as live events.

The series has an achingly funny back catalog and here, in my opinion, are the best of the best that they have to offer.

WARNING: The list under the cutline is very video-intensive!

Play MiSTing For me: the lost art of the MiST.

Marissa Flores Picard everybody

There was a time long ago – okay, maybe ten years or less – where MST3K fans gathered together and created a form of fanfiction that is not only entirely unique to the genre, but one that spread throughout various fandoms and gave birth to sporking culture.

Join Us, Won't You?: 10 Little Life Lessons I’ve Learned From MST3K

Some people get their life instructions from little books about chicken soup.  I get mine from watching Robots banter with movies on satellites.  But what have they taught me?  Read on to find out.

MST3K Half-Month: Of Satellites: How watching Robots make fun of Bad Movies Shaped My Sense of Humor

I still remember my first riff.  

I was about fifteen, my parents were out of town and I was on Easter break.  MST3K had just begun airing in syndication; I had been deprived of the show for years  because our cable company didn’t have Comedy Central (and it wouldn’t for another three years).   It was somewhere past midnight when I turned on what would one day be my local CW affiliate and heard it: “the hat from Breakfast at Tiffany's is coming in for a landing.”  I would later learn that that was Mary Jo Pehl’s first ever riff for the show, and when Pearl Forrester became my favorite character it felt like kismet.

Laverne & Squiggy & Chuck & Rhonda: The Bizarre Last Season of Laverne and Shirley

Here’s a little confession – I love Laverne and Shirley.  Yes, it’s goofy, broad and quite behind the times (avoid The Bully Show at all costs), but there’s something about watching two women struggle against the odds to figure out who they are and survive in an environment that is considerably hostile to them, two single women trying to date.  For all of the traditionalism that soaks into the narrative through the girls’ pursuit of guys and marriage, there are just as many episodes (“The Feminine Mistake” and “2001: A Sitcom Odyssey”) that served as a burgeoning support pillars for the nascent feminist movement that was just trying to grasp the concept that it was okay to want a fair wage, stay unmarried and be less than classically feminine.

The show suffered through some growing pains on its way to the eighth season.  Running out of fresh material, they chose to move the girls to Los Angeles, take them into the 60s and submerge them into the culture of the swinging, movie-mad era of the time.  The girls go from worshiping Fabian to lusting after the Beatles, but little else changes besides the size of their set and the introduction of a flighty-surfaced/iron cored blonde actress/dancer/model named Rhonda Lee

Then Cindy Williams became pregnant, and the show dealt with that fact very poorly.

The Five Most Forgotten (and secretly most awesome) Parody Films in Existence

Humor is a very, very subjective subject.    What’s funny to one person definitely won’t be funny to another, but some parody films (Young Frankenstein, Airplane!, Not Another Teen Movie, Blazing Saddles and Naked Gun, for example) have stood the test of time and become universally beloved.  That said, some movies that are pretty darn good in this genre that have either been critically derided or completely ignored.  These are the top five most obscure – and achingly funny – parody movies you might not have heard of.

The Five Least Necessary Sequels Ever

Film sequels can be divvied up into neat piles.  There are the ones that arrive at the perfect time, with something to say and a theme to build on from its origin film (The Empire Strikes Back, if you please).  There are those that are misbegotten from the very start and leave the audience sitting in their seats scratching their heads (Stayin’ Alive and its odd plot choices).  Still yet there are sequels that get greenlit ten plus years after the first film and arrive before surprised and occasionally horrified audiences (Dumb and Dumber To, rise and take a bow).  Some sequels – even worse -  feature none of the original elements or stars that made the first one so successful (Grease 2) .  But some are special; some fall into the category of being unnecessary because the first film in the series was so satisfying, so complete, that a sequel feels like a desecration. 

Below are the five most unnecessary of that bunch, in my little opinion.  I’ve tried to be a little less obvious with my choices, but some chestnuts cannot resist a good roasting.

Matrimony Month(s): The Notebook versus The Wedding: Love As Tragic Farce In Nicholas Spark’s Mild Kingdom

The late 0’s to the early 10’s were an odd time.  Spurred on by war, famine and fear on all fronts, weary Americans turned toward simplistic, homespun entertainment to comfort them.  All of a sudden, and completely out of the blue, romances were all about tradition, and all about weeping again.

Maritmony Month(s): Mama Mia!: Loud Trope Subversion, ABBA and Fireworks in Greece

It took nearly ten more years after My Big Fat Greek Wedding for another big, splashy ‘feel good’ movie about marriage to hit the big screen – in this case a filmed version of the enormous Broadway jukebox classic “Mama Mia.”

Hitting theaters in 2008, the big-budget film came at the very tail end of the movie musical revival begun by Chicago’s 2002 Oscar win.  There were a handful of highlights and lowlights in the genre leading up to Mama Mia before the genre would receive another mini-revival with 2012’s Les Miserables update.  As for Mama Mia itself –and its POV on marriage and romance – the story is simple.  And complicated.

Matrimony Month: Muriel’s Wedding: Sisterhood in the ‘90’s Romance Oeuvre

The flipside of the traditional values renaissance brought to life by movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding was the anti-traditionalism brought to life by movies as diverse as the critically reviled The Next Best Thing and the critically acclaimed Muriel’s Wedding.