Thursday, December 29, 2011

MST3K: Episode K20 - The Last Chase

I'm continuing my project of watching all of the episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. More about that can be found here and here.

We're nearly done with Season K/Season Zero. The nationally-broadcast season are coming up after the first of the year. Let's finish the KTMA season first.

Episode K20: The Last Chase

First aired: KTMA on 21 May 1989
Availability: MST3KVideos.com

Close you eyes and imagine the future. Imagine a future where Burgess Meredith flies an F-86. Then imagine he uses he F-86 to chase Lee Majors across the country.

"Rowsdower?"
No, really. That's this film. See what happens when you let Canadians make films?

The Mads try a cold fusion experiment ... in Dr. Erhardt's mouth. It doesn't go well. But Trace Beauliew and Josh Weinstein do work well together. I really don't remember ever watching a lot (read that: any) of shows from Season One (Weinstein left after Season One), so the Dr. Erhardt character was unknown to me before I expanded my collection of MST3K shows. I like the character. And, watching how Servo has developed has been fun and interesting.

The movie itself is ... bad. Which I don't need to say. MST3K doesn't do good movies. This one suffers from a bad plot more than bad acting. It's the future, and nobody has any gas. Except there's enough for one car, Lee Majors' Porsche (it looks to me sort of like a 917, but I'm no expert on Porche). And a Korea War-era jet.

Not a hot Japanese she-villain
This one was hard to watch. I tried to not get distracted, but failed several times. Not that the riffing was bad; it wasn't. Just that to get the jokes you have to also watch the movie. And that was hard.

And it wasn't a Sandy Frank film. And no hot Japanese she-villains.

One thing: it reminded me a little of "The Final Sacrifice." Remember that one from Season Nine? If so, when I saw the goofy-smile kid in the audience listening to Lee Majors, I thought "Rowsdower!" And, yes, "The Final Sacrifice" is also a Canadian film.

Still, not a bad show. The show has developed, matured over the last 17 episodes. They have the format down pat. There's still some tweaking to Dr. Forrester's character to be done, but Joel & the Bots are, well, Joel & the Bots.

1 comment:

  1. It's funny that I followed a link on IMAO about a political topic and ended up finding a fellow MST3K fan.

    I have a hard time getting through the early MST3K episodes. Crow didn't yet have the biting personality that Trace Beaulieu put into him in the later seasons. Despite the voice change, the character was carried on pretty well by Bill Corbett in the last few seasons. And I could never get into Weinstein's deadpan version of Tom Servo. The riffs seemed to be few and far between, unlike the height of their Sci-Fi Channel run when the jokes came in a steady stream.

    On the other hand, the first season featured some of the best movies; e.g., "The Crawling Eye", "Robot Monster".

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