Completed Collection Thoughts: MST3K XXVI

[krpalmer]

I started into the latest official collection of Mystery Science Theater 3000 with the expectation of saying a few words about it once I was through. "The Magic Sword" seemed a good way to begin, later on in the "Joel era" than a certain number of the Shout! Factory collections start with and not that gruelling as a movie. The DVD included an extra featuring Bert I. Gordon himself; as with a number of older folks included in the extras of previous collections, he didn't seem to dwell on Mystery Science Theater at all. With "Alien From L.A.," though, that movie's director Albert Pyun did have a philosophical "well, the show did give the movie some more exposure" attitude along with talking about Kathy Ireland's voice indeed being directly addressed by the movie and it being made in Namibia (as opposed to the quips about Australia; shades of "Space Mutiny" being made in South Africa) to make use of blocked funds. With that, I took the unusual step of going straight to the last episode in the collection, "The Mole People." The thought did come to mind that this was the second episode of the collection to deal with "the land under the ground" (and "Alien From L.A." is mentioned on the back of the case), but I might have been thinking more of a faint personal impression of mean-spiritedness when it comes to "riffing" on some of the movie's characters. In any case, the extra on this disc is a little documentary about the making of the movie, getting into how Universal was beginning to make its 1950s science-fiction movies more cheaply with doses of stock footage (in this case, from a British documentary about climbing Mount Everest itself) and touching on the unfortunate fate of the character not allowed to survive an "interracial" relationship despite being blonde. I stepped back to "Danger!! Death Ray," which seems more purely fun to me. Its extra was Mike Nelson's own take on what he's been doing in the past decade; his working with Kevin Nelson and Bill Corbett on a good number of projects did give a bit of a sense I'd already heard about a lot of it, though.