Feb. 11th, 2013

krpalmer: (mst3k)
I had wondered if my very last post commenting on a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode would have moved off the bottom of my journal by the time I finished watching the latest official DVD set, but that didn't quite happen. In any case, even if this set didn't have quite as strong a "theme" as the previous one, it was an entertaining one. "Robot Holocaust" was one of the last episodes I managed to watch "the first time through," which meant it's been a fair while since I saw it. Following an long string of old black-and-white movies in the first season (just how long that string is depends on where you put "Women of the Prehistoric Planet"), I was tempted to think of it an outing that needed minimal prompting from the first-season "riffing" to be funny; it seemed almost a type specimen of "bad acting," and I remembered just why it was the last first season episode I got to. At the same time, I did wonder if it at least tried to go a little beyond the norm in having "ordinary people" help the heroes in their own way and avoiding "the survivors hit it off," as much as I can see people still smirking at the "execution." The episode labelled "Operation Kid Brother" on the case included its original title card on the disc just to reassure everyone the video hadn't been changed from "Operation Double 007"; I also kept reflecting on unfortunate resonances between it and certain works of fanfiction where new characters waltz into established stories to outdo the original main characters.

The way the extras are organised do give sort of a sense of concentrating on the "earliest" and "latest" episodes, but Joel Hodgson provides two introductions and Mike Nelson (who I haven't associated quite so much with Shout! Factory's extras) provides the other two. For "Robot Holocaust" Joel again sort of laments about how they hadn't managed to decorate the Satellite of Love set the way the simpler one of their UHF episodes in Minnesota had been, but with "Operation Double 007" he's more inclined to be pleased at how well the show was running by then (not touching in any way on speculation he was more than ready to leave by that point), and manages to describe the James Bond movies as "what a kid thinks being a grownup will be like." For "Kitten With A Whip," Mike does talk about it as a movie not quite like the expected movies of the series, and sort of mentions trying to "get an angle" on it. With "Revenge of the Creature," though, he addresses the possibility the movie was a bit better than the usual in a way that just might respond to suspicions of my own about the series being "quicker to condemn" in its later years. That perhaps goes along with the little documentary on the movie's director Jack Arnold, where it's sandwiched in with a number of genre classics. J. Elvis Weinstein and Bill Corbett describing what they did after the series round things out.

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