Mystery Science Theater 3000 is one of the shows that created the Internet. Its warped sense of humor, love of obscure references, and celebration of good/bad movies as a concept were all a crucial piece of early Internet culture, and the show's explicit endorsement of the bootleg life--"keep circulating the tapes"--has kept it alive and loved up until the present day.
Back in the '90s, Comedy Central would run a lengthy marathon of MST3K every Thanksgiving, calling it "Turkey Day." It's one of the few holiday traditions that's actually worth observing, and thanks to the wonders of the Internet, it's easy to keep going. Many of the older "experiments" (episodes) from the first 10 seasons of MST3K are up for free on YouTube, uncut. Most of them look like multiple-generation VHS rips, because they are, but higher-quality official DVDs and streams of many MST3K episodes can be purchased from Shout Factory.
Shout Factory is also hosting an officially-endorsed MST3K marathon all day tomorrow starting at 6 AM PST, available via Twitch, YouTube, and many other streaming networks. It's planned to include several classic experiments, including I Accuse My Parents, Eegah, Final Justice, and Hobgoblins, ending in a mystery "wildcard" episode.
On this Thanksgiving, fraught with social distancing as it is, it's a perfect time to make a pizza, curl up on the couch, and let Joel, Mike, Jonah and the bots serve as an endless distraction. Queue up these episodes of MST3K for a little homebrew presentation of Turkey Day 2020: The Viral Menace.
Season 2: Pod People
"She's Zestfully dead."
Joel's initial five-season run hits its first peak here, with what's indisputably the best episode of the second season, the first really good episode of the show, and a solid contender for the funniest experiment in the "Joel era" of MST3K.
The movie in question, a 1983 French/Spanish film, comes off like maybe six different short films that were hemstitched together in post into an incoherent whole. Reportedly, the behind-the-scenes story here is that it was meant to be a straightforward horror film, about a real dickhead of a pop singer who goes on a vacation to the back woods with his band and runs into a homicidal alien. Then its producers demanded major alterations to its script, in order to cash in on the box-office success of Steven Spielberg's E.T., which introduces an entire new plot about a lonely boy who finds and hatches an alien egg. The result is a complete tonal misfire, where the film cuts back and forth almost at random between backup singers getting murdered and an alien baby having low-budget telekinetic misadventures.
As raw material for an MST3K episode, Pod People is almost perfect. It's bad in a fascinating way, with plenty of slow spaces that can be filled with humor, and no single element of the film is less than spectacularly flawed. The soundtrack is atonal synthesizer droning, the continuity is a mess, the kills are haymaker swats from a stuntman in a fur suit, and even the English dub is pure '80s cheese. It's one of the best episodes to show a newcomer to illustrate why MST3K is so beloved.
Season 3: Cave Dwellers
"I don't believe it. They were too cheap to hire villains in this movie."
It would be entirely possible to run a show like MST3K for years entirely on the strength of poorly dubbed 1980s Italian action, horror, and fantasy movies. It's a rich vein of low-budget nonsense that has yet to be fully exploited even today, because it took twenty minutes to film the average '80s Italian schlock-'em-up, any working director in the field could make thirty of them in six months, and everyone involved would clearly be chemically altered the entire time.
Cave Dwellers is the second in a series of four fantasy films that starred Miles O'Keefe as Ator, the not-Conan-really barbarian hero in a poorly-defined ancient world. It was obscure until MST3K picked it up, at which point both it and the experiment became instant cult classics. All the ingredients are here: it meanders for most of its running length, it has very little actual plot, and at one point, the Iron Age barbarian hero Ator somehow MacGyvers together hand grenades and a modern hang glider. It has to be seen to be believed.
This episode is another solid pick for introducing new fans to MST3K. An honorable mention has to go to its predecessor, Ator the Fighting Eagle, which eventually hit MST3K in the Netflix era in season 12. While it lacks Cave Dwellers' unhurried pace and sunny plotlessness, it's been famous for years for starting with what's either one of the great all-time translation errors or a script fueled entirely by cheap cocaine, where a young Ator is almost triumphantly wed to his sister. They only find out they aren't biologically related after she accepts the marriage proposal. It can't help but get less crazy from there, but it's worth that first initial high point.
Season 3: Godzilla vs. Megalon
"This is what it all boils down to: a little game of life that we call 'character.'"
This one's all about the final fight scene. 1973's Godzilla vs. Megalon is famous among giant rubber monster fans as the Godzilla movie that Godzilla is barely in at all. That's because he wasn't supposed to be there in the first place; Godzilla was hastily added late in production, to add much-needed star power to what was meant to be the debut of the brand-new robot superhero Jet Jaguar. It didn't work, the result was a mess, and Jet Jaguar would've ended up as an obscure Japanese film-buff trivia question were it not for MST3K.
The final film is a mess right up until its end, when Jet Jaguar and Godzilla end up in a bizarre tag-team match against Megalon and Gigan. The MST3K crew's jokes immediately shift into treating it all like an old-time boxing match, especially when the stunts get too over-the-top to be believed.
One shot, of Godzilla delivering a dropkick that makes it look like he's skating on his tail, was a prominent feature of the MST3K opening credits for the rest of its run on Comedy Central. It's glorious, and makes it one of MST3K's best forays into the weird world of Japanese monster movies. It's a little harder to find online than many of the other big MST3K hits, perhaps owing to the fact that Godzilla has since become a much bigger deal in America, but it can be watched in full, complete with the original 1991 commercials, on archive.org.
Season 3: War of the Colossal Beast
"Uh, I gotta go finish my letter to Jodie Foster."
Nobody remembers this episode for what's ostensibly its feature, a 1958 black-and-white sci-fi bore by Bert I. Gordon. Instead, this is one of the most famous episodes of MST3K because of its lead-in short, "Mr. B Natural."
It in turn is perhaps one of the first great runs on a trademark MST3K bit, where the players' jokes all draw on the entirely believable assumption that there's a deep mine of darkness behind the G-rated antics onscreen. "Mr. B Natural" is a colorized 1957 short meant to sell a line of musical instruments, but their mascot, a Peter Pan knockoff played by veteran Broadway performer Betty Luster, would come off as a thin slice of hell even without the running commentary.
She's a beaming, too-cheerful-by-200% pixie who is trying to get a kid interested in marching band, for reasons that do not seem benevolent. She casually admits to being as old as humanity, flits in and out of existence, and generally comes off like she's poker buddies with the Outsider from Dishonored. Every run through "Mr. B Natural" comes with the unspoken threat that at some point during one of these viewings, Mr. B is going to face the camera with a grin, pull out a knife, and step out of the screen like Sadako on uppers. It's solid comedy/horror gold, and might be the best/worst short film that MST3K ever lampooned.
Season 6: Zombie Nightmare
"You're right, Mike. This is either America ten years ago or Canada today."
Jon Mikl Thor is a weird dude. He's a Canadian bodybuilder with a legitimately impressive career in his field, the vocalist for a metal band he named after himself, and someone who has definitely edited his own Wikipedia article. Whenever he appears in a film, it's an obvious vanity project that's also a guaranteed shot of pure 1980s cheese. Another Thor movie, Rock'n'Roll Nightmare, recently resurfaced on an episode of Red Letter Media's "Best of the Worst," and if there is mercy in this twisted universe, it will be used in a future Jonah-hosted MST3K.
Back in 1986, Thor played the villain and wrote the score for the Canadian horror film Zombie Nightmare, which co-stars Adam West and a young Tia Carrere. When a street gang murders a young man on his way home from a baseball game, his grieving mother turns to a local voodoo priestess for revenge. Reanimated as a discount Jason Voorhees, and Jason himself was already pretty low-budget, the zombie tracks down his killers, despite token opposition from a couple of in-over-their-heads small-town cops.
There always needed to be more '80s horror on MST3K, and Zombie Nightmare is a handy showcase of why. It's a fundamentally ridiculous genre that's only gotten moreso with age, and the jokes in this episode get a lot of mileage out of the low budget, the Canadian setting (every so often, MST3K goes out of its way to remind the viewer that the cast and crew were all in Minnesota), Thor's obvious pride in his build, and of course, West's time on the Batman TV show. Added to the self-consciously over-the-top metal of Thor's soundtrack, which sounds like the kind of metal that someone would make if they were trying to make fun of metal, and it's one of the highlights (along with Danger! Death Ray and Angels' Revenge) of the show's somewhat middling sixth season.
Season 9: The Final Sacrifice
"I wonder if there's beer on the sun."
A lot of memes got started with this one, which pits Mike and the bots against a zero-budget adventure thriller. Unlikely hero Zap Rowsdower, a big ol' buttery slab of Canadian stereotypes with either the greatest or worst name in cinematic history, goes up against a brown-robed cult alongside an awkward teenager, in a battle over who gets to discover a lost civilization's city.
In a weird way, this might be the most successful student film ever made. Produced on a budget of about $1,500 Canadian, so about six bucks in real money, The Final Sacrifice gamely tries and mostly fails to make a bunch of car chases through backwoods Alberta exciting. It's a misfire on just about every level, but it's a likable misfire, and it's got heart. There's a reason why there are so many people on the Internet using "Zap Rowsdower" as a handle, and it's only mostly ironic.
While the MST3K crew's jokes once again stray into taking too-easy shots at Canada, it's one of the best-known episodes of Mike's run. There's a lot of fun to be had in mining the film's student-film missteps, Rowsdower's doofy name, and the low-budget antics of a newbie filmmaker trying to make Raiders of the Lost Ark in his backyard with the money he found in his couch. The Final Sacrifice was recently pulled off of YouTube due to what appears to be the efforts of a copyright troll, but it's still available on Dailymotion (which still exists!) and DVD. It could easily be the funniest episode of MST3K during its run on the Sci-Fi Channel... if not for the next episode on this list.
Season 8: Space Mutiny
"I think it was very nice of you to give that dead woman another chance."
This episode holds a lot of crowns. It's one of Mike Nelson's best shows as host, easily the stand-out experiment of the show's Sci-Fi Channel run, and an endless font of quotable gold. The running gag where Mike and the bots keep assigning new heroic nicknames to the film's protagonist Dave Ryder (Crunch Beefsteak! Blast Hardcheese! Big McLargehuge!) has been providing nerds with Internet handles for over 20 years now.
If MST3K hadn't picked up Space Mutiny when it did, the film was destined for a half-life in Internet film discussion circles, just as with other schlock classics like Silent Night, Deadly Night 2. Its co-star Cisse Cameron has tried to claim it was a spoof, but Space Mutiny plays its hand deadly straight; if it was intended as a satire, no one involved was told until well after the fact.
Instead, it comes off as exactly what it appears to be: a low-budget South African space opera set aboard a generation ship, which embraces several cliches and makes up a few of its own. There's a square-jawed blond hero, a designated love interest who appears to be twice his age, Cameron Mitchell slumming it up, a bunch of skinny women in jazzercise gear pretending to be alien prophets, space battle sequences that are blatantly stolen from the original Battlestar Galactica, and one of the most blatant continuity errors ever committed to film. It's a glorious mess, and it led to some of the best MST3K gags in the show's entire run.
Season 11: Avalanche
"Even the fire smells like gin."
Arguably the most star-studded film to ever receive the MST3K treatment, as well as the best experiment in the two Netflix seasons, 1978's Avalanche purports to be a disaster movie. It's actually a really weak love story from MST3K mainstay Roger Corman, which ends in both figurative and literal disaster.
Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow co-star, as a resort owner trying to win back the hand of his estranged wife for about 70 minutes while his ski lodge slowly disintegrates around him. It's one of those '70s movies that isn't so much slow burn as no burn. Farrow seems heavily sedated, Hudson has more chemistry with random pieces of scenery than he does with her, and the entire film looks like it was shot through gauze. The avalanche ends up feeling like a mercy kill for the entire dysfunctional situation.
While Avalanche still has the characteristic pace of Jonah Ray's episodes, where the jokes aren't so much told as firehosed upon the audience, the film is just languorous enough that the overall pace evens out. The best running joke, about how long it's taking the avalanche to show up in a film entitled Avalanche, is solid, deserved, and endlessly iterated upon. While the Netflix revival has a few other decent to good episodes, particularly Star Crash and Killer Fish, Avalanche is easily as good as it gets.