MST3K VOL. 20: Sinbad Vs. Ninjas On The Moon, Plus Wisecracks Galore

If any­thing brought post­mod­ernism into the appre­ci­a­tion of exploita­tion cin­ema, it was Mystery Science Theater 3000.  This long-running show took the cult film fan’s pas­time of goof­ing on b-movies to the masses and increased the view­er­ship of cel­lu­loid rejects like Robot Monster and Manos, The Hands Of Fate, pre­sent­ing them in an acces­si­ble way to  an audi­ence who oth­er­wise wouldn’t have both­ered.  The end result became so pop­u­lar that “MST3K,” the acronym for the show’s name, became part of the lingo as both an adjec­tive (“Did you see that flick? It’s total MST3K mate­r­ial.” ) and a verb (“I’m gonna have fun MST3K-ing that movie.”).

Some schlock-cineastes bris­tle at the show’s approach to satire — mainly because of all the bad arm­chair satirists it has inspired — but a close look at Mystery Science Theater 3000 reveals a cer­tain bril­liance in their abil­ity to decon­struct the most obscure pop cul­ture in an enter­tain­ing style.  At their best, the show’s writ­ers and per­form­ers were able to draw deeply from sev­eral points on the pop cul­ture con­tin­uüm to cre­ate vir­tu­oso dis­plays of free-associating that could engage the savvy viewer on mul­ti­ple lev­els comedically.

In fact, you could argue that no one else did this kind of thing bet­ter.  The show’s cre­ators and per­form­ers spent a lot of time hon­ing their craft and they have ten-plus sea­sons’ worth of shows to prove it.  That brings us to MST3K Vol. 20: this 4-disc set serves up a quar­tet of episodes from three dif­fer­ent sea­sons dur­ing the first half of the show’s run.  Along the way, this set illus­trates both the plea­sures and the per­ils of the series.

Project Moonbase comes from the first offi­cial sea­son of the show (the real first sea­son of the show was done on a UHF sta­tion and is con­sid­ered “Season Zero” by both cre­ators and fans).  The show staff had just switched over from free-associative riff­ing for the films to actu­ally assem­bling a script and this episode has a ten­ta­tive qual­ity as a result.  The jokes are more sparse dur­ing the film because they were still feel­ing their way towards the right speed and quan­tity of gags.

This is unfor­tu­nate because the film itself is dull to the point of being lethal.  Project Moonbase is a slow, talky exam­ple of the kind of films about space travel that pre­ceded actual space travel and is notable for its thread­bare spe­cial effects and a casual atti­tude of intense sex­ism that is pretty eye-raising in ret­ro­spect.  The lat­ter ele­ment is most mem­o­rably expressed when the head of the space project threat­ens to spank an unruly female astro­naut!  The mix of a dull film and a ten­ta­tive comedic style ensures that this episode never gets beyond mod­er­ately amus­ing, even with a few episodes of the Radar Men From The Moon ser­ial to spice it up.

The Magic Voyage Of Sinbad is bet­ter.  It comes from the fifth sea­son so the show’s style of humor was both con­fi­dent and fully-realized.  However, this episode illus­trates an ele­ment unique to the show: some­times the films were so weird that they actu­ally com­peted with the crew.  Thie film was not really a Sinbad story but a Russo-Finnish copro­duc­tion about a dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter that was refash­ioned into an ersatz Sinbad tale via dub­bing so it could be sold to an American audi­ence.  As a result, there is a weird dis­lo­ca­tion between the dia­logue and the images.  Combine that with an odd mix­ture of large pro­duc­tion val­ues and acci­den­tally sur­real spe­cial effects and you have a film that vies against the cast for your attention.

Thankfully, Joel and the bots turn in a solid per­for­mance.  The riff­ing builds in a slow-burn fash­ion as the crew gets their bear­ings before giv­ing way to a pretty hilar­i­ous final half-hour (espe­cially when they poke fun at the cop-out nature of the film’s finale).  There’s also a great bit early on where a scene of a man wrestling a bear (!) is com­mented on as if it were an inter­ven­tion for Grizzly Adams.  The wrap­around seg­ments are pretty great here, too: the high­light is a killer “inven­tion exchange” bit that allows the gang to show off their knowl­edge of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack.

However, the best part of this set is a pair of episodes from the third sea­son: Master Ninja 1 and 2.  These “films” are sim­ply repack­aged episodes from Lee Van Cleef’s short-lived action show The Master, with two episodes slapped together to cre­ate arti­fi­cial feature-length sto­ries.  Since they come from the early-1980’s net­works t.v. mill, they have plenty of famil­iar faces: Demi Moore, Claude Akins, Clu Gulager, David McCallum, Crystal Bernard and George Lazenby to name a few.  The main stars were Van Cleef and future t.v. director/Class Of 1984 alum­nus Timothy Van Patten.

Since The Master was an inher­ently for­mu­laic show — basi­cally, it was an attempt to make t.v.-friendly riff on the early 1980’s ninja craze — it has the kind of sim­ple nar­ra­tive con­ven­tions that leave plenty of room for MST3K–style spoof­ing.  Joel and the bots tear into it with glee: high­lights include Tom Servo impro­vis­ing inspi­ra­tional lyrics for a hand­i­capped character’s heart-tugging theme music and every­body goof­ing on Van Patten’s mumbly, Stallone-esque deliv­ery of his lines.  There are also some great bits in the wrap­around seg­ments, par­tic­u­larly the crew’s beatboxing-and-vocalese cre­ation of a “Master Ninja Theme Song.”

To sum up, this set offers two gems and two lesser but still inter­est­ing exam­ples of Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew at work.  If you’re already a fan, the Master Ninja episodes alone make it worth the pur­chase price.