Anyone who reads this blog knows what a devoted trekkie I am:
On the other hand, I've never been much of a Star Wars fan. I appreciated the original movies as fun, goofy, block busters but I never saw them as particularly great. However, I have recently begun to enjoy Star Wars a bit more, I liked the Force Awakens a lot, and I loved Rogue One. So maybe I've been seduced by the dark side a bit, and I even bought this:
40 hours of extras! I mean what the hell could be on this thing.
Still Star Wars will never hold a candle to Trek for me and my absolute favorite thing in the Star Wars oeuvre is something that most people have either never heard of, or would rather forget. The Holiday Special
It aired in November of 1978 after the first movie had become a mega-hit and it is incredibly weird and awful. I pride myself on being a connoisseur of so bad there good, as in funny, movies and I'm a devoted fan of the make fun of bad movies show MST3K and its later incarnation Rifftrax, still the Star Wars special threw me through a loop. Even after a life time spent watching bad movies, the weirdness of this one comes as a shock.
The basic premise of the special, if you can go so far as to say that it has one, is that Chewy the Wookie is trying to get home to his family to celebrate the big Wookie Holiday Life Day
Obviously it is a mistake to focus a television special on characters that communicate by grunting. Never the less the producers of The Star Wars Holiday special did just this, at least half of the special is Chewy's family grunting at each other.
At some point CBS must have realized they couldn't get by on grunted conversations alone and they threw in some guest stars of the kitschiest caliber and created a sort of variety hour. Art Carney appears as the Wookie neighbor
Bea Arthur sings in an alien bar
and Disco Star Dihann Carol appears as some sort of virtual reality entertainment of a rather mature sort :
The whole thing culmintates in the Wookies donning rather creepy red robes for Life Day and walking off into the stars while Princess Leia sings the Life Day song:
The special is so bad that it remained virtually hidden for years with George Lucas trying to bury it and erase it from the collective conscious. It was never re-aired and never released, but it couldn't be destroyed and with therelease of the Force Awakens the Holiday special crawled out of the wood work. It can be seen on you tube as can all of the wonderful 1970s commercials:
but if you are going to watch it, and I strongly recommend that you do because it is hilarious, you really need to see the Rifftrax version.
It's just so bad and so weird that I'm afraid without the riffing it would be unwatchable, but with the riffing it may well be the funniest Holiday movie ever
As we all know Thanksgiving is the time for family
and for family traditions.
Now it's not something I really share regularly on the blog, but I don't have a big traditional family. I'm an only child and my husband and I are child free, so they'll be no big family gathering for us. This is not something I'm sad about, in fact I love celebrating Thanksgiving with my husband and pets. I even have a specific non-traditional tradition that I follow every year.
Before my dad passed away five years ago he used to visit us every year for Thanksgiving. Now my dad is the reason I love the kitschy-vintage things I do. Like me he loved silly old movies and one of his favorite shows, and one we watched together when I was in high school, was Mystery Science Theatre Three Thousand.
The hilarious sci-fi show about a man and his robot palls who are stuck in outer space and forced to watch bad movies. I hadn't seen MST3K, as it's known by fans, for years when shout factory started releasing the box set DVDs. Needless to say my dad and I started buying them and when he would visit on Thanksgiving we'd watch them.
Just imagine less people, more dogs and cats, and robots in space on tv and you have the idea.
At the time I didn't realize that we weren't the only people following this "tradition." Unknown to me MST3K premiered on Thanksgiving day in 1988. Since then fans have watched the show on Thanksgiving to celebrate "turkey day"
The turkey in this case being the terrible movies. These days you can even stream an MST3K turkey day marathon on Thanksgiving. I just wish my dad where here to see it.
I myself don't usually stream the marathon because I have specific MST3K episodes I like to watch on Thanksgiving, mostly the Holiday ones. Here are my top 5 favorites.
1) Santa Clause Vs. The Martians, 1964-This is a great starter episode for MST3K newbies. The movie is truly terrible, and bizarre. The basic incomprehensible plot is that Santa has been abducted by martians because the martian children are too serious to have any fun. Never fear though, to Earth children are on hand to help Santa out.
The movie is so awful it would be hilarious even without the MST3K's casts jokes too. The host segments in the episode are also great. My favorite being the Patrick Swayze's Road House inspired Christmas Carol they sing (remember this was the 80s.)
2) Santa Clause 1959- Another incredibly weird mid-century children's film, this episode doesn't quite achieve the brilliance of Santa Clause vs The Martians, but it's still very funny and perfect for the Holidays. It's a Mexican film about a poor little girl who desperately wants a doll from Santa, the devil is also involved.
The weirdest part is definitely the beginning when the children from different lands serenade Santa from what look's like a snow globe prison.
3) Mr. B Natural, 1956-Mr. B Natural is technically not a movie, it's an educational short. MST3K riffed alot of educational shorts and this is one of the funniest Mr. B has nothing to do with the Holidays, he/she is supposed to be the spirit of music. A creature who hops out of lockers and materializes in the bedrooms of 1950s teens to lecture them on instruments, but there is something very elf like about him/her.
4) Santa Clause and The Ice Cream Bunny, 1972-This is actually an episode or Rifftrax. Rifftrax is a sort off follow up to MST3K with some of the same hosts. You can purchase episodes on their website. There are actually two versions of Santa Clause and The Ice Cream Bunny. I wrote about the first one last year in this post. The second version is the same except instead of the bizarre Thumbalina story there is a version of Jack and The Bean Stalk. Both versions are an advertisement for the now defunct Pirates World Amusement park which if these films are to be believed must have been terrifying.
5) Fun in Balloon Land, 1965-I would say this is the worst movie I've ever seen, and I'm kind of an expert, except like the Rifftrax hosts (this is another Rifftrax episode), I'm not sure if it technically qualifies as a movie.
Basically someone took amateur, very amateur, footage of a 1965 Thanksgiving parade in Pennsylvania and added some sort of bizarre story about a fairy tale balloon land. It has to be seen to be believed. If you only see one episode of Rifftrax make it this one, it's worth the ten bucks.
Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy Your Traditions Whatever They Are!
Today Rifftrax, a comedy company from the makers of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 which I wrote about here is having a live event, streaming a riff of the Japanse sci-fi film, Mothra, to theatres ascross the country.
I won't be seeing it until the encore show on Tuesday, but it reminded me of one of my favorite pet Halloween costumes. Ping's Mothra outfit from maybe 6 or 7 years ago. Is she not the cutest?
Decades ago my late dad used to spend his Saturday afternoons watching a fun show with a truly unique premise. A man and his robot palls are stuck in space and forced to watch bad movies
Teenage me watched the show and laughed and I saw the movie, with my dad, in the theatre, twice (he was a nerd, like me).
I was a fan, but not a huge fan. Then about six years ago I rediscovered the show on netflix and became a massive fan, a MSTie.
I watched episodes repeatedly, bought boxed sets, and quoted lines back and forth with my husband. After Star Trek, it is my favorite show. There is so much to love about MST3K. The kitschy old films
the hosts
the robots
the mad scientists
Especially Frank
the songs
the Star Trek references
the educational shorts
the home made low tech sets
its all perfect. There are plenty of articles about MST3Ks influence on pop culture, but the bottom line is that its just a great show! Which is why it is so sad that it was canceled and so great that its coming back.
However, its never really left, because we have Riff Trax.
Starring three MST3K alumns, Riff Trax offers hilarious streaming commentary on mainstream films like the Twilight Saga
b movie riffs
"educational shorts"
and live shows
The live shows are my favorite. They are streamed from Nashville to theaters all over the US and are always fun. Usually John and I go to a theatre in NJ and its empty, but once we went in Manhattan and it was packed. I prefer the empty theatre. This Thursday they are riffing Time Chasersa hilariously bad 1994 film.
I already have my tickets and can't wait. If you like MST3K, kitsch, or cheesy movies you owe it to yourself to check out Riff Trax.
With Thanksgiving behind us we are firmly in the midst of Christmas mania, and if your like mike you like your Christmas with a hefty dose of sparkly kitsch.
If you are like me you also have a viewing list of films you watch each Holliday. I don't tend to watch the traditional classics though, unless you consider the 1999 Xmas Story Futurama episode a classic. Instead I tend to watch oddball things that make me laugh, and if your into kitschy, funny, and just plain weird, there is noting to beat the 1972 film Santa and The Ice Cream Bunny.
Strictly speaking I'm not even sure you can call this thing a film, most kindergarteners with cell phone cameras could make something much better, and more coherent. Santa and The Ice Cream Bunny is more of a monument to the utterly bizarre, and full warning I am a connoisseur of bad movies and this is perhaps the worst I've seen. Its also the so bad its good type, in that its side splittingly funny. Filmed in 1972 it primarily functions as an advertisement for the long gone amusement park Pirates World.
Pirates World closed in 1975 with the advent of Disney World, and perhaps it was already struggling in 1972, because the glimpses of it seen in the film are hardly impressive. The thread bare plot of the film, is that a badly costumed Santa's sled gets stuck in the Florida mud
and an ever more bizarre parade children, costumed adults and animals try to pull the sleigh free.
For some inexplicable reason, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are also there.
Stuck in the mud Santa starts to tell the children a bizarre third hand story about Thumbelina. Its third hand because Santa is telling the story, as it is viewed and imagined by a girl who is spending the day at Pirates World. This version of Thumbelina features lots of moles, bad paper mache birds, flower children, and production values that have to seen to be believed.
After the story is over the titular Ice Cream bunny finally makes his appearance riding a fire truck, and extracts Santa's sleigh.
The film was so terrible it achieved a sort of underground cult status among connoisseurs of terrible films.
Its also been the subject of a RiffTrax commentary. Rifftrax is a movie parody company that releases comedy audio commentaries of films . It you have ever seen the 1990s TV show Mystery Science Theatre Three Thousand
you'll recognize the format and the commentators. The Rifftrax version is available on Amazon instant video and my husband and I both agree its one of the funnies things we have ever seen.
Even better though, a new Riff Trax live version, is being released in select theaters this Thursday.
Im very excited to be going. The perfect kick of to the Kitschmas season.
