For decade after decade, television programming fit neatly into a kind of pre-fabricated, shrink-wrapped box. Whether it was the hour-long drama, the thirty-minute sitcom, or the two-hour “made for TV” movie, the geniuses working in network programming seemed to have only a handful of genres deemed fit for the great-unwashed masses.

Enter Joel Hodgson and his MST3K revolutionaries. When the show began in 1988 (on a local Minneapolis TV station), the notion of watching a movie while listening to a running commentary in real time was bold, to say the least. For some, it was (and remains) unsettling, but modern audiences, already accustomed to that other revolution, the DVD commentary track, should find themselves in a nice, safe place.

Volume 6 of Rhino’s ongoing Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection delivers 4 discs of top notch material from Hodgson and the gang’s early years on Comedy Central. The first disc starts with UNDERSEA KINGDOM, a genuine Saturday afternoon serial (the kind we’re told ad infinitum directly led Spielberg and Lucas to the creation of Raiders of the Lost Ark) starring 30’s action hero Crash Corrigan. Corrigan, whose special skills seem to revolve around acrobatic rescues of small children, gets caught up in an evil underwater lair filled with all sorts of art deco era gadgets. Joel takes particular interest in one of the props: “G.E.—we bring good things… to DEATH.”

Disc 1’s “full length” feature (if you consider 62 minutes “full length"), Roger Corman’s Attack of the Giant Leeches, starts with an understated, lower-case only title sequence ("looks like an ee cummings book cover") that now seems horribly dated. The story, set in the Florida swamplands, revolves around backwoods folk struggling to deal with a visitation of, yes, Giant Leeches. Joel and his robot friends, Crow and Tom Servo, have fun mocking the town nymphet and her bloated cuckold of a husband, and the murkily filmed underwater sequences are laughably unsuspenseful. Watch for the frequent mentions of coffee drinking.

Disc 2 brings us Gunslinger, another Roger Corman flick, set in the rip-roarin’ Old West. The quality of this movie is a bit high for a MST3K episode, but don’t fret—the pacing is lugubrious, and the outdoor sets look as though a light breeze would knock them over. Of all the material in Volume 6, Gunslinger was the least enjoyable. It’s just a drag, plainly and simply.

The short films on Disc 3, MR. B’S LOST SHORTS, are standouts. “Design For Dreaming” is a surrealistic nightmare from the good folks at General Motors. A lot of money was clearly spent on this pastiche of modern dance, flying sequences, and kitchens of the future, but it’s unrelenting message of a modern, consumerist utopia is enough to make even Donald Trump kvetch. The hallucination continues with “Mr. B Natural,” the story of a budding young musician and his imaginary, asexual friend, Mr. B. Prancing and dancing and an awkward encounter in a young boy’s bedroom make this one of the most sickenly saccharine short films ever made. “Are You Ready For Marriage” is another “educational” film from the fifties created with the sole intention of preventing sex-starved teenyboppers from acting upon those raging hormones. “Hired!” follows the difficult life of an ambitious car salesman who, alas, doesn’t own a car. His solution? Go door to door and ask people if they need a vehicle! Does it work? Not very well. “Johnny At The Fair” is a routine travelogue style short telling the story of an adventurous tike who gets separated from his parents while visiting some long forgotten Canadian World Exposition. Finally, “X Marks The Spot” follows a reckless driver’s grim descent into a sort of afterlife People’s Court, where he learns the lessons of safe driving sadly much too late.

Disc 4’s TEENAGERS FROM OUTERSPACE was one of my earliest introductions to the show and it remains a true MST3K classic. This sci-fi oddity concerns Derek, a Harry Connick, Jr. look-alike who visits 1950’s Hollywood with his space pals. They’re looking for a place to harvest their food source (their food source looks suspiciously like Maine lobsters) but Derek isn’t completely on board with the scheme. He instead makes friends with a horny high school girl and her kindly, buffonishly naive grandfather. TEENAGERS’ deliberate pace and laughable script serve as a perfect straight man for Joel and the robots. Most of their barbs fill the empty spaces in the movies’ soporific dialogue perfectly and make this an early example of MST3K writing at its finest.

Other than the features and shorts, there are no extra features to speak of. Still, at over 6 hours, the dusty old films sparkle back to life and leave MST3K fans (and fans of great comedy writing) with plenty to laugh at. The revolution marches on!

Review by David Grizzard

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