The 10 Most Iconic Joel Episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 According To IMDb

The 10 Most Iconic Joel Episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, According To IMDb

One of Mystery Science Theater 3000’s creators is on his farewell tour. Joel Hodgson’s creation has a great future, but let’s take a look at his past.

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One of Mystery Science Theater 3000’s creators is currently on his farewell tour. Joel Hodgson, a guy not too different from you or me, started the show in 1988 at a UHF station in Minneapolis, MN. Starting with a budget of $50 a week, he brought us terrible movies accompanied by robot-fueled commentary and bizarre skits and songs. Given a recent reboot on Netflix with host Jonah Ray Rodriguez and mad scientist Felicia Day, the show’s newest cast is currently on the road with a jaw-droppingly hilarious live show that demonstrates the series has a great future.

To celebrate Hodgson’s achievements as the show’s original host, we’re looking at his greatest episodes during his reign as host from 1988 to 1993. Using IMDb as our guide, these are Joel’s greatest episodes, and the home of some of the series’ most iconic moments. A special shout out to The Painted Hills, which also received an 8.5 rating, but is not quite as well remembered as its peers on this list. Which is weird, since it’s basically Lassie’s Revenge.

10 Pod People (8.5)

This plodding E.T. rip-off is mostly famous for its cute/horrifying alien kid, named– this is a fact, not a joke– “Trumpy.” In a more coherent film, it might be hard for the audience to deal with the fact that both the alien-kidnapping poachers and the murderous “bemused mammoth”-faced aliens are completely unsympathetic. Don’t worry, though. The child actor and anti-cute Trumpy are there to also elicit zero empathy.

9 Girl in Lovers Lane (8.5)

The Girl in Lovers Lane can be generously referred to as a ‘hobo epic.’ A rich kid wants to become a drifter and is mentored in his new profession by a guy named Bix. Joel and the bots dub Bix “Big Stupid,” and hilariously, the film ends up being an examination of Bix’s life choices when he meets a waitress and realizes “no visible means of support” looks terrible in a dating profile.

Most memorable is the theme song Joel and bots improvise over the film’s opening credits.

“If only they had half a brain

They could attain

A measure of fame

From a film like Shane

But nooooo

To their disdaaaain

The Girl in Lovers Lane.”

8 Teenagers from Outer Space (8.6)

“Really old teenagers from outer space.”

Infamous not just for the age of its “teenaged” actors and its incoherent sci-fi plot, this story about a human-looking alien boy pursued by a villain with a skeleton gun (everyone he shoots is replaced with skeletons) eventually becomes an alien invasion plot. The alien kid, Derek, decides to thwart his planet’s efforts to colonize Earth with ‘gargons,’ (space cows?) by sacrificing himself. In its attempt to fit several movies into one plot it ends up creating a classically confusing muddle.

7 Attack of the Eye Creatures (8.7)

A film about an inept alien invasion thwarted by unarmed teenagers, viewers never find out what the Eye Creatures were after or how these apparently speechless photophobes conquered interstellar space travel. They don’t seem to have any weapons, and their invasion plan mostly seems to involve menacing strangers with their goofy masks.

The best moment comes in one of the skits, when Joel and the bots run through the “different kinds of Eye Creatures,” highlighting the monsters variously incomplete costumes in a movie that clearly only had the budget for a couple eyeball-covered costumes.

6 Amazing Colossal Man (8.7)

A classic of the American kaiju genre, Amazing Colossal Man basically has a plot Stan Lee might have cribbed from when he made The Hulk. A soldier is exposed to a “plutonium bomb,” and grows 50 feet tall, reducing the flow of blood to his brain. As a result, he kinda goes crazy and attacks Las Vegas, before getting shot in the face with a rocket.

The sequel, War of the Colossal Beasts, wasn’t highly rated enough to make this list, but it did give us the classic short “Mister B Natural,” where Mister B is not only the dancing incarnation of music appreciation but is also clearly a woman. This is also one of future show host’s Mike Nelson’s first appearances, as he plays the in-show version of the Colossal Man.

5 Gamera vs Guiron (8.8)

Joel, Mike, and the Bots met several versions of the rocket-powered space turtle, Gamera, but this is the most memorable. The mighty kaiju battles Guiron, whose power is he has a knife for a face. Since Gamera loves children he fights for humanity and stuff, but mainly this episode gave us the lyrics to the Gamera theme song!

Gamera is really neat

He is filled with turtle meat

We are eating Gamera!

4 I Accuse My Parents (8.8)

Preceded by The Truck Farmer, one of MST3K’s more memorably pointless short films. It’s really about transporting vegetables, evidently a new idea at the time, but the image of truck farms it conjures is unforgettable.

This 1940s film about how a kid who’s clearly guilty of manslaughter parents are to blame for the crime is a classic of the “meandering criminals” genre. Featuring wooden acting, alcoholism shaming, and a teenager dating a gangster’s girlfriend, the movie begins and ends in a courtroom scene where both the teenage protagonist and the court’s judge blame the parents for not noticing that their kid had bad friends and, therefore, was probably going to murder people. He was clearly a good kid, after all. He won an essay contest.

3 Operation Double 007 (8.8)

This amazingly blatant rip-off of the James Bond franchise never quite says Bond’s name, but it evokes him throughout. The film’s plot is literally that James Bond is unavailable, so the good guys recruit his brother Neil to impersonate him. The movie stars Sean Connery’s kid brother Neil Connery and happily recruits actors from the Bond franchise to make the imitation feel legitimate. This film is sometimes known as Operation Kid Brother. In either case, it pretty much sums up its entire premise in its title.

2 Mitchell (8.9)

This film about a police detective with zero social graces is also Joel’s final appearance in the television series. With the Mad Scientists finally deciding to kill Joel, he and the Bots scramble to get him off of the space station before his time runs out. It’s probably the closest the series ever gets to having a cohesive plot of its own, at least until Jonah’s turn at the helm.

This movie begins MST3K’s feud with Joe Don Baker. The burly actor threatened the cast with physical violence after seeing their treatment of this film. They, of course, roasted him again MST3K classic Final Justice.

1 Manos: The Hands of Fate (9.2)

Probably the most infamous MST3K of all time. Joel and the Bots know they’re in trouble when the film opens on 10 minutes of characters driving around literally looking for a place where they can start their movie. Its classically nonsensical plot revolves around the swollen-kneed Torgo, a cult of lady wrestlers, and the possibly undead “Master,” who does get a kind of cool black-and-red robe. Also, there’s a family in the middle of this supposed horror story, apparently to give the audience someone to root for. In its favor, Manos doesn’t overexplain itself to its audience. It also doesn’t explain anything at all, resulting in a hilarious hot mess of a movie that was clearly made without any professional intervention.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/most-iconic-joel-hodgson-episodes-mystery-science-theater-3000-mst3k-imdb/

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