When the Creeping Terror is helping himself to "...all the girls in town." at the community dance hall, Tom Servo has the riff "sheer energy" when the young lady in the stockings is being forced down the things gullet. I never knew what the hell they were referencing until I saw that catchfrase on the side of one of those little boxes stockings are sold in.
(Phop!) Ah, I can see clearly know that I've pulled my head out of my ass. Anyone else ever miss some obscure reference or not 'get' a line?
-Art Savage, with his shiny new nickname derived from the writer/director/actor/editor/narrator/huckster of The Creeping Terror.
"I think this is some kind of weird little turn-on for the director." -Tom Servo
I have no idea what you just said.
But yeah some of the stuff they say makes no sense.
Like in Prince of Space they kept saying "Back to cram school." Whatever that means.
Ah - but that's the sad part. We don't get it until we get it, and then we get it so it's not something we didn't get anymore. So we don't know what we don't know, until we do.
I feel REALLY dumb when I finally figure some of them out - so maybe I wouldn't tell anyway.
But I know what you mean. Those obscure references and 'inside' jokes can be half the fun.
The "back to cram school" thing was just a reference to the fact that in Japan, they have a thing called cram school. It's like school, but you have to learn more, faster.
They have a lot of inside jokes that no one but them can get. They have a list of their 50 favorite obscure jokes in the MST Amazing Colossal Episode Guide. You can get a used copy on Amazon fairly cheap, I recommend checking it out.
Brother R
They were always making references to various celebrities from the distant past - at least that's who I assume they were, considering I have no idea who they were talking about. There were probably a dozen jokes per episode like that. I don't know who was supposed to get those jokes - old people? Film school graduates? Film school dropouts? Anybody at all?
But that's part of the fun -- there are references I haven't gotten for years, and then I'll learn some stray fact or bit of history and all of a sudden -- "Holy crap, they mentioned that in the [fill in the blank] episode of MST!"
A couple of my favorites are:
Various Episodes: Making references to the Arthur "Two-Sheds" Jackson skit from Monty Python, probably most notable in the Touch of Satan episode.
Also from Touch of Satan: The old farmwife - 'Oh bosch!" Crow - "Oh Heironymous" making reference to the 15-century artist Heironymous Bosch, who painted really strange pictures of Hell.
Brother R
Ah ha! And 'ol Heironymous was the insperation for my first name, HIyronimous Flangepart!
I got most of the referances. There are none i can think of, off hand, that i missed...at least none that wern't covered in the Amazing, collosal eph. guide mentioned earlier...
I tend to miss some celebrity name droppings, but otherwise I get a whole lot of them. Course, I haven't seen very many episodes...
They say something like "Red in the silence spot, (or spa)" in a few episodes. I've never understood that.
I always loved when they made Wisconsin references. They should have made more.
"Red in a silent spot" comes from the Red Skelton Show. Each of his show ended with a mime segment which was know as "A Silent Spot." The announcer would say "and now Red in a silent spot." MST3K usually did this when there was no dialog in the scene.
Seeing the videos of Red Skelton and Benny Hill back to back, I see how much they must have stole from each other.
I did get "Good work Stanley" in the short about the devil and angel fighting over the breadsalesman. Until I saw the original Bedazzled again. The devil is dressed as a cop when he talks to the angel/reporter in the park. One of the best scenes in Bedazzled has the devil, played by Peter Cook, dressed as a cop expiring parking meters.
Love all the Japanese things they mention in the Prince of Space movies, like, "I have to go buy violent degrading porn comics now". I've got a book somewhere that lists and explains the most obscure references in the back (The Amazing Colossal Episode Guide), lots of them things like the name of a guy on a local fishing show in Wisconsin in days of yore.
Now I know what was missing from the Red Skelton show - T&A 'n' cockney ribaldry.
I have some of Red's last season on VHS and you would be surprised how much he got away with. There is one where George Gobel has a WW1 German helmet with the spike on top. Red says to Gobel, "Stop thinking dirty thoughts, that thing on your head is standing up."
There is also a skit with Raymond Burr as an escaped prisoner and Barbara Anderson (Eve from Ironside) as his girlfriend. He tells Red, playing Freddie the Freeloader, "I've been in solitary confinment for a long time. You know what I want to do, don't you."
Red answers, " I understand. I tell her to leave and we'll get started." They both start laughing. I'm wondering if Red Skelton knew about Raymond Burr's real sex life.