Thanksgiving Day has its attractions, to be sure—for myself,
the mashed potatoes concocted by any member of my mother’s family, as well as
the variety of non-pumpkin-based desserts made by a favorite aunt (including
impossibly sumptuous brownies and a lemon meringue pie with a meringue so high
as to remind one of that guy from Kid ‘N Play), were and remain strong draws to
the holiday and its animating spirit of gratitude. However, the day has never
been a particularly great one on which to not be a sports fan. Specifically a
football fan. Now, these days I’m perfectly capable of sitting and
half-enjoying a football game if necessary—I learned quite a bit by playing
those Madden video games, so I kind of “get it” now—but in my sensitive youth I
wasn’t having it, and so, whenever I was lucky enough to spend Thanksgiving at
the home of a relative who had a second television set, I’d spend the
non-eating portions of the day in a different tri-state area ritual: Watching a
bunch of “King Kong”-related movies, including, of course, the deathless “Kong”
its own self (OF COURSE I mean the 1933 Cooper-Schoedsack film) on WWOR Channel
9, the New York station that provided Martin Scorsese and so many other
cinephiles and cineastes with an early film education.
But nothing lasts forever, and WWOR Channel 9 is now “My 9,”
home of bottomless “Big Bang Theory” reruns and no movies to speak of. It’s
been that way for a while. So as a younger adult, eventually I became happy to
find a less cinephilically pure but highly entertaining replacement ritual in
Mystery Science Theater 3000’s “Turkey Day,” a quasi-marathon of MST3K episodes
shown over the course of a Thanksgiving on Comedy Central and then The SciFi
Channel.
I understand that a lot of film lovers, particularly those
with a particular jones for genre movies, find the very idea of MST3K, in which
a cast of unusual characters provides an oft-mocking running commentary to real
movies that its dinky-catchy theme song terms “cheesy,” offensive practically
to the point of sacrilege. I recall reading a particularly scathing dismissal
of the program by the estimable critic and author Kim Newman. But I remember
inadvertently coming upon an episode sometime in 1990, checking out the cable
hookup at the apartment I had just moved into, and being immediately
flabbergasted, and then laughing, a lot, and wondering what I’d just seen. Once
I learned, I was hooked. The arguable desecration of some of the movies (many
of which had been victimized before they even made it to the show, as in
several of the Russian fairy-tale movies redubbed and edited for American
audiences) didn’t bother me—I like to think I’m a good semi-postmodernist, open
to all stripes of creative repurposing. I did feel a little better when I got
to spend one Turkey Day in the company of several other critic-types, including
one certified Val Lewton scholar, and we all had a grand old drunken time.
That tradition, too, is ended—MST3K ended in 1999, and the
various creators behind it have dispersed to such similar entertainment
ventures as “Rifftrax” (you provide the movie, they provide a standalone
commentary you watch along), “Cinematic Titanic,” and sundry live MST3K events.
And of course the Turkey Day experience can be simulated via physical media:
between Rhino and now Shout! Factory, there are over 30 volumes of MST 3K
episodes in print. But I have to say that it warms the cockles of this
particular fan’s heart that the just-released Volume XXXI is dubbed “The Turkey
Day Collection.” For no actually really good reason except to provide Shout!
Factory’s designers to come up with nifty robots-dressed-as-Pilgrims artwork
for the commemorative tin…and, okay, have show co-creator Joel Hodgson provide
brand-new intros for the movies, of which I’d have to say “The Painted Hills”
is a big favorite. This 1951 concoction is a novelty, in that it stars the
famed collie Lassie, only here Lassie isn’t playing him/herself, but rather
Shep, the dog pal of a grizzled old prospector who’s betrayed by a protégé. The
action occasions a lot of terrific animal-voiceover humor from bots Tom Servo
and Crow T. Robot, mitigated as usual by the soothing sarcasm of Joel. As has
been the custom recently, the box divides itself between the two hosts, Hodgson
and Mike Nelson. One of the Nelson episodes is the definitively disquieting
1976 killer-worms exposition “Squirm,” the kind of thing that hardcore genre
fans get kind of shirty about (its writer/director Jeff Lieberman subsequently
made the cult acid picture “Blue Sunshine”). I’m so earthworm-phobic I can
barely bring myself to watch it regardless of whether the soundtrack’s the
original, or the MST 3K wisecrackers. It’s still a potent form of DVD comfort
food to have that, “Jungle Goddess,” and “The Screaming Skull” added to the
pile of hilarity this Thanksgiving. Hope yours is a bountiful one.
