MST3K gives you a reason to stay home this Thanksgiving—wherever home is
Aux Features Mystery Science theater 3000
By now, the message is clear: If you’re celebrating Thanksgiving at all in 2020, you should not be traveling great distances nor meeting up with large groups of people to do so. Sure, these precautions mean missing out on Grandma’s signature flair for suspending frozen fruit in Jell-O mold. But it also means reducing the risk of missing out on Grandma in the immediate future. Traditions endure—COVID-19 means a greater chance that all the people you might come into contact with around the dinner table (and then all the people you come into contact with after you leave, and all the people they come into contact with after you’ve come into contact with them, and the people coming in contact with all those other people around the dinner table, and so on) might not.
And even in this, the strangest and most frightening November of our lifetimes, some beloved Thanksgiving customs will still be there for you. The Macy’s parade will, improbably, march on. The Detroit Lions will, inevitably, lose. And Mystery Science Theater 3000 will roast six hand-picked, robot-carved cinematic turkeys on the live-streaming platform of your choice.
The 2020 MST3K Turkey Day Marathon kicks off at 9 a.m. Eastern/6 a.m. Pacific on Thursday, November 26, following a fan-vote tournament bracket that recently culminated in the matchup between Joel-era heavyweights Pod People and I Accuse My Parents. The lineup will consist of those two episodes, along with the tourney’s top three vote getters and a second-round “wild card” to be named later. (Hope yet for Quest Of The Delta Knights, a season-nine installment whose exile in IP limbo only recently came to an end.) Speaking of exile, this year marks the marathon’s global debut via the MST3K Twitch and YouTube channels, ensuring any American MSTies left stranded by the alternately malevolent and dunderheaded actions of comic villains with bad hair can still enjoy a slice of Turkey Day.
And while we may be reheating the same quarantine/Satellite Of Love analogies we were using back when this whole mess started, surely the MST3K Live crew—human test subject Emily Marsh, Conor McGiffin as Tom Servo, Nate Begle as Crow T. Robot, and Yvonne Freese in the dual role of GPC and MegaSynthia—will bring fresher material to their Turkey Day hosting stint. Joel Hodgson, Jonah Ray, and Rebecca Hanson are set to stop by as well—remotely, safely, and conscientiously.
36 Comments
Maybe Stafford won’t start and they WON’T lose.
Thank you for that.
I don’t think I will ever get used to the new voices for the bots.
(Hope yet for Quest Of The Delta Knights, a season-nine installment whose exile in IP limbo only recently came to an end.)
And yet the best episode of MST3K ever is still no where to be found because of the same shit.
The Final Sacrifice is a top ten MST3K episode for me, for sure“Rowsdower? Is that a stupid name, or…”
To be fair, Final Sacrifice has been around for AGES; even if the rights have lapsed recently, it’s not exactly super rare given the length of time the set with it was in print.
Okay? Doesn’t change the fact that it was widely available now its not anywhere (legally) beyond an out of print dvd. It sucks.
Not even available on iTunes anymore. A damn shame.
Wait… WHY is it not available? I remember it was on Shout for a while, then it suddenly wasn’t. I assumed they just rotate the stock occasionally.
The films director is trying to strongarm streaming services into coughing up more money apparently. He has single handedly made it impossible to legally stream it anywhere. Sucks.
That is most un-zapdowerian.
Noticed it was gone the other day on YouTube and Tubi.
It’s unavailable to legally stream anywhere right now.
There was a time when I seriously questioned myself whether it was worth it for me to buy all of the Shout Factory MST3K box sets. Score another win for physical media!
I got an 87 episode streaming and downloadable package as a perk during their Netflix kick-starter campaign. It’s still on there.“This movie has the stink of Canada all over it.”
Lucky you!
(singing) Remember when I accused my parents and I killed them…we’ll see who’s laughing nooooow…
“Mirror mirror on the wall…can I make it to last call?”GOD I love that episode so much. It’s up there with Mitchell, Eegah and a few others as an all time favorite.
But really, at the end of the day, do you TRULY enjoy your work?
Pod People is so bizarre. I fucking love it. How does it rip off ET and 80s slashers? Who would do that? And why does it have more fog than the movie “The Fog”?
I think it began as the slasher but then had a bunch of the ET stuff tacked on to capitalize on the popularity of said property.It stinks!
Please tell me “It stinks!” is a reference to The Critic.
I bow to no one in my love for The Critic, but – in this case – it is in reference to the film and MST3K episode currently under discussion.
Gotcha! Well, I need to watch this ep of MST3K.
My first and still favorite. I remember weekends in the early 90s when me and my brother would take the money our mom gave us and go to 7-11. We will then watch it along with Gilligan’s Island and WWF.
It is 5 movies in one!
“Meanwhile in movie “D”…for dumb.”
Winged potatoes gets me every time.
Also, Many Europeans would do that. Eh, it was truly a wacky time.
AND AND AND its one of a number of movies MST riffed that was distributed by Film Ventures International, who had a habit of including clips from a completely different movie during the opening credits of their movies! So the opening credits of Pod People feature aliens completely different from those in the movie, with scenes and actors that do not appear in the rest of the movie either. So you have a shitty horror movie that tacked on a shitty ET rip-off, the shitty young person band who feel like they belong in another movie, and opening credits featuring scenes from an ACTUAL different movie. Its like a turducken of turds.
The 80s were a very foggy time. At least, I think so. As they say: If you can remember the 80s, you weren’t there, maaaaaan!I was born in 1981.
I grew up watching monster movies on Saturday afternoons via WUAB out of Cleveland/Loraine county, lol. MST3K was a natural migration for me and most of my family never got it. I love that they are still doing their turkey day marathons, even if it isn’t on a network.
Loved Channel 43 WUAB Loraine/Cleveland. We used to get it in Ontario back in the 80s. My memory might be failing me, but I’m pretty sure that’s where I watched the Sunday afternoon block of Star Trek, Space 1999, Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica.
LOL I’ve been trying to remember if it was WUAB or the USA network that I watched that block of on Sundays for decades now. I would go with my dad to my grandmother’s house every Sunday growing up in the 80’s, and if there wasn’t any decent sports on (my grandma loved her Ohio sports teams) that block of sci-fi was the fall back. I’ve been stuck in upstate NY since this time last year, essentially 120 miles due south of Montreal, and I never realized how much media we have access to from Canada being right across the boarder here.
Pretry please, provide me with the greatest Thanksgiving of all and ungrey me, please? I am anti-jerk unless we are talking about “The Jerk”. Then I am staunchly pro.