MST3K: 21 Years into the Not-Too-Distant Future

The delightful Mystery Science Theater 3000 is twenty-one Earth years of age.  And, as a citizen of the United State of Minnesota, it's now old enough to drink. In order to celebrate, the good, kind, friendly people of DAPCentral's IRC channel have prepared a list of MST-themed drinks to be served at your MST-themed drinking parties.  Thanks and credit go to the likes of Minstrel, SoRefined, Candover, Moogle, Rhesus, Rumm,  and Fnord.

• Go ahead and start with a Killer Shrew.
• Ring of Terror - vodka, lime and angostura bitters in tonic water and over ice.
• Catalina Caper  - KeKe Beach, rum, and mango juice.
• Space Mutiny - Blue curacao with a raspberry vodka float.
• Screaming Skull - Scotch, dry vermouth, triple sec with a twist of lemon.
• The High School Bigshot - induces suicidal tendencies, so the recipe is not reproduced here, for your own safety.

When indulging in a night of MST-Shots, it is customary to set out a 'Torgo,' which is a shotglass of coffee.  The Torgo is not consumed however, it is merely set out in anticipation of the Master.

• What goes in a Gamera? - Turtle Meat!  Turtle Meat and 151.  On fire.  Served neat, of course.
• A Laserblast?  - That's gin and grapefruit juice.
• The Eegah - a simple, single shot of Jeppson's Malort.
• The Monster-a-Go-Go is a drink that results in you being found several miles away, naked, and of normal size.
• A Devil Doll - is a kind of ham daquiri.  Or porquiri, if you will.

I don't drink very often myself, but I do like a good Prince of Space.  In fact, I like it VERY MUCH.

• Invasion of the Neptune Men - Tarantula tequilla and raw fish, served in a short glass.
• The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed Up Zombies - was based on a drink, actually.
• Master Ninja - comes in two variations.  One is a california sake with a beer back.
• The Leech Woman - Irish whiskey and Red Bull.
• The Squirm - is typically served with a curly straw, but don't eat the garnish.
• Track of the Moon Beast - is a very old drink, and is made from chicken...corn...green peppers...onions...and tequila!

The Riding With Death, with a high volume of Wild Turkey, is an extremely mellow and delicious beverage, but it tends to reappear later in the night, much to your regret.

Unfortunately, although every bartender we consulted had heard of it, not one could track down a recipe for the Robert Denby.

• Adam Chance - Absinthe with an aluminum foil twist.
• Bart Fargo - A drink developed for peaceful purposes, the Bart Fargo is surprisingly jazzy and smooth, and ordered by the dozen.
• The Starfighter - Starts off as a simple scotch & soda, but the bartender keeps adding more soda while you're working on it.
• The Alien from LA - Malibu with a vegemite garnish.
• The Mitchell - Just a shot and a beer.  The shot is melted butter.

It goes without saying, the Agent Double 007 is stirred, not shaken.

• Red Zone Cuba - The opposite of a Cuba Libre, so...sprite and vodka.
• Cavedweller - Boilermaker served in a leather mug.
• The Thing That Just Couldn't Die -  is a spanish wine aged in a hat box with a stick and black powder infusion.
• The Human Duplicator - A double shot.  The first is tequila in a holey condom.  The second, tequila again, with a condom floating in it.  (See?  It's reversed.)
• Puma Man - Brown ale with agave nectar and benadryl, onion slice garnish.
• Future War - a bloody mary served in a melted candle with a plastic dinosaur garnish.

Manos is not actually a drink, it's the name given to the round of applause given to the person who can stay awake for 90 minutes after drinking The Master without touching the Torgo.

• Brute Man - Grape juice and everclear, served with a chicken wing.  Of TOMORROW!
• Posture Pals vary in content by region, but they're always served straight up.
• Touch of Satan - Raspberry chocolate martini with a rock and a goldfish.
• A Last Clear Chance - A Boilermaker with Gentle Pressure.
• Horror of Party Beach - A Long Island Iced Tea with hotdog in it.  Salt on the rim, naturally.

A Bride of the Monster is just about any drink as long as you're lonely and slow when you drink it.

• Attack of the Eye Creatures - A delightful themed drink sampler in which every drink has just a kiss of nougat!
• A Sampo - is the perfect choice for a classy lady looking for something to wear on a night out of MST-boozin'.
• Incredible Melting Man - A glass of Bailey's served in a dribble glass.
• The Giant Leech - Sucks.  Not worth making.  (High-fives all around!)
• A Tormented - Champagne and seaweed.
• The Rosdower - A tidal wave of kahlua!
• The Mr. B Natural - Just seltzer. With an LSD Chaser.

And the Beatnik is always the final drink of the night - it killed that fat barkeep!

#1,497: Inglourious Basterds

Here's a post that didn't post at the end of August, because I was too lazy to do all the two-line reviews: Feverishly hacking away at the mountain of editorial assistance required to bring SpikeTV's Surviving Disaster to a television screen near you starting next Tuesday, Sept 1, and every Tuesday thereafter for the next ten weeks.

In June, we had a little time off and I went off to edit a feature film shot on the RED, The Selling, written by and starring Gabriel Diani (who you can hear in episodes of Better Radio, my sci-fi sketch comedy radio show (re: podcast) ).  It's great, by far the best feature I've worked on so far.  Spooky and funny in turn, it's a haunted house story that's more inconvenient for a real estate agent than it's terrifying for a family.

While I was working on that, I was also watching:

-Public Access - Bryan Singer & Christopher McQuarrie's first movie.  Not exactly...good.  Reminded me of Sex, Lies, & Videotape a bit.  And there's the formative version of the big twist they'd get right the next time around.

-Jandek on Corwood - Documentary on a musical recluse.  Not at all as interesting as its own subject.

-Zombie Girl - Same problem, different cause.  I'd suspect this was shot without a plan, and pieced together from the footage, which is a much less likely route to a captivating doc.

-Man on Wire - I probably would have been way more into this one if I'd seen it cold, a year ago when it was new, instead of hearing all the details all over the place in advance.  It was, however, a fun inaugural run for MustacheTV.

-Captivity - Kim Bauer Gets Kidnapped: The Movie.  Snooze.

-Push - Why aren't original movies about superheroes any good?  What's the exception to this rule?  Is it because (almost?) all of them try to break from comic book tradition with the edgy, raw, gritty idea of using superpowers in order to be lazy?

-The Great Debaters - Good, but pretty by-the-book example of one of these.  Also, I think it had some anachronistic stuff about Hitler and WWII that wouldn't've happened yet at the time the movie takes place.

-The Hurt Locker -  This was pretty good, but also kind of a cheat.  What's more exciting in a movie than the stock moment of 'will the bomb be defused in time?'  And this movie is a huge collection of those scenes!  I did wonder though, about what they might have been saying with the spent cartridge floating and bouncing in slow motion, and why they bothered to set it 5 years ago when it probably wasn't written that way, with all its references to things that didn't exist 5 years ago.

-G.I. Joe - I was never at all a fan of G.I. Joe back in the day, so I went into this one not knowing who anyone was.  Thankfully, they make it easy on newcomers by putting one of everyone on both teams.  I wonder if the toys were just repaints of the same figure.  It's been a good year for animation, so this is far from getting the 'one of the best animated movies I've seen this year' joke.  Still, way better than Transformers, even if I did doze off for a bit somewhere in the middle.

-Funny People - First Apatow movie I've seen.  Good thing they didn't call it 'Good Actors.'  I liked it overall, especially from the perspective knowing a bunch of upcoming comics.  That Jonah Hill guy though; yuck.

-District 9 - Cool movie.  Loved it less than the popular response.  Close as we'll get to Half-Life: The Movie.  Still don't like when mock docs don't commit.  Hope, like Cloverfield, they'll have the guts not to take the bait on a sequel.

-District 13 - Action parkour fighting movie!  Kind of like Escape From Paris.

-District 13: Ultimatum -  The sequel to action parkour fighting movie!  I actually liked this one even better for the most part.  Crazy and more elaborate fights, flashier parkour chases, and an even more disappointing ending!

-Ponyo by the Sea - Hot on the heels of the original, Studio Ghibli's anime remake of last year's action hit Taken is a terrific retelling.  It hits the beats of the original while still adding something new to the father's relentless search for his missing daughter.  The casting for the English dub was well done, and the recruiting Liam Neeson to reprise the original role is brilliant.  The primary difference in this version is that the girl is overcome with Hugo's Disease.  I don't think anything I've seen in the theater this year so far has gotten as much laughter as this did.

-Last of the Mohicans - the 1936 version.  AND

-Last of the Mohicans - the 1992 version, which is a remake of the 1936 edition, not a fresh version of the book.  I thought I'd start a series here on double features, but it's been a while since I saw these, and I was surprised by how lousy they were.  Even more so, how the movie doesn't seem to be about the Last of the Mohicans (who, by the by, aren't extinct).

-Inglourious Basterds - this was fun to see, the way it's always fun to see more from someone who has such a distinctive mark on their movies.  And it was fun to see the audience around me not-enjoying it, from the walk-outs to the guy who kept complaining that scenes didn't make any sense and it was too much work to read the subtitles.  I liked the way it would make silly concessions and then double back on them and turn out to be clever.  I wonder how much it changed since it's premiere at Cannes, since Ebert's review didn't seem to apply to the finished cut.  Also, one gets the sense that the clan of Basterds were only included as an excuse to use a title QT loved on his movie about something else entirely.

8 or 9 out of 17 this round.

Dead Air

"I'm going to go home and download that song.  Legally!"
"What?"
"I said, 'I'm going to go home and download that song,' and then I said, 'legally!'"
"You can't say that."
"Why not?"
"Is music-sharing legal?"
"I think it is"
"Wait, it is?"
"Maybe it isn't."
"I think it is if one person paid for it."
"I'm not really sure how it works."
"Anyway, you should all know that WE are going to go out to eat after our show today!"
"We haven't even decided where we're going to go yet."
"I think I could go for Aunt Chilada's"
*ding sound effect*
"Yay!"
"I think maybe it's not good if you're going more than three times a week though."
"It's Sunday, so I haven't been there at all this week yet."
"Wait, are we advertising them?"
"No, they are just a place that exists.  And has really good food."
"Oh, I don't go there for the food."
"And has really good...something else...even, I mean, but not unless you have ID"
"Oh, no, of course not."
"Of course."
"Well, since Mike was kind enough to come in and tell us that the levels were turned off--"
"Thanks Mike!"
"We love Mike!"
"He's smart.  He knows how this board thing works"
"But since he told us nobody heard our opening block, we're going to play our first six songs again"
"Oh, I don't want to listen to those again."
"What?  Why not?"
"I didn't like, like, three of them"
"You didn't like those?  I thought you said you - wait, what?"
"gestures on the radio!"
*giggling*
"I'm nervous!  I don't want to talk anymore!"
"Uh oh, she just walked out."
*Same 2-minute commercial for Ray & Mike's Deli plays three times in a row*

-College radio station WQAQ, now simulcast on internet, just in case any alumni should ever experience accidental interest, mild waves of nostalgia, swelling, or existential crisis

I'm ruining it. RIGHT NOW.

Until this moment, the words "inert zune" returned only one result in a google search. Still, it's a lovely phrase, for any number of reasons.

More like AWESOME W. K.!

Got myself all distracted from writing this morning when it occurred to me to pursue Andrew WK records that I hadn't heard, and in fact hadn't been released in the US. So of course we end up on wikipedia after a while:

and down the rabbit hole we go, decoding http://www.awk.dudeguy.com/STEEV%20MIKE.htm (which is a nested number-letter code that works out to 'there is one more coming') and some more hunting around reveals 'the story so far' as told by someone who writes like a maniac:

http://awilkeskrier.homestead.com/   (take heart, it's an incredibly long page, and manages to get a little bit less interesting as it goes)

So, Mr. WK not only makes such brilliant music as "It's Time to Party" and "Party Hard," apparently puts on performance art pieces that end up as party-concerts in addition to great big tours that go on for years (even when he's stuck in a wheelchair because he broke his foot jumping around on stage), and somehow has a live action TV show on Cartoon Network, where he combines teams of kids and really big explosives, but he's also got his own Conspiracy Theory (re: he's an actor playing Andrew playing music written by some evil faceless shadowy figure?) or more likely his own ARG (since every one of the sites with crazy codes and stuff on them are owned by his production company.)?  Hey, leave some awesome for the fish, huh?