Film Year: 1957
Genre: Adventure, Fantasy
Director: Roger Corman
Starring: Abby Dalton, Suson Cabot, Brad Jackson, June Kenney, Richard Devon
MST Season: 3
Featured Short: "The Home Economics Story"
The Short
Are you a woman who dreams of being President of the United States? An Astronaut? Curing cancer? Dream no longer! Because that aint gonna happen! We’re here to tell you how you’re paying good money to go to college yet the only course for you is Home Economics, to prepare you for all those jobs out there for women: like cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children!
A short that’s more dated than most provides a look at what doors were open to women in the 1950’s, which weren’t very many. The short was probably made as a helpful tool to guide young girls into picking a career, even if that “career” was housewife. Today it’s sad, but at the time it probably seemed proactive. This was what a woman’s life was like, and these were the options they had, and Home Economics was a safe bet in ensuring they exorcised those options into their maximum potential.
There’s very little here for a modern viewer, unless one really wants to be domestic and loves Home Economics. If that’s the direction you want, then power to you. But be forewarned that feminists aren’t high on this short’s list of people to please.
Now get into the kitchen, bitch. And don’t leave unless you’re popping out a baby.
The Movie
A group of Viking women go on a voyage to seek out their missing men and set sail on the seas. After their boat is destroyed by a giant sea serpent, they wash ashore and discover their men have been taken prisoner by barbarians. The women take it upon themselves to free their men, escape the barbarians, and defeat the sea monster to make their way home.
Affectionately called Roger Corman’s most ambitious motion picture, The Saga of the Viking Woman and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (there’s a reason most just call it Viking Women and the Sea Serpent) can’t break free of Corman’s penny-pinching nature. And even if it did, it’s still distinctly a Corman film with weak humor, stilted performances, bad effects, and almost no story (and even less plot).
That said, just because Corman products are always vintage bad, doesn’t mean they can’t be enjoyable. Little Shop of Horrors, for example, often tops lists of guilty pleasures. Viking Women and the Sea Serpent isn’t nearly as oddly cute as that film, but it has an oddball charm about it. There’s something almost brilliant about the way it portrays women as macho warriors and men as shrill crybabies (“But you don’t understand, I’M A PRINCE!”). It’s hard to describe the film as a feminist movie, when it mostly just seems an excuse to see some wonderful figures in skimpy costumes, but these gals still have a tendency to kick booty at the best of times. Disappointingly the movie gets fairly man-heavy for the finale, but makes up for it with some goofy action scenes to bring on a laugh.
Add in a really crappy puppet portraying a sea serpent and you have a movie that I kind of dig, even if it is pretty lousy. Corman doesn’t make great movies, but if you have a beer in hand you can kill an hour watching this crap and not regret it.
The Episode
To be honest, the first time I had seen The Home Economics Story was outside of the show on the Shorts Volume 1 DVD, and I was left unimpressed. It’s fairly long, drones on and on, and at times it can seem overwhelmingly monotonous. Within the context of the episode, it flows a lot smoother, and it’s hard to explain why. I think the surrounding episode gives the short in question a better foothold and it works better as an actual ensemble piece.
I absolutely adore the pairing of the short and the movie. We open up with a piece about women learning their place in society and follow it up by a feature about warrior women who are capable of fending for themselves and rescue their wussy males. It’s too perfect that it has to be intentional! The theater segments give our boys a lot of room to work with gender jokes, given the dated educational short and exploitation follow-up giving the episode a theme of women (or I’m Gonna Make it After All, if you will). That said, they don’t over-rely on it and try to maintain a wide variety throughout the episode. Including the catchy cheer…
“Look, look, look at my crotch! Look, look, look at my crotch!”
As for the host segments, our gang on the Satellite has a one-track mind this week and the word on the street is “Waffles.” You would think the breakfast food theme would wear out its welcome by episode’s end, but it adds to the charm of this episode. Whatever may have inspired such an idea for a host segment theme, the crew seems insistent on riding it as high as possible. We’re given lots of syrupy sketches, including the famous “Waffles!” sketch (the shortest they’ve ever done) and the sketch where Crow dons the identity of Willy the Waffle, a pre-callback to the instructional short A Case of Spring Fever, which wasn’t even featured on the show at this point (it would eventually be shown in the tenth season episode Squirm). The invention exchange is fun, as the Mads echo Frankenstein with their Meat Re-Animator where they bring a chicken back to life. Joel and the Bots bring us the aptly-named Waffle Iron, which turns a waffle into a pancake.
Waffles are an odd theme for an MST episode, specifically for one with the feminism vs. chauvinism flavor of the movie segments. The end product of an episode is odd, but tasty, like a waffle itself. And one that’s always a welcome presence on my television.
Classic
The DVD
Shout Factory released the film under an abbreviated title of “Viking Women vs. the Sea Serpent” in their all-AIP celebratory set of Volume XXXIV. Audio and video were spectacular, and the disc was the most loaded of the set. We start off with a brief, fluffy introduction by Frank Conniff, who doesn’t really say anything about the episode but just mocks the title of the movie. But after that is the real star of the show on this disc.
The second special feature is It Was a Colossal Teenage Movie Machine: The American International Pictures Story, a ninety-minute look at the history of this particular company that gave MST so much wonderful fodder over the years. This documentary is apologetic of product quality but brimming with love as they take a look at these particular moviemakers’ place in cinema history. It’s not short on context, describing the landscape of Hollywood at the time and the age of moviegoers, and make a good argument for how this studio managed to be so successful with their cheapies. An absolutely wonderful love letter to one of the best B-movie product churners on the planet.
For fans of The Home Economics Story who could take or leave the rest of the episode, it is the very first short featured in Rhino’s Shorts Volume 1 compilation featured on their Volume 2 set. The short has an original humorous introduction by Tom Servo (voiced by Kevin Murphy, of course). This compilation was re-released by Shout Factory in their re-release of Volume 2, which also included the Tom Servo introduction.
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