616-Racket Girls

Film Year:  1951
Genre:  Drama, Sports, Crime
Director:  Robert C. Dertano
Starring:  Peaches Page, Timothy Farrell, Clara Mortenson, Rita Martinez
MST Season:  6
Featured Short:  "Are You Ready for Marriage?"

The Short

BOING!

This educational short evaluates the relationships between man and woman and what it takes to build a successful marriage (my sister should have taken tips from it, as she was on her third husband by age thirty).  Larry and Sue plan to get married right after high school, but after their parents scoff at the idea they decide to elope.  Discussing it with marriage counselor Reuben Hall, they discover they might have a lot to learn about marriage compatibility.

Almost a companion piece for Is This Love?, Are You Ready for Marriage? isn’t nearly as melodramatic, a bit goofier, and features a moral hammered into the heads of all that watch it instead of acting as a discussion piece.  Like Is This Love?, the material here is to sway youngsters from getting married too soon, and likely didn’t work because nothing can overwhelm the power of a 50’s teenager who is squishy.  This particular short lends itself to riffing far better than Is This Love?, given the bad acting, lackluster “Just rappin’ with the kids” lecture, and overall overstaged oddness of the production.

The Movie

Many, many hours of wrestling footage is used as a front for a gangster making money off of gambling, drugs, and prostitution.  Soon he gets in trouble with mob boss Mr. Big (possibly the same Mr. Big from Sex and the City), and tries to make a getaway with the money.  But it doesn’t matter, because WOMEN WRESTLING!

Racket Girls stars real life women wrestlers Peaches Page, Clara Mortensen, and Rita Martinez (who is forced to bear an absurd Mexican accent because the director found the Mexican champion sounded “Too American”).  I can’t find much about Page online, as this movie seems to be her only claim to fame, but Mortensen and Martinez apparently had quite a few real life bouts which they reenact for the climax of the film.  Like in the film, Mortensen won most of them.

There is not much story here.  I’d say the gangster plot is supposed to be the important point, but it’s padded out with the endless wrestling scenes that have very little to do with it.  Breasts and asses are the star of the show, I reckon.  I can only imagine this was supposed to be an exploitation film.  There are many prolonged scenes of women in tights and undergarments exorcising, jumping up and down, and crawling all over each other.  It’s not really sexy though.  Sure Peaches Page’s bust takes up ninety percent of her body, but I’d be hardpressed to say I find her attractive.  Specifically since she seems to only have one facial expression, which amounts to “guh?”

The most I can say about Racket Girls is that it led to the epiphany that this movie was ahead of its time.  Yawn worthy sequences of choreographed wrestling?  Padded out with nonsensical drama that nobody cares about?  Correct me if I’m wrong but this sounds a lot like what pro wrestling is today.  I think it’s time to critically reevaluate this forgotten masterpiece.

The Episode

This episode opens up with what is hands down one of the best shorts of the series.  Are You Ready for Marriage? (“Yeah, I’m sick of sex anyway.”) is a likable lunkhead of a film, and the boys hold nothing back on it.  They go after just about every aspect of it, specifically our two leads, enhancing their boneheaded peabrains into two of the most memorable characters ever featured Oon the show.  Plus the short gave us one of the best stingers the show ever had…

“IT’S GONE!”

“WHERE’D IT GO?!”

When it gets down to the movie, for the most part it’s a hard takedown.  While the movie might be bad, there’s not really a lot you can do with it.  Ultimately I’m of the same opinion on this one as I am The Starfighters, where the riffing is an admirable effort but the movie itself makes the episode a beast of an experience.  If you laugh, it’s unlikely you’ll remember.  It’s also unlikely you’ll remember much of any riffs, as your brain will be clouded with images of musclebound female butts being slammed into a mat (“It’s kind of looking at an erotic cave painting.”).  What riffs are there?  A lot of talk about a filmmaker’s visualized sexual fantasies and pointing out that the women featured look like really large grandmothers.  Technically they’re on point, but hearing these riffs nonstop for three theater segments makes me a little bored.  They go a bit broader when the shady gym owners come into play, which results in the best material (“That’s the spirit we need in our hookers!”).

Highlighting the host segments is Tom Servo and Crow being inspired by the short into getting married…to each other.  Theoretically they have known each other for six years, so they wouldn’t be rushing into it.  It’s an odd series of segments that are mildly funny in premise alone, but they just kind of labor it on until it fizzles.  The other segments tickle my fancy a little more.  When commenting on the opening segment, I’ll have to admit I know very little about Lisa Loeb, and can’t speak for how well Bridget Jones portrays her.  My only real subjection to Loeb is hearing her voice as Mary Jane in that (pretty sucky) animated Spider-Man show that MTV used to air, tying in to the 2002 Sam Raimi film.  I will say I do react the way Mike and the bots do to several other musicians, so I get the joke.  All of these taken into consideration, I think the most enjoyable segments this week belonged to the Mads, who have a security breach and try to fix it.  Dr. Forrester’s attempts to communicate with Mike over a radio are hilarious, and I bust a gut when he started using flags.

I laughed fairly loud in portions of Racket Girls.  There are even lines I’d say rank among my all-time favorites (“And how long have you been my doppelganger?”).  It opens more brilliantly than most of my favorite episodes with one of the greatest shorts they’ve ever done.  I’m just perplexed by the nose dive they take.  This episode is a wonderful take off, engines sputtering, a threat of a crash landing, but making it to its destination relatively smoothly.  I wish I could give it marks for promising to be amazing, though.

Average

The DVD

Racket Girls was released in Shout Factory’s Volume XV set, with excellent video and audio.  Special features were scarce but present.

First up is a brief excerpt from what appears to be a very low budget independent comedy film called Hamlet ADD, a humorous retelling of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet with a sci-fi twist.  The scene depicted is The Mousetrap play, where Hamlet studies the reaction of Claudius to a reenactment of the supposed murder of the king.  The reenactment is portrayed by three robots, who are voiced by Kevin Murphy, Trace Beaulieu, and the late Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (of Star Trek fame).  Not as funny as the parody scene seen on The Simpsons (“Hey, I didn’t use THAT much poison!”), but it’s an interesting piece.

The only other extra is a promo for the film, under the title of “Blonde Pickup.”  Hilariously the ad prominently features what looks like a still of a pinup girl who isn’t even in the movie, trying to sell sex appeal where there isn’t any.

The short, Are You Ready for Marriage?, was the final short on Mr. B’s Lost Shorts, which was featured on Rhino’s Volume 6 set.  Wonderful way to close out that collection, I might add.