1002-Girl in Gold Boots

Film Year:  1968
Genre:  Drama
Director:  Ted V. Mikels
Starring:  Jody Daniels, Leslie McRae, Tom Pace, Chris Howard
MST Season:  10

The Movie

Michele, a depressed waitress who loves dancing, is given the opportunity of a lifetime when shady “agent” Buz agrees to take her to Los Angeles to become a Go-Go dancer and train with Buz’s sister Joanie, the top dancer in the city.  They pick up vagrant Critter along the way to help pay for expenses (because obviously hitchhikers have loads of cash, it’s just common sense), which leads to conflict for Michele’s affections.  Michele is an instant hit on the club scene, but the corruption, crime, and drug dealing backstage convinces Critter to try and whisk Michele away back to a normal life.

Upon watching Girl in Gold Boots one finds themselves thankful that Go-Go dancing trash like this isn’t made any more.  Then you realize that this movie isn’t much different than crap like You Got Served and Step Up, coming to the sad conclusion that they still make trash like this, just in a different style and decade.  In Gold Boots defense, it’s less flashy and very poorly made, and when the melodrama comes it SCREAMS AT YOU SHRILLY.  All this makes it more amusing than your average dance porn movie.  Plus there’s a mafia subplot because why not?  If something is popular with the kids, then the adults making the movie have to portray it as corrupt somehow.

Girl in Gold Boots has modest ambitions of just showing off fit Go-Go girl bodies and dancing to little numbers that aren’t painful, but not memorable.  I guess it succeeds, and I imagine more than a few teenagers flocked to it and wasted money on it because they didn’t feel like watching Charlton Heston running away from guys in ape costumes in 1968.  There had to be someone, I guess.

The Episode

The only first run episodes of MST I watched were during the Sci-Fi era of the series.  I didn’t even know it used to be on Comedy Central, and I had never heard of the likes of Josh or Trace and only really knew of Joel and Frank because of their appearance in the previous episode, Soultaker.  But I had no clue who they were, so their cameo flew right over my head.  I was not by any means versed on MST history (MSTory?), so keep in mind that my experience with the show was restricted to Sci-Fi’s limitations on the what the series could show until this point, which was sci-fi, fantasy, and horror.

When Girl in Gold Boots first aired it both confused and enraged me.  I remember reading the title of the movie in TV Guide as the next episode and I had assumed it was some goofy fantasy movie about a girl with magical shoes or something.  I thought the point of this show was to make fun of bad genre pictures, and couldn’t for the life of me figure out why they were doing a Go-Go drama.  I didn’t realize that the series had done quite a few of this type of movie in the past, was really pushing to do them again, and only just got the network to agree.  So at the time, this was my least favorite episode, because it seemed like a waste of a movie.

Then I grew up and started laughing.  Girl in Gold Boots is wildly funny.  The movie itself is never the same one minute to the next, giving Mike and the bots ample opportunity to shake things up.  Be it a road trip, dance scenes, or crime planning, our boys on the Satellite of Love adapt beautifully to each change and make it hilariously worthwhile.  They are especially impressive during the various dance and music scenes, bringing a surprising amount of fresh riffs to the table with borderline similar content.

“Honey!  Way to play the harmonica with your ass!”

One of the funniest points in the film features Critter leaning against a wall with a guitar, singing a sorrowful song and daydreaming of Michele, which her disembodied head jumps into the frame every now and again.  The crew clearly love this sequence, and not only does it come out in the funny that they spew at it but it spills over into one of the best host segments of the series featuring Mike doing the same thing, with Crow and Servo floating into frame and trying to tell him the ship is on fire.

As the other host segments go, the other SOL segments play with moments of the movie like this and they are amusing but amount to nothing much.  However, this episode was the start of a mini-arc where Pearl becomes a certified Mad Scientist.  The storyline never really went anywhere, but for the most part it was just something they seemed to enjoy playing around with and Mary Jo receives a lot of good material out of it.  I like these first Mads segments they give us where they see here being inspected and she struggles to impress him.  Her exchange with Observer where she wishes to give him an Igor-like hump on his back, only for him to misinterpret her statement of “I wanna give you a hump” is brilliantly written.

While this return to less-fantasy-based films was short lived before the series was cancelled (which also brought us Final Justice, Hamlet, and to a lesser extent Diabolik, though it’s comic booky nature makes that debatable), Girl in Gold Boots sees our crew giving a sigh of relief in doing something different.  There’s a bit of excitement in their voices and you can tell they’re giving it their all.  While not everything about the episode clicks to the point for me to consider it a favorite, Girl in Gold Boots is a delightful rainy day episode that will never fail to make me laugh.

Good

The DVD

Rhino released Girl in Gold Boots on their all-Sci-Fi era set of Volume 4, the first time any of the Sci-Fi episodes saw a home media release. Since Gold Boots was disc one, I guess one could make the argument that it was the first Sci-Fi episode released period.  The transfer is about as good as can be asked for, with excellent audio as well.

Special features start off with an episode introduction by Mike Nelson, who reflects upon Crow’s disturbing Gold Boot dance as well as being relieved that he wasn’t the one that did it.  Also included are a trailer and a TV spot, both of which make the movie look just as bad as it really is (if not worse).  So if you saw this movie in the 60’s, it’s your own fault.

Shout Factory later re-released the episode as a single disc sole exclusively through their website, with no extras.  They also re-released Volume 4, which looks roughly the same.  All the extras are the same.