112-Untamed Youth

Film Year:  1957
Genre:  Drama, Musical
Director:  Howard W. Koch
Starring:  Mamie Van Doren, Lori Nelson, John Russell, Eddie Cochran
MST Season:  1

The Movie

Staring Mamie Van Doren, Lori Nelson, Mamie Van Doren’s breasts, Eddie Cochran, and Mamie Van Doren’s bum, this troubled youth, “adults don’t get me OR my music!” demographic flick aint gonna make no cottonpicker out of me!  Untamed Youth is a tale of how work will kill you, while being a vagrant and believing in nothing but partying and rock ‘n’ roll will make you rich and famous!

Van Doren and Nelson play sisters who are caught skinny dipping and are sentenced to labor on a cottonpicking farm.  Of course they’ll be fine, because they’re Caucasian (“BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”  ::dodges tomato:: ).  But this farm is filled with youthful labor, overworked and undernourished.  When their conditions start becoming fatal, the march is on to expose the labor for what it really is.

Meanwhile, Mamie becomes a famous singer!  GO CALYPSO GO!

I’m kind of soft on this movie, and I mostly give it a pass by the skin of its teeth.  It’s fairly silly and dim, but it’s never dull.  It’s kept lively by a bunch of toe-tapping musical numbers by Mamie Van Doren and Eddie Cochran.  And it’s not that they’re great songs either (they aren’t), as a lot of them are inane and repetitive, they’re just catchy. It gives the movie a groove that’s hard to pass up.   As such, while the movie isn’t fairly interesting in of itself, it can maintain your attention span.  That’s no easy feat.

But it’s not that good of a movie.  That much can be recognized.  It’s a “world ends at 16, and we know everything there is to know” kind of movie.  Movies like this are rarely ever good.  Some are just more enjoyable than most.

The Episode

My opinion of a lot of these later season one episodes certainly seems to be that the movie does a lot of the heavy lifting, while some sparse and off-target riffing doesn’t really match the amusement factor of just watching the movie by itself.  Untamed Youth certainly seems like it would be another in that line, but the riffing is actually pretty good here.  After an onslaught of sci-fi films, the energy of this dramatic musical gives the riffers a shot of adrenaline.  They’re a bit more energized by this movie and their wit becomes a bit sharper as a result.  Watching this episode makes me hungry for more juvenile delinquent dramas and/or musicals, and the show was definitely not short on them.

The host segments are mostly kind of useless lumps.  I admit being really perplexed by the flashback presentation of the second segment, in which Joel tries to “look” into Gypsy’s brain (which is of course made up of Richard Basehart and RAM chips).  The Greg Brady presentation is a mildly amusing prolonging of a decent running gag, while the cotton segment is just weird.  I like the Never-Light Pipe in the Invention Exchange though, while the tongue puppet kinda sucks.

Poopie!:  In the third segment, Gypsy loses her lip while a Servo puppet loses a hand.

Like a lot of season one episodes, Untamed Youth could have probably been a better episode later on in the series when they were more skilled at their art.  But you have to start somewhere, and as it is it’s a funny and entertaining episode.  I get a kick out of this one.

Good

The DVD

Get ready to Go Calypso with Shout Factory’s Volume XXIX set.  Video and audio are very good, while quite a few bonuses help make the disc a worthwhile purchase.

First up is an introduction by Joel, which isn’t very extensive.  He discusses how the film’s genre helped open a gateway for the series, but doesn’t much talk about the episode itself.  Talking about her career is an interview with star Mamie Van Doren, who discusses how she got her start in Hollywood and her love for Untamed Youth.  There’s also a trailer for the movie.

Unrelated to the episode or film, we have a bonus about Joel’s project Riffing Myself, which was a live one-man-show Joel performed that is based on his own life.  It gets me interested in seeing the show, but I never had the pleasure.