K02-Revenge of the Mysterons from Mars

Film Year:  1981 (edited from a 1967 television series)
Genre:  Adventure, Science Fiction
Director:  Robert Lynn, Ken Turner, Brian Burgess
Starring:  Francis Matthews, Ed Bishop, Liz Morgan, Donald Gray
MST Season:  KTMA

The Movie

For years the title to the movie in this formerly lost episode seemed to be mistranslated as Revenge of the Mysterians.  I had assumed that it was some sort of unofficial sequel to the Toho alien invasion movie The Mysterians before discovering the name of the Mysterons was misspelled and that it was actually cobbled together from an old Gerry and Sylvia Anderson marionette series called Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.  Boy was my face red.

Or...scarlet...

::snicker::snicker::

This series is about an alien civilization on Mars called the Mysterons as they wage a war on Earth, meanwhile a color-coded team of special agents are assigned to prevent any attack the Mysterons might perform. While it's not quite explained in the film itself (that I recall) but some interesting context I found while researching this film, in this series Captain Scarlet is a recreation of a dead agent made by the Mysterons to kill the President, but is reprogrammed by his agency to regain the original Scarlet's personality, making him a practically indestructible weapon.  Boy, how's that for a backstory?

This film consists of four edited together episodes that have little to do with each other, leading to an episodic back and fourth between Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.  At various points we are forced to contend with a duplicated scientist planting bombs, shady goings on in a rogue moon colony, blowing up a Mysteron complex, and an attempt at a truce between Earth and Mars.

Initially I was a bit baffled by Revenge of the Mysterons from Mars because it assumes we're familiar with the Captain Scarlet story for the most part, so I wasn't really that engrossed by it.  With a bit more knowledge of the Scarlet character and it's mythology this show is starting to seem slightly more interesting.  There's kind of a neat Invasion of the Body Snatchers type of story going on here, with certain characters being turned into Mysteron agents as the stories go on and I was starting to grow more into it.

That said, out of what few Anderson marionette shows I've seen, this is probably the one I like the least.  It's not very interesting to look at and because of that when it drags it's a slog.  I'm not sure if it's because I'm unfamiliar with the series, but the product as a whole doesn't seem to work for those who aren't.  But Anderson fans will likely eat it up.

The Episode

Previously lost as MSTies had no taped copies to circulate, the great and wise Joel Hodgson was kind enough to share a copy of this episode in 2016 as a big "thank you" to the backers of the wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to relaunch Mystery Science Theater.  While not all fans are enthusiastic about seeing more of the sparse and improvised KTMA era, I love to watch and study evolution of various artists and filmmakers and am a firm believer that the preservation and availability of our film history is important, regardless of quality.  While it's a shame that there is still one episode that is lost (hopefully Shout Factory, the current owners of MST's library, have a tape of it rattling around in a box somewhere), having Revenge of the Mysterons of Mars back in the hands of the fans is an event worth celebrating.

In historical context this is an important episode for two reasons.  First it's the first appearance of Servo (later dubbed the first name "Tom") on the series.  Josh Weinstein had controlled a puppet named Beeper in the pilot but it's fairly clear a non-verbal character would have been ill-advised for this particular series (Beeper was mentioned in passing in Invaders from the Deep, however I attribute this to reusing the pilot's script for the host segments).  The Beeper puppet was reconstructed into the silver-turned-red Bot we know and love today and he makes his debut here, starting a legacy passed on to Kevin Murphy and Baron Vaughn.  It has always been known that in these early episodes Josh struggled to give the little bot a distinctive voice, and here he's given a not-very-subtle drawl.  His voice is entirely different in the next episode fans have access to, Gamera vs. Barugon, leaving us to wonder if the lost episode of Star Force:  Fugitive Alien II saw a transition of some kind.

The second point of importance is a bit more minor, but is certainly notable:  This is the first episode in which Trace Beaulieu puppeteers Crow T. Robot.  I say this is minor due to Trace doing the puppet work for Crow in the pilot episode, but since that was unaired this is his true debut on the series.  In the previous episode Crow was played by Josh, presumably because the Beeper puppet was scrapped and Trace was unavailable for filming.  And thus Beaulieu's soon brilliant and inimitable run with the Crow character begins as well.

As for the movie segments, I consider this a step down from Invaders from the Deep.  But that's partially because I find the film less imaginative and aesthetically interesting than the previous.  That said I found some good laughs early on when I noticed Joel and Crow in the first theater segment emphasizing physical reactions to the movie.  During the odd back-and-forth, drumbeat transitions Crow juts his head around in confusion, Joel looks around the theater to search for the disembodied voice of the Mysterons, and there's a cute moment where they try to dodge a landing spacecraft that's heading to their position.  This is pretty wonderful stuff for such an early episode.  However their enthusiasm for providing visual gags for the audience subsides when Servo enters the theater, to which they mostly seem content in watching the movie and commenting on select things.  Crow however does ride on reacting to the transition switch every time it occurs, making it perhaps the first running gag of the series.  We also get a mildly amusing gag where Joel fills Servo's head with popcorn because why not?

The first two episodes of Mystery Science Theater aired on Thanksgiving Day, 1988, cementing Thanksgiving as an important holiday for the series.  The show would later commemorate the holiday as "Turkey Day" and hold marathons of the series on Comedy Central, which continue to this day online via Shout Factory.  While Invaders from the Deep's host segments didn't acknowledge the holiday, Revenge of the Mysterons seems aware of the holiday it's airing on and provide us with a Thanksgiving theme for the host segments.  These segments mostly involve Joel trying to explain the holiday the best he can to the Bots, to minor amusement.  These segments usually go on a bit too long and end on a weak gag, such as Servo's self-awareness of segment padding.  There's also a particularly strange segment in which Joel tries to turn a seemingly clueless Gypsy into a canopy centerpiece.  We also have drawing hand turkeys and a final Thanksgiving dinner.

What can I be thankful for at Thanksgiving?  Well at the very least I can be thankful that we have this episode at all.  It was very closed to being locked away in a vault and never being seen by fan eyes again.  It's not particularly memorable, with a riff pace that dwindles by the end, but it's a piece of the show's history that has been re-established.  Maybe it's for completists only, but I definitely am one.

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