902-The Phantom Planet

Film Year:  1961
Genre:  Science Fiction
Director:  William Marshall
Starring:  Richard Kiel, Dean Fredericks, Coleen Grey, Francis X. Bushman
MST Season:  9

The Movie

Slight echos of Fire Maidens of Outer Space and The Mole People can be felt in the premise of The Phantom Planet, so there's not a lot in this movie we haven't already seen before.  Except for an Incredible Shrinking Man twist!  An astronaut finds himself stranded on an asteroid and shrinks down to less than a foot tall.  There he finds a colony of tiny people and taken prisoner...where he is sentenced to be free and stay there forever...because logic.  While there he gets into a romance with the native girls, because everyone wants the almighty Caucasian stranger in these movies, and intervenes with a war with an alien race called the Solarites.

Phantom Planet is also cheap in many ways we're familiar with.  There is plenty of stiff model work, clumsy compositing shots, and of course silly looking alien costumes on display.  It's a genre film made like it was trying to get quick dollars from kids who like rocketship movies, though the film's talky nature suggests that it might have initially targeted at an older audience.  But while there are some fine premises featured in The Phantom Planet, it feels like at some point it got dumbed down and its budget slashed.

As is the film is perfectly watchable.  It probably never would have been a classic, but the film services some minor entertainment beats for people who love movies like this.  It is more likely to appeal to the camp demographic of that audience however, as it showcases limited effects work, some goofy designs, and a gladiator match that involves pushing a metal rod from one side of the room to the other.  I dig it for the most part, though its pacing sometimes makes it something of a mood watch.

If you need more of an indication of what you're watching, there's a bombastic narrator in this film who claims this story is "Only the beginning..." and then the film ends with the words "The Beginning" instead of "The End."  The beginning of what, I'm not sure, since the movie's story pretty much had a definitive ending, but that's the kind of corny nonsense you should expect from this movie.

The Episode

"Wow, there's so much gravity out in space!"

The Phantom Planet's pacing and dry tone are a bit of a hurdle when it comes to riffing this film, but when I come out the other end of this experiment I find myself immensely entertained.  The laughter comes early with 60's sci-fi movie logic trying to blindly guess what space travel is like, and the quips are pretty quality.  From there on the film introduces a new concept in a small world, causing the transition of a shrinking leading man leading to more inspiration from our comedians ('Oh...why did THAT have to shrink twice as much as the rest of me?").  The film threatens to go on a bit long as it belabors itself, causing things to feel slightly stale at times, but there's usually something new around each corner to excite our riffers.  The metal rod death match is hilarious, the love triangle gets good laughs, and when we get Richard Kiel lumbering around in a ridiculous alien costume looking like a giant biped bulldog all bets are off and the puppy dog running gags are in full force.

"All dogs GO TO HELL!"

The host segments are a bit slighter, mostly concentrating on Pearl, Observer, and Bobo moving into Castle Forrester.  We see Pearl opening her World Domination Starter Kit only to find pieces of her doomsday machine missing, a supposed haunting (AKA Bobo), and an angry mob of villagers welcoming them to the neighborhood.  On the Satellite of Love, Mike and the Bots get into a pretty hilarious Andy Rooney impression contest (and I think Servo won), Servo ponders "The Good and the Beautiful," Mike floats off into space due to Crow's neglect, and Mike also shows off his water glass music skills.

I'm not sure if The Phantom Planet makes very many top ten lists, if it does I'm not surprised.  It's a quality episode that I laugh a lot during.  Sometimes I can feel the movie anchoring the episode down though, which holds me back a bit from loving it too much.  Still it's one to pop in if your looking for solid laughs and an old fashioned, cheap movie.

Good

The DVD

Rhino released The Phantom Planet on their Volume 8 collection, with good audio and video but also without special features.  The episode was later re-released by Shout Factory on their re-release of the set.  It featured a trailer for the film as a bonus feature.