K01-Invaders from the Deep

Film Year:  1981 (edited from a 1964 television series)

Genre:  Science Fiction, Adventure

Director:  Desmond Saunders, John Kelly, David Elliott

Starring:  Ray Barrett, Robert Easton, David Graham, Don Mason, Lois Maxwell, Sylvia Anderson

MST Season:  KTMA

The Movie

Probably best known for the children's science fiction television series Thunderbirds from 1965, Gerry Anderson and his wife Sylvia were responsible for many similar shows throughout the 60's, including Supercar, Fireball XL5, and Joe 90, which created high concept sci-fi stories and told them through marionette puppets (called "Supermarionation," for the uninitiated).  The film Invaders of the Deep is edited from four episodes of their 1964 series Stingray, a series about the crew of aquanauts aboard a nuclear-powered submarine called Stingray which fends off the surface world from threats from under the sea.  This particular batch has Captain Troy Tempest and his team rescue an Admiral and his wife from sea dwellers, fending off missiles threatening their base of Marineville, going to the lowest depths of the ocean to destroy a superweapon, and getting captured by undersea people.

I enjoy these Gerry and Sylvia Anderson shows.  They may be made with children in mind, but I've always appreciated works that try to achieve a lot with so little and can even succeed at it.  That's one of the reasons why I love Japanese monster movies, because even without cutting edge CGI the crews of those movies will move hell or high water to create a sort of hyper reality out of costumes, models, and props to create a heightened world for the viewer to visit.  These Supermarionation shows aren't much different.  They take high concept premises and build their entire world by hand, including the main characters that inhabit it.  Even if you can't accept the series as reality, you can accept it as the reality that these characters inhabit.  I love that.

That being said, while these shows are neat, they're also an acquired taste.  Anybody who seeks them out for a laugh thinking they're Team America:  World Police will be disappointed in how stoic they are.  The characters are two-dimensional and self serious.  Captain Troy is generic team leader and Commander Shore is generic hard-as-nails boss, while Phones is a little looser than the others, he's not exactly the levity one might think a show like this needs.  Lady roles are limited to love interests for Troy, including Shore's daughter Atlanta and a mute girl named Marina, who is the more interesting of the two as she's a freed underwater slave woman, making her the exotic girl for the heroes to be infatuated with.  Unfortunately since Marina can't talk, the show has to work extra hard to make her puppet expressive, and they aren't really that successful.

Of the two Supermarionation movies seen on Mystery Science Theater 3000, Invaders from the Deep is the better of the two.  I'm going to attribute this to Stingray being a more aesthetically interesting series than Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.  Whether or not it's the better series, I'm not sure.  Maybe one day I'll watch both these shows and let you guys know.  But Stingray has the cooler models and the more adventurous premise, so for now it wins.  But it's hard to genuinely turn one's nose up at either, especially with what the children's television landscape actually looked like in the 1960's.  If you compare these shows with the popular cartoon shows targeted at the tykes back then, shows like Stingray and Captain Scarlet stand tall and proud.  One could even make the argument that they were some of the better sci-fi adventure programs made up until that point, their competition mainly being Doctor Who or Lost in Space until Star Trek came around.  Because of that, they're something worth remembering and admiring.

The Episode

Guy in Minneapolis in 1988 just channel surfing.  He flicks on a little channel that's showing a little marionette movie and he responds "Hey!  I used to watch Thunderbirds and Supercar all the time!  ...what the fuck are those things at the bottom of the screen?"

Next Week, Same Guy:  "I need a tape!  I NEED A TAPE!  That weird puppet show is on!"

Welcome to Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Who knew what was going to grow out of this dumb thing that was on a public access channel in one specific spot in Minnesota back in 1988.  That legacy continues to this day, having spawned a TV franchise and several spin-off projects, such as Rifftrax, Cinematic Titanic, and The Film Crew.  It all stemmed from that fateful Thanksgiving day.

While the Green Slime "episode" was just a rough idea of what the show was for KTMA executives, Invaders from the Deep is the first proper episode of the series which features a full movie.  There is a lot of uncertainty of what the series is in this episode, but it seems fairly clear that they had dropped the "Joel drops film trivia" idea from the pilot episode and decided to make it more comedy based.  The first theater segment is very light on commentary, save for a few slight sarcastic jabs at the movie (the first riff of the series is Joel just saying "Suuuuuuuuuuure...").  After a while Joel doesn't do much of any commentary and just brings a bag of popcorn into the theater and we listen to him munch on it, while slurping a soda.  I'm inclined to believe this portion is supposed to be humorously meta, but it's kind of charming that the series started with a segment this simple of Joel just watching a movie with popcorn before evolving into an entire comedy act.

The wit picks up once Crow enters the theater, who is interestingly enough not played by Trace Beaulieu, but rather future-Servo puppeteer Josh Weinstein.  While Trace played the role in the Green Slime pilot, apparently for whatever reason he couldn't participate in the very first episode of the series.  Seeing as Josh's puppet from the pilot, Beeper, was being overhauled into Servo, I imagine that they just gave him the Crow puppet and told him to sound as much like Trace as he possibly could.  Since he has an entire episode under his belt, I guess that makes Josh an official Crow (along with Trace, Bill Corbett, and Hampton Yaunt).  He would also reprise the role briefly in a clip used in the KTMA versions of Gamera and Gamera vs. Gaos.

But not to digress too much, banter actually begins once Crow enters the theater, as Josh doesn't seem too intent on leaving too much dead air in their program.  He's more of a chatterbox than Joel, who seems more interested in just watching the movie.  Crow will start conversations with Joel, ask him to sum up parts he missed, and try and get them to bounce jokes off of each other.  There is some pretty wonderful energy on display here, hinting at how great the series would become.  Invaders from the Deep is just a rough draft of it.  Adding into the appeal is that Stingray is a pretty enjoyable series, which makes the movie segments here a winner.

Primarily the host segments just remake segments from the Green Slime pilot, specifically the space virus arc.  They even seem to be using the exact same script, as there is still a reference to the abandoned Beeper puppet in it.  I actually think these segments are a bit funnier in The Green Slime, but I'm glad they transitioned into the regular series.  Other segments are very simple, as Joel demonstrates a few inventions that the later re-did in the first season (the Airbag Motorcycle Helmet and the Electric Bagpipes) and just opens the episode by just reading off a description of the movie.

For many years, Invaders from the Deep was something of a "lost episode," which is unfortunate because being the first episode of this beloved series means it was an important one, even if it wasn't as strong as later entries.  It only aired once, and nobody knew what the show was back then, so nobody had the forethought to tape it for prosperity.  Making it even more painful was knowing there was a tape of the episode somewhere at the offices of Best Brains Inc, but we couldn't have access to it.  At long last, in 2016, Joel gave out copies of the episode to Kickstarter backers who contributed to the Bring Back MST3K campaign, as a token of gratitude.  I am so glad that he did.  This episode may seem quaint by today's standards, but beginnings are as important as endings.  And with a fun movie, a few laughs, and historic value on its side, Invaders from the Deep is an episode that I treasure.

Good