1302-Robot Wars

Film Year:  1993

Genre:  Science Fiction

Director:  Albert Band

Starring:  Don Michael Paul, Barbara Crampton, James Staley, Lisa Rinna

MST Season:  13

Host:  Jonah

The Movie

*I HAVE SURVIVED WATCHING THIS MOVIE UNRIFFED*

In the year 2041, North America has been turned into a barren wasteland by a cataclysmic event.  Warring factions the North Hemi and the Eastern Alliance are in the middle of negotiations for the North Hemi to construct smaller versions of their giant robot vehicles for the Eastern Alliance in hopes of boosting their own economy and building better relations between the two sides.  But the Eastern Alliance representative General Wa-Lee betrays the North Hemi and seizes the opportunity to steal the giant mech MRAS-2.  It's up to hotshot robot pilot Captain Drake, his co-pilot Stumpy, and archeologist Lena Faning to uncover the remains of an older robot, MEGA-1, and stop Wa-Lee from stealing the MRAS-2 and taking a group of hostages with him.

Full Moon features usually have their own distinctive look and feel to them, flavored by their producer Charles Band.  Mystery Science Theater has already seen a couple of Band productions on their show in Laserblast and The Day Time Ended, both of which featured cheap film stock, clumsy acting, and stop motion effects.  Band went full speed ahead on these concepts with the direct-to-video market which was Full Moon's target audience.  I haven't seen a ton of Full Moon features, as I'm mostly familiar with their children's line of Moonbeam from when I was a tyke (which resulted in movies like Prehysteria and Dragonworld).  Though of course, most will know Full Moon from it's long-running horror franchise, Puppet Master, which this film pokes fun at with a theater in 2041 playing the film Puppet Master 54.

I'm sure they snickered to themselves at this absurd joke at the time because there were only three Puppet Master movies at the time while a fourth and a fifth were being filmed back to back.  As of this writing, Puppet Master is preparing to release its fifteenth film (a spin-off of its Doktor Death character), so who's laughing now?

Robot Wars is very much a Full Moon film, looking excessively cheap throughout its runtime with a couple of shots that you can tell they blew their entire budget on.  One thing the Puppet Master movies had going for them, and that first film in particular, it that it knew how to scale back and ration out its money to what it needed and what effects they can afford.  Robot Wars is almost embarrassingly ambitious by comparison.  Hell, the title promises two things:  Robots and wars.  Living up to that is probably more money than Charles Band has ever thrown at a movie.  That being said, the movie is very light on both robots and wars.  Atlantic Rim had more robots and wars than this movie.

Why the fuck am I even here?

Robot Wars is 70 minutes long, and with a runtime like that it should be brisk and action packed.  It's not.  The movie's first act takes 45 minutes to play out, and it plays it as if the film is two hours long.  After that, the movie just kind of mushes its second and third acts into some sort of payoff pudding for the final half-hour.  When we do finally get to see some robot action, the sequence is about four minutes long, featuring some awesome stop motion animation and some silly model bumping edited in.

The film doesn't really have much of a human plot.  The lead is played by future Tremors 5, 6, and 7 director Don Michael Paul who is pretty much playing Big McLargeHuge from Space Mutiny if he were a bit unhinged like Gary Busey.  Cult icon (and woman who got her head blown up in Chopping Mall) Barbara Crampton plays his love interest, though the screenplay seems to be written by someone who had seen one too many episodes of Moonlighting and felt the only way to express sexual tension is for the two leads to get increasingly irritated at each other.  The romantic angle is two-dimensional and even a little bit creepy in how Paul treats Crampton's character, but I think the filmmakers knew more men would be renting this movie than women so they didn't worry about her coming off as a sexual reward for his character.  Just as offensive are the films take on Asian villains.  The stereotype stretching is one thing, though the movie crosses a line when they communicate in a language that is Asian-influenced but obviously off-the-cuff gibberish.

How are the robots?  If I'm being honest...they're really fucking cool.  That's what's painful about this movie, it looks like shit for most of the time then it tosses in some cool designs and becomes fun briefly to tease you before becoming flat again.  MRAS-2 has a badass scorpion influenced design while MEGA-1 is a charming and huggable rock-em-sock-em.  The movie springs to life when they're onscreen, but it's always refraining from using them and thrusting us into cheap sets and stock locations on backlots, which makes Robot Wars a bit of a pain in the ass.

The Episode

Welcome back to another episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000!  One might initially think four weeks is too long to wait for another episode, but hey it's shorter than the three years we waited for the last one!

Today we're settling down with a nice viewing of Robot Wars, a movie that does remind one of the good ol' selection we used to face on the Sci-Fi Channel, though it's a fairly uneven flick that isn't quite bolstered by its commentary.  Robot Wars is an episode that mostly passes inspection for simulating the vibe of a good MST3K episode, even if it doesn't quite achieve a frequency of its own.  It's a movie that feels like it should work but the comedy doesn't feel all that inspired by it.  Jabs are present and can make for a laugh or two, and I did quite enjoy barbs like answering the question of "What would John Wayne do?" with "Say something racist." ("Remember the Alamo!"  "Yep, like that!")  I feel like the episode tends to tread water a lot though, as it struggles to find a correct joke so it just tosses one out to fill dead air.  When MEGA-1 is introduced in the climax of the episode, the best Jonah can do is pretend it's Alpha 5 from Power Rangers and recite Zordon's opening lines at it, but the robot doesn't really look all that much like Alpha 5 so the line falls flat (EDIT:  I'm realizing in retrospect that he might be comparing the MEGA-1 to the Megazord, but even if that were the case that specific "teenagers with attitude" line doesn't fit the scene).  There are also a few token references to previous episodes, such as a Space Mutiny "BLAST HARDCHEESE!" name drop (to be fair, I knew this had to be in the cards considering how similar our hero is to Dave Ryder), and early on there are a few odd recycled riffs from This Island Earth that I don't think quite landed.  Robot Wars is full of scattered odds and ends like this, which feel present for the sake of being present.

I can't be negative about the experience as a whole because of the doofus amusement that a film like Robot Wars provides by its lonesome and when Jonah and the Bots hit, they do score a hit.  I got some quality laughs from the observation that Don Michael Paul is obviously all in on the simulation of being in a robot brawling with another robot by bobbing up and down conveying turbulence, meanwhile passenger Barbara Crampton is just sitting stationary (and now I can't unsee it).  Even earlier is a dig at Crampton's sleuthing preparation, to which she says she's been working on her investigation for weeks and Crow chimes in that she has "Two whole pictures and some dirt!"  It's easy to stay in love what Mystery Science Theater has to offer us, even if the whole isn't the sum of its parts.

One noteworthy aspect of the riffing for this episode is that Robot Wars brings back riffing during the end credits of the movie, which is something lost during the Netflix seasons that I was fully in support of bringing back.  To an extent it feels like the folks making the show don't understand why fans wanted this, as a lot of Robot Wars's credits is filled with just reading names and making jokes off of them paired with awkward silence, so there is an aura of "Are you sure this is what you want?"  The answer to that question is yes, though I'd always advocate filling that time in more creative ways, like Mike's forced perspective presentation in Future War, the Final Sacrifice TV series pitch, or "TUSK" in Werewolf.  At any rate, it's a nice wind-down from the movie and it does help set up Servo and Crow having their own "Robot War" in the following host segment.

Now that we bring up those host segments, Robot Wars is mostly full of costume skits inspired by the film, as a lot of them are excuses to put Jonah and his little companions in funny little outfits and play oddball characters.  This is very much the show embracing a variety show format, as one saw them doing this quite a bit in the previous episode too.  The closing Robot War between Servo and Crow is a treat, while I also enjoyed the bit where the trio were playing "flight attendants" on MRAS-2.  By contrast, the whole 90's vibe sales pitch is just okay, while I wasn't too into the segment devoted to comedic stooge Stumpy from the film, but there was a cameo by Kinga and Max during it that slayed me.  On the subject of Kinga and Max, there are adjustments to the coloring of their Moon 1 backdrop that adds more violet to it so that the duo looks less disconnected to their surrounding and it's much easier on the eyes (I'm assuming that this is going to be added to the previous episode for the final version).  Their segments are highlighted by a cold open where Baron Vaughn graduates from Bot voicing to live character portrayal like other Bot handling predecessors and portrays a character named Dr. Kabahl, the Mysterious Financier from the Future, who is the one bankrolling the Gizmoplex for Kinga.  Baron's really fun in the role, and it's stated in the livestream that we'll see more of him and I'm excited for that.  The segment sets up some new remodeling for the Gizmoplex and the Satellite of Love, and Cabal states that the experiment should have more than one test subject.  As Kinga and Max fret about this, they send for a Gizmonic technician who just happens to be... 

Pre-Release Version:

Premiere Version:

So probably the big talk of this episode will be that it's the debut of Emily Marsh as the new MST co-host Emily Connor (at least in the show proper, as Emily has been built up through Live Shows, Turkey Days, and livestreams since 2019).  Not a whole lot is known about her at this point except that she's presented like an upselling mechanic during her one scene, where she talks Synthia's ear off during the shuttle ride to the moon.  There is a hint of things to come as Kinga says to Max "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" which has echoes of Dr. Forrester's ominous "Say Mike, what size jumpsuit do you wear?" at the end of Mitchell.  Where things go from here is a bit left in the dark.  That final line might indicate that Beyond Atlantis could be Emily's first episode, but I think it's more likely we won't see her riff until Munchie as the next episode builds up her being hijacked by Kinga a bit more (Editor's Note:  I was wrong).  It's titillating to see new blood this close to being unleashed on the series and I have high hopes for the character and her Bot team of Conor McGiffin and Nate Begle. (Editor's Note:  Nate Begle actually left this project very quietly and I along with many other fans were surprised to find he was overdubbed by Kelsey Ann Brady in the Beyond Atlantis and future episodes.)

I do ask myself whether or not I'm over-scrutinizing at times.  In the case of the previous episode, I thought it was half a good episode and half an okay one, so I rounded down to keep myself restrained from being a gushing fanboy.  Robot Wars I feel is a bit more inconsistent, though bright spots that shine in the rough patches, so by comparison to the grading curve I started with the premiere, this season is off to a fairly middling start.  Is this too harsh?  I dunno.  One thing that needs to be noted is that I don't do this.  Not "talk about MST3K," I do that all the time (some might wish I talk about it less).  When I started writing these, this blog was about episodes I had seen many times over and already had established opinions of.  I even took time with the Netflix seasons to resonate with me before I wrote about those episodes, especially since I was still in the middle of creating entries for the classic series.  I'm done with that and I have no excuse to not cover these as they come out except that I'm lazy.  Forming a full opinion of an episode overnight is something I haven't really done for this blog, only precedented by off-the-cuff RiffTrax and Mads reviews.  But with MST I've always been a bit more careful and guided by things I already think.  Bearing that in mind, episodes like Robot Wars might grow on me over time, we'll have to wait and see.  Until then I'm inclined to say it's toward the middle of the pack.

Average

The Backer Livestream

This livestream was a bit different than the previous ones.  Just about all the extra content in it was pre-recorded, as opposed to the live presentations they gave us for Santo in The Treasure of Dracula or the Tribute to Manos.  I imagine a lot of this has to do with production deadlines and it might also have been easier to work with already filmed material than doing everything in the moment.  The entire stream isn't exactly smooth sailing, as there are less tech issues but it has less of a flow to it than previous ones.  For example, this stream has two intros:  one with Joel Hodgson through a webcam and one with writers Matt McGinnis and Gabe Castro on set with some (intentionally?) cringe rehearsed material.  Concluding the stream is a roundtable discussion with Joel, Matt, Ivan Askwith, and Leslie Kinzel, which feels more like a shareholder meeting than a fun sitdown.

It's not a non-worthwhile experience, as they get a bit creatively playful with some fun winks to the last live show.  They pretend the stream breaks during the opening theme song as the video just freezes and we see the all-powerful White Dot.  However, this stream went live on April 1st so we get the message of APRIL FOOLS soon after.  What a glorious cameo!  And the roundtable discussion does hit home a lot of points that people might have questions about, such as what the Gizmoplex has to offer the series and what might shape a potential season 14.

One apt comparison that I don't think they hit on is that the show is sold through the Gizmoplex similarly to the way RiffTrax offers their video-on-demand content as pay-per-selection options (this is outside the relatively new RiffTrax Friends subscription model), which might be the most simplistic way to describe how MST content is being housed on the website.  The live events take things a step further than that with offering sort of "group gab" sessions with the fans to work the crowd and create community experiences.  A lot about what they talk about is sort of a long road to conclusions that I've found pretty easy to read, though I found some of the insight about struggles finding a home for the show on network and streaming fairly interesting as it gives more context for why MST didn't quite land on its feet during the streaming era like it should have.

Whether the Gizmoplex is a sustainable model for the series is up in the air, though I think it's a healthy environment for it to develop its personality.  Joel admits there is a possibility that this could be the last season for the show.  I hope it isn't, as I'm invested in seeing it evolve further, especially in a realm outside of corporate influence.  Our indie puppet show is taking its "indie" cred back.

Ultimately what's lacking from this stream is discussion of the episode itself.  They do briefly address it by praising Baron's new role as Dr. Kabahl (which they damn well should, because he's great) but they really don't go further than that other than a cute pun during the intro asking how it compares to the old television robot fighting competition series BattleBots (because there was a competing show that was also called Robot Wars, you see).  Not much is talked about here, nor is there any discussion of Emily's debut on the show, which is a sad oversight even if her role is brief.

And if I were to bring up one last note of disappointment, the livestream that was supposed to happen on April 15th was postponed to May 12th, which means our next stream will be the Beyond Atlantis premiere in four weeks.  Bummer.  But we'll get three straight weeks of live content, so we have that to look forward to.

This whole event is like having your teacher sit down in a backwards chair and trying to talk to you on your level about things that aren't really that hard to deduce.  There are tidbits worth picking up from it, and Leslie is a glowing gem in the conversation as she really approaches the scenario as a fan of the series.  Joel even relates an amusing situation where a woman on Facebook told him he should just "Give up." (I think I know about the person he's talking about, though I won't make assumptions so I'll say no more).  They all laugh it off, as they should.  Giving up would bring no rewards, and even if the series were to die here, the reward then becomes giving it your best shot and standing on your own two feet when it's over.

You aren't breaking us, Apollo.  We're the Italian Stallion.

The Premiere Livestream

The participants of the Gizmoplex grand opening livestream are dropping like flies this time around.  It all starts ominously as the feed breaks and the episode started about twenty minutes late, with less White Dot than the original Santo stream.  Things continue to fritz out as Matt McGinnis tries to introduce writer Matt Oswalt, brother of Patton, to help introduce the festivities, but Matt O. can't get his sound to work.  As the non-TV's-Son-of-TV's-Frank Oswalt brother bows out to try and fix it (spoiler alert:  He is absent for almost the entire stream), Matt McG. introduces us to the rest of our guests tonight:  Jonah Ray, Joel Hodgson (who both have dropped feeds at different points, joining Matt O. in limbo), and special guest Robot Wars star Barbara Crampton!  Barbara is actually a guest that Matt Oswalt is friends with and helped book for this special event, but unfortunately Barbara flies without Matt for the majority of the stream.  But she seems to be happy to talking about a movie that isn't Chopping Mall.  Though Jonah and Matt McG. are both huge fans of Chopping Mall.

I'll be honest, I don't trust people who don't love Chopping Mall, so Jonah and Matt are now in my circle of trust.

As always, I have nothing but love for Barbara.  She's a fun presence, and she knows she has some bad movies under her belt.  Robot Wars is one she seems to have mostly gone on with her life without having thought twice about, and she says watching it through Mystery Science Theater was the first time she's seen it in ages.  She does remember a bit about making it, relating just how hard Charles Band pitched the movie to her and how much the film itself doesn't live up to that.  She also talks about how she was able to bring one of her friends on to play her galpal in the film, which was how Lisa Rinna was cast, and lets the secret slip that Lisa and lead Don Michael Paul had a fling while filming the movie.  Jonah asks for some "hot goss" on who Stumpy hooked up with, to which Barbara is nearly speechless.  She's stumped on Stumpy.  There are a few production questions Joel has for her, such as how long the shoots were and whether the movie was direct to video (Full Moon was mostly a direct to video label, so her confirming Robot Wars was a DTV movie is not really a surprise).  A lot of this sparks Barbara reminiscing about doing work for Charles Band under Empire Pictures with films like Re-Animator and how it evolved into Full Moon with Puppet Master.

They ask her about movies that she has done that might be good for the show, and she hypes up a vampire movie called The Sisterhood which she thinks would be great for the series because "It has a lot of sex in it," until they remind her that this is a family show (that didn't stop us from seeing Mitchell's baby oil, let me tell you).  Barbara then brings up a TV movie called Lightning:  Fire from the Sky, which was actually directed by Time Chasers director David Giancola.  The discussion then turns to Giancola for a bit as Barbara tries to remember a movie that he made with "a pin-up girl who died early," which turned out to be Anna Nicole Smith.  She eventually settles on a movie called Addicted to Fame, which may or may not be the movie she's thinking of but but is actually a documentary made by Giancola after Anna Nicole had passed away on the making of her final film Illegal Aliens, which he also directed.  Finally Barbara's husband suggests Cold Harvest, which they don't really discuss at all.  (Someone on the Mystery Discourse forum suggested Space Truckers, which I haven't seen in decades but from memory would probably suit the show well).

Matt Oswalt finally gets a moment where he can get at least some audio in.  It's enough for him to ask Barbara if she can do a "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" with her career, to which Barbara is a bit perplexed on, though she does relate a story about how she saw Kevin Bacon at a restaurant one time, which ends with her dropping the F-bomb on this stream targeting families.  Oops!  But the deed is done, and everyone takes it in stride.  We just need to remind her that she's not on Shudder talking about Castle Freak with Joe Bob Briggs anymore.  Matt's feed gets garbled soon after that and is kicked out of the discussion for the rest of the stream.

One minor note, the crew seems to have come up with a method for delivering names of backers intermittently throughout the stream rather than all at once.  I guess Joel had a talk with them about spending ten minutes at the end of the last stream doing it, since he seemed really taken aback by it.  Barbara even gets to list a few names (those lucky people!) and there Jonah sounds off the name Tiffany Fricke, who is a MSTie that I know from Twitter and is one of the nicest fans you'll ever meet.  If you're on that app, give her a follow.  She's a sweetheart.

Some minor nitpicks about this stream, the episode itself is given very little discussion, notably the appearances of Dr. Kabahl and Emily are not discussed.  The spotlight is squarely on Barbara and her recalling the production of this movie, which is not a raw deal as special guests with insights to the film itself are always a treat, like Frank Deitz (who is namedropped in this stream) and Jackie Neyman Jones.  It's a bit unfortunate since the previous livestream burned itself on a sitdown with less patient fans, though it did touch briefly on Baron's new role.  That being said, this stream was a lot better than the backer stream and it was infinitely more fun.  I hope they get to do more interviews with cast and crew from these films.  I imagine that Demon Squad director/co-writer Thomas Smith and co-writer/star Erin Lilley Smith would definitely be game for this and Christmas Dragon co-writer Shylah Addante has shown enthusiasm for the show featuring the film and interest in talking about her experience on the movie as well.  And sex-be-damned, let's get Sisterhood on this show and ask Barbara Crampton back.  She's a treat for every stream she's on.