"Bicycling Visual Skills" & A Tribute to Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (MST3K Special)

The Short

Get ready for the short that Pearl calls "so boring it feels like a feature" but thrills enough for Emily to call it "The Fast and the Furious:  Toledo Drift."  Bicycling Visual Skills is a bicycle safety short designed for kids to learn the rules of the road so they don't wind up roadkill.  Some kids listen better than others.  Whoops!

It's a short that rushes through the rules while trying to also be lively enough that children won't be bored (good luck with that).  The problem that my ADD brain has is that it's easy to just glaze itself and the world just becomes fuzzy until its over, and by then I barely remember I watched anything.  I don't learn anything from something like this because information comes at me too fast with imagery that doesn't sink in.  Occasionally I'll snap out of my trance and collect a tidbit or two.  Whether it's useful is something I can't say at the time, but at least something stuck.

That's the impression I get when I watch this short, and all I remember is a whirlwind of color.  That goes for the riffing as well, unfortunately.  Here's the deal, originally I didn't review the last collection of Season 13 shorts and Gizmoplex events because my schedule didn't allow it (more on that below), with the intent of covering them in January.  But things weren't so cut-and-dry for me because everytime I sat down to do these entries, I was presented with this short.  Every single time it ends, I feel blank and it takes me a moment to recover, and I can't really write anything about it because I don't remember it.  After a while I just forgot that I never typed up entries for the rest of these shorts despite having event write-ups finished for a while now, when I suddenly decided "Oh snap, I need to get that done!"

It took me a while to realize just what was happening, but maybe it's bullshit to blame the short itself for this, but here I am trying to review it and I'm just typing this word salad instead.  I don't want to talk about it because I don't know what to say about it.

What I do remember is that the short is pretty funny.  I mostly remember quips at the beginning, such as Toledo Drift and using the Konami Code to unlock bicycle safety.  From there my brain hits cruise control, and while I recall being more amused than not, I just sit there coasting during it.  I'm not going to blame Emily and her crew, because they seem to be rising to the occasion.  This one's on me.

Thumbs Up

👍

The Livestream

Twas the special Holiday week of the Gizmoplex, and I was stuck at overtime at work.  Chances were low that I was ever going to attend these events, because they coincided with my normal work nights anyway and asking for an entire week off to watch old Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes was out of the question.  I'm glad the holiday tributes happened, because it seemed like a fun ride for some Yule Tide luls.  Apparently, I missed a full two-hour Gizmoplex crash, though, of which our stream hasn't seen the likes of since Demon Squad.  I did catch wind that they were directing people toward Trace and Frank's Mads stream that night while they fixed the issue, which was nice of them.

Following a hilarious Holiday-themed Jackbox Showdown on Monday, we spend the rest of the week watching our favorite show's Holiday specials leading up to the debut of The Christmas Dragon!  What a glorious Christmas present to all of us!  First up is, of course, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (review here), which is here to deliver a Patrick Swayze Christmas to one and all.  We also have a generous portion of new segments featuring Emily and her Bots accompanying it, which decides to take a bit of a dig at the movie Mean Girls, having the Bots get sassy about the movie's boxy bot, which makes Emily uncomfortable.  She also points out that this is the first movie to portray Mrs. Claus in cinema ("Score one for feminism!").

The aftershow is something a little different.  Earlier in December they had some live shows performed at the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, famous for a classic sequence in the 1958 monster movie The Blob, starring Steve McQueen.  They did a night of comedy there as well as debuted The Christmas Dragon in front of an audience, with a Q&A afterward.  The Gizmoplex offers us a peek at these events, broken up into segments and offered them as deserts to our tribute events.  And personally, I found them to be an absolute delight.

Our first offering is what Matt McGinnis calls "Memories Roasting on an Open Fire," an MST3K Yule Log of sorts.  This is a showcase of castmember family photos of Christmases past shown off to the audience where the cast is invited to riff on, roast, and heckle.  Only a few of the cast seemed to have participated, as we only see photos of Conor McGiffin, Emily Marsh, Kelsey Ann Brady, and Tim Ryder, but we have a pretty loaded batch of riffers, which include Emily, Kelsey, and Tim (Conor is absent), as well as Jonah Ray, Baron Vaughn, Yvonne Freese, and Rebecca Hanson.  The photos are suitably adorable and awkward and the jokes are high rate and very funny (I assume they edited out a bunch of duds for this experience).  Tim Ryder gets the largest amount of hazing, which he probably deserves for that loser of a blackface riff he did earlier in the evening.  Emily gets some of the most inspired content, as her photos seem to have the most to play with.  Then there is poor Kelsey, who gets mistaken for both Emily and Tim (somehow) at different points in the presentation.  But she does have that fun, giant dress photo, which is my personal favorite.  She is also the subject of my favorite riff, where she wears a "bell" costume in a school play and it's remarked "When Kelsey heard she was playing 'Belle,' this isn't what she had in mind."

Fun stuff.  Let's see what the third day of Christmas brings us!

To Be Continued....