Gizmonic Institute Radio: Your MST3K Companion

I don’t know a lot about science, let alone mad science, but I’m pretty sure doing an “exchange program” with your test subjects isn’t par for the course. But in the domain of Dr. Odd “par for the course” is usually about as far from normal as you can get, so I suppose that this shouldn’t have been unexpected. Dr. Odd and Dr. Rodd have decided to do a test-subject switcheroo, meaning that Seth was sent away to be subject to whatever horrors Dr. Rodd has in store, and Dr. Rodd’s captive Renea was sent over to the land of MST3K and clam juice.

After a brief acclimation period, we watch MST3K S4E3 – City Limits a film which seems to have inspired most, if not all of the outfits in the Fallout video game series. It’s a pretty bad movie, but a overall pretty decent MST3K episode.

Oh no! This week your favorite MST3K podcast hosts are really ‘boned! (that joke will make sense once you’ve listened to the episode, trust me). Dr. Odd unleashes his newest hobby on us, and we get to watch S11E1 – Reptilicus, the first of the FOURTEEN NEW EPISODES OF MST3K THAT CAME OUT THIS YEAR AND I CAN’T EVEN BELIEVE THAT THIS IS A SENTENCE I GET TO WRITE. Seth and Jeff have slightly differing opinions on certain aspects of the new episode, but overall really love it.

I’m not going to lie, things get a little weird this week. Dr. Odd has started some sort of farm in his Chuck E. Cheese basement, but also there might be a gas leak? One thing’s for sure, there are a lot of puns!

We also discuss MST3K S4E2 – The Giant Gila Monster. It’s a movie where people throw a real lizard at models, and features some original “music”, or as I like to call it, “crimes against a ukulele”. Luckily, the film itself is so manic, that the riffing is fantastic, making it a preeeeety great MST3K episode.

We’re excited to dig into the first episode of MST3K season 4, and Dr. Odd is excited about managing a baseball team! A werewolf butler baseball team! But not as excited as he is to tell us about his “roller derby” experiences. Who knew Dr. Odd was so athletic? Certainly not us!

This episode we discuss MST3K Season 4 Episode 1 Space Travelers, which may be the most star studded film they’ve had on the show yet! It’s also one of the most boring and dour films they’ve had on the show to date, despite the fact that it actually won an Academy Award (which we also have serious issue with, but not for the reasons you might think).

Hello everybody! You know, sometimes when life gives you lemons, you challenge yourself by shoving an entire lemon in your mouth and trying to eat it. That old adage has never been more true, especially for us this episode.  We also discuss the final episode of season 3, S3E24 – Master Ninja II, which is really just two episodes of a TV show standing on each others’ shoulders while wearing a trench coat and trying to convince everyone that they’re a real movie. It does have a hamster in it though (the film, not the trench coat)!

Hello friends! It’s nice to see you again! Things are still totally normal up here in space, and this week Dr. Odd let us watch a recording of the world series and showed us his newest hobby! An old friend returns for some goofs as well!

We also discussed MST3K S3E23 – The Castle Of Fu Manchu – the film equivalent of spending an entire day staring at grains of sand being blown around in the wind, except there isn’t any wind and at the end of the day you find out the grains of sand actually had character names. This movie is pure Deep Hurting, and is so bad that it actually negatively affects the episode enjoyment quite a bit. That’s a huge shame because the host segments are actually some of the best in the series so far (particularly the final segment), but even that can’t save things as a whole. We still had a lot of fun talking about it though!

Hello everyone! I hope that you’re enjoying the summertime down on earth, running around and capturing defunct mid-2000’s celebrities on your flip phone app. Or maybe that’s just Dr. Odd.

This episode we discuss MST3K S3E22 – Master Ninja I, a MST3K episode that we didn’t really like that much, riffing a movie that we kind of did like… This paradox has left us shaken to our collective cores – we’ll be over here sitting in the corner, rocking back and forth with our knees clutched to our chests mumbling about racist stereotype accents.

Hello and happy holidays! (whatever holidays those may be).

Dr. Odd has mysteriously disappeared, leaving us completely unsupervised up here in space. Since this was the case, we threw a dart at our space calendar and decided that by our calculations (and we’re both very good at regular math and calendar related math) it was probably prettttty close to the Christmastime holidays down on earth, which is great because our audiolog is about MST3K S3E21 – Santa Claus Conquers the Martians! This episode is truly a treat – the movie itself is poorly made and has the world’s most obnoxious theme song, but it has a lot of heart and is genuinely enjoyable in spots. The riffing from Joel and the bots is SPOT ON this episode. These two factors combine to make this a classic episode – great for watching over and over again, or for introducing someone new to the joys of MST3K.

Hello everyone! Don’t be scared! That isn’t a living jack-o-lantern filled with fake blood grinning at you! That’s just Dr. Odd with a mouthful of cough drops. A LOT of cough drops. On second thought, maybe you should be scared.

This week we discuss MST3K S3E20 – The Unearthly, a slow-moving garbage barge of a movie that even MST3K riffing failed to salvage. Luckily, this episode is balanced out with a couple of delightful shorts – “Posture Pals” and “Appreciating Our Parents”. These shorts were able to pull this episode back from the void of extreme boredom. Man, is The Unearthly bad. I don’t think we can stress that enough.

I want to start off by saying that it isn’t our fault we ALLEGEDLY might be sky criminals. Unintentional sky criminals. Sorry about the headaches.

This month we watches MST3K S3E19 – War of the Colossal Beast, an unnecessary sequel to a movie that probably didn’t need to be made in the first place. Seth kind of liked some of the makeup? Luckily this episode also featured the phenominal short – Mr. B Natural, which kind of redeems the whole thing. It’s about a demon woman who uses her dark powers to convince middle schoolers to join the band and buy CONN brand musical instruments. It’s… it’s really unique.