Poor Boris Karloff. This year his birthday would’ve fallen on Thanksgiving. Though, I suppose if you were to dig him up and put some bolts through his neck and shoot a few kajillion volts through him and bring him back to life, that overlap might be low on his list of concerns. Even if you didn’t do that, I suppose it still wouldn’t bother him too much right now. It is a concern for me, since I don’t want to shoehorn the celebrations into the Thanksgiving marathon, so I consulted the appropriate legislation (H.R. 5768X, Standard for Celebration of Boris Karloff’s Birthday) and saw that in such cases, it should be celebrated on the following Monday. So, come on by Inventing Situations Monday November 27th at 7 PM eastern, and join us for The Ape and The Terror.
Our more attentive readers might ask why it is I feel these little mockfests are appropriate ways to celebrate artistes’ birthdays while I didn’t feel one was the right way to mark Sid Davis’ death. Good question. I could give you a load of philosophical nonsense here, but the short answer is “because I do”.

Introducing our third (of five) “new” movies this year for Turkey Week: Hercules Unchained, as featured in mst3k episode 408. A few factoids on the film:

• This was the first of four Hercules movies featured on mst.
• This was the second of Steve Reeves‘ two turns as Herc.
• This is the last of the four to premiere on Inventing Situations. Hercules Against The Moon Men [410] and Hercules And The Captive Women [412] have been with us since the start of our turkey marathons and Hercules [502] premiered last year.

I had to remove the copy of Sylva Koscina singing “Evening Star” (the love theme from Hercules Unchained) to make room for the turkey week pictures, sorry. I left it as anexercise for the reader to create their own mash-up with this, The 5th Dimension’s (Last Night) I Didn’t Get To Sleep at All, and Gypsy’s mash-up of the two.

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Sid Davis, the man responsible for many of the great films in the social guidance genre, passed away last month. Giving his films a special showing here just so we can mock them seems sort of the wrong way to show our respects, but certainly his contributions here make his passing worth noting.

Some of Mr. Davis’ IS staples include:

• Alchohol is Dynamite
• Dangerous Stranger
• Keep off the Grass
• Skateboard Sense
• The Terrible Truth

Now that we’re done with all those campaign ads, here’s a little something I whipped up to promote the upcoming Thanksgiving festivities at IS:

Direct link to the video.

As the eagle eyed mstie will no doubt notice, all but one of these bits were also used as stingers, which sort of explains why the flow from clip to clip is not always as good as it could be. I leave it as an excercise for the viewer to identify what films these come from, which one wasn’t a stinger, which one is edited differently than the stinger version (this is simply how it appeared on the copy of the film I had), and what movie I lifted the audio from.

Please feel free to share this vid with any msties you want to turn onto capping.

[Edit 11/17: Links!]

I don’t think anything says Thanksgiving quite like confessing to the murder of fat barkeeps. That’s why we’re adding Paul “Boris Badenov” Frees‘ 1959 classic The Beatniks to our annual Turkey Week marathon this year. Well, that and the fact that it was featured in episode 415 of Mystery Science Theater 3000. This film demonstrates why Frees is remembered as one of the great voiceover artists and not as one of the great writer/directors. Actually, it only demonstrates the latter, though to be fair, it’s almost sort of a good movie, by mst standards.

The episode itself features both one of my favorite host segments (”You’re probably not a Beatnik”) and riffs (”Dish of Ice Cream? Don’t tempt me!”). The film features no Beatniks what so ever.

Running Tuesday the 21st, 12:47 PM, Thursday the 23rd 8:40 PM, and Saturday the 25th 10:40 PM.

(Update - 11/11/6: As promised, the mp3 is gone.
Update - 11/19/6: As promised, the replacement mp3 is also gone).
Some more links: youtube videos of the song and the stinger, and the whole movie at archive.org.