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.

November’s not even 24 hours old, so it’s time for me to start plugging our annual Thanksgiving marathon of films that were featured on mst3k. The first new to IS film for the year is Bloodlust! (1961), as featured in episode 607. It’s a heartfelt story of a fellow who likes to hunt - people. Since the people he hunts are mostly killers and Robert Reed, he could be a remotely sympathetic character, except for the fact that he’s thoroughly unsporting and not that great of a hunter. In addition to showing up on our schedule for the week of Thanksgiving, selected pictures are already available for riffing over at Wasting Precious Time, along with a random selection of grabs from films from the early seasons.

Random factoids:

• In the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, Mary Jo notes that they agreed to limit themselves to one Brady Bunch joke for Robert Reed. I’m sure the cappers will exercise the same restraint. Just remember, the only funny thing about the Brady Bunch is that anybody over the age of ten ever watched it. And even that’s more ’sad funny’ than ‘ha-ha funny.’
• This movie might feature one of the most sincere readings of the phrase “so long, suckers” in film history.
• Since we’ve already got Uncle Jim’s Dairy Farm this makes nine episodes we’ve got the short and the feature for.
• The jacket of the dollar bin DVD I picked up of this film lists Mike Nelson and Tom Servo in the cast. I can almost imagine getting Mike Nelson on there from some weird cut and paste, but I have to think their was a mstie having fun to get Tom on there.
• Rewatching this episode, it was nice to recall a simpler time when the notion of “Scooby Doo: The Movie” was still just an absurdist notion and the character of Pearl Forrester was still well motivated and remotely funny.

Running at Wednesday the 22nd, 1:05 PM and Friday the 24th, 7:35 PM.

The movie catalog & request system has finally reached a useful beta test. You can now schedule a showing of any of the 420* features films, cartoons, tv shows, ephemeral shorts, surveillance videos, and movie serials that make up IS Playhouse and our Turkey Day festivities. Plus, you can rate the grabs you most (and least) enjoy capping. Best of all, while I’m still working the bugs out, requests are FREE. Each capper can make at least one request, and depending on the total volume of requests, maybe more. Once I’m satisfied everything’s working ok, I’ll start requesting a small fee via PayPal for the service. (The payment button is live, but the price is set to zero. If you want to test it out by sending me money, I won’t stop you, but your movie will still play.) This is in beta mode now, so please report and tolerate any bugs you encounter and let me know what I can do to make it better.

I know some of you won’t/don’t/can’t use PayPal and that there are good reasons for me to think twice about using it. If this thing takes off, I will probably add more payment methods. But for now, I estimate that they are popular enough that a total failure of this scheme will not be because of my choice of payment systems. If anybody wants to suggest alternative methods that are as simple and comparably priced for a small operation like this, please do.

* Coincidence, really. I don’t do that stuff.

Well actually it’s on the night before Halloween, since I’m sure on the night of you’ll all be busy stealing cand….I mean taking neighborhood orphans trick or treating. Cut to the chase, Monday the 30th at 8PM, a double bill of Horror Hotel starring Christopher Lee and Night of the Living Dead on Inventing Situations.

I just added over a hundred sample images to the movie catalog. There are a few other new improvements to the system like proper sorting on titles, episode numbers for tv shows and serials, and showing the sample images on the list page instead of just the details page. It’s still a work in progress and apart from the “now playing” feature it feeds, most of what will make it really exciting is still in the wings. Now is still a very good time to suggest changes (and catch any mistakes in the data). I should have ability for users to schedule showings of movies ready for a public trial in the next week or two - and honestly, that was my main motivation in building the whole thing. (Well, the next stage of that system, where I start requesting/requiring a small gratuity for the service was).

As I’ve been building this thing I haven’t exactly experienced feature creep, but working with what’s done so far has helped change my priorities for it. The things that I figured could wait for the second version are feeling like they need to be done to before I can rest on my laurels. It’s already clear that what “little” data is there requires better searching tools than just sorting and category filters. Most of all, the data that’s there needs to be fleshed out - both by me and my fellow cappers. Which of course means that I need to add a commenting and rating tool to the catalog. But perhaps the biggest hole I’ve spotted in my plans is that maybe cappers would rather be able to schedule showings of the ephemeral films - and boy, I don’t even want to think about fixing that.

A quick note to anybody who wants to link to all the images I’ve just added: don’t. Well, you can make a hyperlink to them, but don’t try embedding them as images on your pages or posts on other sites - they won’t work. They’re supposed to get IS’ address superimposed on them when they’re embedded somewhere else, but the script that does that is on the fritz. Since it’s my contention that these images are in the public domain, if you want to take them and handle the hosting yourself, I won’t stand in your way. Obviously a link back in exchange for my effort in selecting these and putting them in a handy package would be nice, though.