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.

I’ve just released a beta version of stage one of my latest crazy project: a catalog of the “Inventing Situations Playhouse” movies. Links to the films at the imdb and archive.org (where you can watch them!) It also includes the non-ephemeral Turkey day movies, even though most of them aren’t in the rotation yet.

Stage two of this project is going to let you pick a movie, and then through the magic of PayPal, send me money to let you cap it at the time and date of your choice. It might include some other good reasons to click into the movies and better searching and sorting.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

In order to serve you better (or maybe just mix things up) I’m moving around the ‘programming blocks’ at Inventing Situations. There’s still going to be five hours a day of ‘Non-Ephemeral’ films (e.g. feature films and tv shows), they’ll just be playing at different hours. Here’s the new schedule. It can also be found on the info page.

I’ve decreased the Library of Congress images to one hour a day since they’re repeating a lot faster than either of the larger collections.

In the coming weeks and months I’ll be tinkering with the schedule a little more:

• Adding another hour of “Non-Ephemeral” films.
• After Thanksgiving, I’ll be adding all of this year’s new to IS turkey-day movies to the regular rotation. There should be at least five this year. I’ll proceed to drop in the rest at some steady rate.
• Bonanza: Six new to IS episodes should start showing up in a month or two. Once those have premiered, the 18 episodes I’ve already run will start appearing.
• Plus, I’m toying with yet another programming block. It’s material that technically could go in with the feature films, but that I think will work better on their own.

While I’m discussing picture sources, thought I’d offer an update on how my campaign to add grabs has been going since I last discussed it:

Without considering the 1,500+ images I’ve tossed from the ephemeral collection, that’s around 75 grabs a day.

One last thought: Can anybody suggest a better phrase than “Non-Ephemeral Films”. I’m looking for a term that differentiates them from the “ephemeral films”, acknowledges the fact that they conist of more than just feature films (there’s cartoons, tv shows, movie trailers, Three Stooges shorts, and drive in ads in there too), and is less awkward and obscure than “Non-Ephemeral”.