Episode 0: Fudginating With Hitler

Ryan and Steve set out on an exciting new adventure, only 4 to 5 years after they originally planned on doing it.

In this badly-made premiere episode, Ryan and Steve test their capabilities to record and find themselves wanting. As such, audio quality is suspect and there are the occassional glitches and blasts of noise that the listener must ignore, if they actually want to listen to this crap. Instead of forcing themselves to re-record the entire episode, Ryan and Steve did their best to clean up and edit the audio for release as very special "Episode 0" to give listeners an idea of what to expect in the future (with better sound) and to save themselves from having to do anymore work.

This was another rough print. It was like going back to season 1, as far as movie quality goes. While it was decently amusing, I'm already having trouble remembering anything about it. And whatever there was to see was covered up by the intense graininess and poor print quality.

Probably one of the more boring "white guys go into the jungle and deal with savages" movies, the focus is mainly on the arguing between the two lugs at the center, one played by George Reeves. He and his compatriot argue over a girl and the obvious and two-dimensional heel wants to bring the girl back dead, more interested in quick cash than absurd blonde beauties hiding in the jungle. This film made Reeves' sad, sympathetic character in Holywoodland seem, somehow, even more tragic. Reeves' co-star, Ralph Byrd, shared the fate of his early death. Perhaps this movie was a curse in more than its shoddiness. I'm sure that few of the black actors cast as African savages and forced to stand around in loinclothes, yelling gibberish, thought too highly of the experience. But at least everyone involved tried.

This is probably never going to be considered one of the more interesting episodes of MST3K by anyone. I can't imagine who would list this as a favorite. The whole thing is a sort of shrug; it was neither bad nor good, though it was entirely watchable. Perhaps there was something funny in there, but my mind has already erased almost all traces of this episode. And maybe that's for the best.

I thought that I knew a little bit about "The Sidehackers". For some reason, I was pretty sure that it was one of those black & white 1950's biker gang movies. I definitely never saw this one (and was probably getting it confused with "Wild Rebels" or "Daddy-O" or some such thing). Instead, this one is much more in the '60's "everybody's a bit of a cool hippie cat" vein, with the typical villain who's less like a gang leader and more like a scenery-chewing parody of Charles Manson or Jim Jones.

Oh, and how the scenery was chewed in this one. Michael Pataki ate everything on screen in his role as J.C. (I'm left to wonder if "J.C." stood for "Jesus Christ", what with "Nero" and "Rommel" already being in the movie. Tony Huston was definitely no great writer; he also wrote "The Hellcats", appearing later in MST3K's second season.) Not that anyone else did a particularly good job of acting in this one. The people who had no other credits to their names seemed to be much more staid and normal in their capacity to exhibit genuine human emotions than the people who went on to have long careers in episodic television and crappy movies.

As far as episodes went, it was a bit of a step back for the writing. "Rocketship X-M", as perfect as it was for the show, immediately showed the flaws in "The Sidehackers". As stated in the episode guide, this is the last episode where they only watched part of the film before accepting it for production. In the midst of the movie, there turns out to be a "brutal" (their word; I found it to be fairly tame and not even vaguely shocking) rape and murder scene, which they weren't aware of when they chose it. You'd think it was in the time between J.C.'s arrival at the cabin and Rommel waking up, tied to the wall, but it was in that really strange moment where the beaten Rommel arrives at his partner's house and then runs outside for no good reason. While watching his buddy's kids roughhouse, he flashes back to his girlfriend being raped and then accidentally killed. That scene and another shot of her body had to be excised from the episode. It feels, knowing that, like they never quite recovered the appropriate mindset to find the last half of the movie to be funny enough. There was a dour note constantly hanging over the whole production, as if they couldn't get it out of their heads. As silly as the whole movie was, perhaps it just wasn't as inclined to be comedic as "Rocketship X-M". Though at least you can see them really getting a handle on how to make more amusing host segments.

Still, this episode was head and shoulders above anything in the first season, and rarely was there a color film that was boring to watch on MST3K. Even if it lacked a bit in the joke department and the lines were not coming in as fast and furiously as they should have, the pathetic production values and absurd plot more than made up for it. This was another one that went down much more easily.