My hats are off to you! It isn’t easy to step outside your comfort zone. Hamlet (1961) isn’t the easiest to jump into. Them attempting The Bard in Season 10 is why it works so well. They are so on the ball the curveball of the language and the play fails to phase them much. It amuses more than it has any right to and that blame is Best Brains knocking it out of the park.
I rewatched it too after seeing this thread, and the combination of Shakespearean English + thick German accents + a muddy soundtrack does not help it at all. I wasn’t really sure what they were saying a lot of the time, though the riffs were pretty decent. “Run DMC Everett Coop” was brilliant.
I said, quality, not idiocy!
This is more about the play than the episode but I was thinking the other day…what the heck kind of poison was poured in the king’s ear anyway? I’ve read/seen this play dozens of times but it just struck me how odd ear poison is.
I don’t know if there is actually a story behind the ear poison, but weird things in old plays/stories/artwork always make me think of how the vast majority of pop culture has been forgotten. How many jokes, songs, plays, folk stories (“memes”, if you will) have we lost forever? And how many of those lost things survive only as references in the things we still have, which of course we’ll never actually recognise without something specifically saying so?
Think of all the jokes in MST3K that rely on knowledge of specific shows, or even local commercials. How many Weird Al songs are there that people don’t know are parodies? How many times has the parody overtaken the original?
Was ear poison the hot meme that year because of a joke or real life incident? “Hey, did you hear Lady Karen’s trying to say her maid was trying to poison her ear when she spilled that drink on her?” Chances are we’ll never know.
Sorry, this is just one of my pet weird archaeologist thoughts.
The answer appears to be “poison.”
My feeling about memes is that most of them stop being funny after the second or third view, and the faster they all get swallowed up by The Great Void, the better. (If I ever knew enough about their origins to find them funny in the first place.) And that warmed-over 4chan sh-t is the worst. Stop trying to “reclaim” trash which came from Nazis, People. It can’t be done. All you’re doing is helping Nazis disseminate more of their sh-t POV, because you’re too lazy to do your own crappy drawing and upload it.
I love this episode. Not top 10 or anything, but there’s something cool about giving Shakespeare the ol’ MST3K treatment. It’s just a shame that this production sucks all the energy out of the play. (Although the read on, “To sleep… perchance to DREEEEeeeEEAM!” tickles me every time.)
This one is the Deepest of Hurting for me. A part of the Trinity of Meh…With Castle of Fu Manchu and Red Zone Cuba. However, I adore Manos. To each their own, I guess🤷♂️
Some time ago, I got the Shout Factory DVD box set which had Hamlet (included alongside fellow Sci-Fi era titles Space Mutiny, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, and Girl in Gold Boots).
I have to say, I love how the DVD menu features the “to be or not to be” speech over the Mighty Science Theater theme, just like we hear over the episode’s end credits.
Just rewatched this and it’s a rare ‘improved on second viewing’ for me. Here are two things it actually has going for it above most other MST3k material.
1: It’s a solid tale because… it’s Shakespeare. Unlike nearly everything else they’ve done this is actually a good story.
2: Schell and Montalban are great actors and even if it’s only in dubbing they add gravitas that’s missing in Zombie Nightmare or Sidehackers.
I think what really works against it is there’s nothing absurd in it. It’s low budget is all. It’s not Cave Dwellers or Attack of the Eye Creatures with absurdly stupid things to laugh and make fun of.
I will definitely take it over things like Castle of Fu Manchu or The Painted Hills, which nothing can save for me. It’s not great but it’s also not bottom tier for me.
Sirveaux.
In my July 29 post, I expounded on how Hamlet is a fairly typical MST3K protagonist, which makes this Shakespeare play perfect for the show. But then there’s the issue of why this specific Hamlet. The theory I’ve heard is that the Brains had been hoping that this made for German television production dubbed back into English would feature a Blind Idiot Translation. To give you an idea of what could have been, I ran the second line of the To Be or Not to Be soliloquy through Google Translate from English to German and back to English and got the following:
“Whether it is nobler in the head to suffer the slings and arrows of unheard-of luck or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and fight them by fighting them.”
That would have been great. Tragically, the company that handled the dub was lazy and just had the voice actors read straight from the original play script. You can spot a couple of instances where the dialogue doesn’t really match what’s happening on the screen, suggesting that the adaptation took a few liberties.
In the missed opportunities department, Horatio was portrayed by Karl Michael Vogler, who was Rommel in Patton. Certainly, Hamlet’s enthusiastic greeting of Horatio would have been a perfect moment to insert a Magnificent Bastard riff.
This one gets a lot of despite. While not the strongest episode, I’ve never felt it quite lives up to the “worst” monicker. There are moments I laugh at. Not as many as I’d like, but there are some good moments.
My thoughts too! Hamlet (1961) is an out there episode and its reach beyond typical targets earns it added flack it doesn’t deserve. Shakespeare is Shakespeare and it challenges you even without riffs and references on top. I wager the strain and discomfort for some of that stretch is why it has a worser reputation than other episodes. I don’t mind it but it’s not a show I watch often.
Me and Horatio got blasted on aqua vite and woke up on an express bus to Copenhagen.
“And does he have a package!”
I do like this one. It’s not a top 20 or anything, but there’s some fun to be had in just how novel it is to see Shakespeare on the show.
I can’t correctly place the memories, but I did see this when it aired and I would’ve been about 11 or 12 years old, glady gobbling up everything MST3k did as an introverted kid in a small WI town. But I think at that point I also actually had a copy of Hamlet that I had gotten from those scholastic book catalogs they had elementary school kids order stuff from? I know I tried to read it and struggled, as a kid tackling Shakespeare all on his own will always do. But between that experience and this episode, and that, at some point my folks actually rented the Mel Gibson version of Hamlet they did in the 80’s or 90’s or whatever for family movie night (why my folks rented that I have no idea, they weren’t really keen on Shakespeare and I have zero memories of them ever trying anything else like that growing up), I do have a soft spot for Hamlet in general. And it’s clear that the Best Brains folks did too, there’s a lot of affection for the source material in this episode.
So yeah, this episode is fun for me. Not an all time classic or anything but nowhere near the bottom either, I’ll gladly take this over a whole bunch of season 1 or 2. For me, the movie can be slow but the riffing can’t, and I struggle with the earlier seasons more than the later stuff for that reason, even if the later season stuff features movies that are the deep hurting kind.
“Trick or treat for nipples.”
Hamlet would be a true fan favorite if it just had a bunch of rock-climbing. 
Instead it has a bunch of TALKING. Then more TALKING. The TALKING is the thing.