How could you watch a glorious musical number like Yipes! Stripes! in black and white?!
Would you watch Leslie Caron’s dancing in An American in Paris in black and white? No. You wouldn’t. And you wouldn’t watch that folkie-type girl singing and dancing to Yipes! Stripes! in black and white either!
There is a version available in b/w. Teen-Age Strangler (1964) was re-released in 1990 in b/w. I’ve only seen in it color. The odd thing is when I ponder the movie I have to remind myself it’s in color. Strange…
Mikey is so overwrought in his performance that it dominates anything else the movie may have been trying to accomplish. I thought Jim Carrey could chew the scenery, but Mikey makes Jim Carrey performances look subtle and restrained. If the English language thought that the word “melodramatic” was a superlative, then Mikey takes that and throws it back to being the mere positive form of the word. The ranking now goes …
Positive ranking: Melodramatic
Comparative ranking: ???
Superlative ranking: Mikey
And I LIKED “Yipes Stripes”. 
The makers of that Cats epic really missed out when they didn’t work “Yipes Stripes” into the story somehow.
Pretty good episode! With the milestone events out of the way, MST3K can now finally begin to settle back to normal. There’s still some growing pains happening as Mike is still trying to figure out Mike and his relationship with the Bots, but for the most part, this episode goes by very well!
Absolutely love the short and the movie another one of those “amateur homebrew” deals I dig. Despite the incredibly dark subject matter, there’s a quirky charm to it.
Mikey is a real legendary character!
Spoiler alert!!! 
I don’t feel like that is as much of a spoiler as learning Mikey stole the bike. That reveal comes way later in the movie.
I love this episode. It may not be a “milestone ep”, as @ArtCrow put it, but it’s the second rough one in a row for young Mike Nelson, and IMHO the crew nails this one just about perfectly. They also found a way for Mike to imitate another movie character, which was something largely lost once he became host.
I said “largely lost”, not “entirely lost”… I know he would later appear as Torgo and Dablone, to name two. 
Agreed with everyone else who feels Mikey is the most memorable character. It’s not even close, as all the other characters are various shades of bland.
“Oh, don’t invoke Jupiter.”
And nothing ever comes of it. Mikey admits to it in the epic police station meltdown, yet that’s the end of it.
Well, it was out of their jurisdiction. 
I love this one! Mike’s 2nd experiment, and it’s a good one! Yikes stripes, Mikey, weepy Betty. I’m not a big fan of the short, but the movie is, oh so riffable! “I didn’t steal no bike neither”! Mikey is reminiscent of Troy MacGreggor from The Final Sacrifice. I dare anyone to find a bigger nerd than these two in Mst3K.
That’s especially hilarious considering that Mikey and family moved to this town because of the bike incident. Yes, the entire family moved in shame because the older kid was suspected (not convicted, not even formally charged, just suspected) of stealing a bicycle.
Yes, but that bicycle helped liberate three POW camps in WWII. It’s a bicycle with a Congressional Medal of Honor. Stealing it is practically unAmerican.
We can only hope Mikey later found the courage to admit to his parents that he stole the bike. Then Jimmy could go to the diner to see his girlfriend without fear of being grounded. Assuming the family doesn’t move again out of shame towards Mikey.
Tommy isn’t too far behind. He had every sign of a nerd in the making.
This is one of my all time favorite episodes. The movie feels like it was an early John Waters comedy but on accident. So many over the top bad acting choices by “actors” who have no clue what they’re doing. This movie was practically made for MST3K. My husband hates it though haha.
He hates it for the same reasons you love it?
My husband just finds it annoying, but he also grew up in the midwest it might hit too close to home.
But it was made in West Virginia…
Well that’s closer to the Midwest than East Virginia is.
