1000 Percent AGREE.
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âI have food!â
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As part of an effort to update the This Date in MSTory feature over at Satellite News (which were first compiled back in the late 1990s), Iâve been going over the IMDB profiles of the cast and crew of the MST3K movies to determine who has had birth and death dates added since then. Oddly enough, I just finished The Dead Talk Back the other day. Myron Natwick (Raymond Milburn) and Betty Ruth (Sarah Stholl) have birth dates listed (12/13/27 and 8/1/29 respectively) but no death dates. Of course, this doesnât guarantee that one or both of them didnât pass on unnoticed, but you never know. I imagine that the two kids are probably still alive.
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Agreed. Krasker is the MVP of this movie and deserves much of the credit for this episode being more than just an average outing. For such an ostensibly nerdy and dweeby kind of guy, he just manages to bring enough gravitas and panache to the role that you canât help but enjoy his overly-dramatic delivery. Thereâs only a few characters that come along with his kind of memorability. Torgo. Ortega. Perrico. Maybe a few more but the kind of instant scenery chewing top-of-mind style Krasker has is some rarified air.
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At the end of this months The Dead Talk Back vault pick, they have an interview with Myron Natwick. Although I am not sure when it was done, it seems to be fairly recent. He seemed as surprised as anyone that the movie got released 35 years after the fact, and did not really shed any light on why it was not released until then.
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Well, you kind of got the sense from him that the movie was very VERY âindieâ and he himself was not so much an actor as a guy who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Reading between those lines you get the impression the film was very much one angel investorâs personal pet project that was flying by the seat of its pants without a studio backing it or really anything going for it at all except the drive and ambition of the person behind the project. So it gets finished and no studio cares about it so it gets put on a shelf and doesnât see the light of day until MST3K randomly stumbles across it. Maybe thatâs not exactly how it went, but I bet itâs pretty close.
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That doesnât quite track, as the movie was released 5 years before MST3K riffed it. MST3K may have gotten it a wider audience, but someone came along 35 years after this movie was made, and decided that it was now time to release it.
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IMDB has a trivia section on the page for the movie that says:
Shot in 1957, the film was never seen outside of an editing machine until 1993, when it was discovered by Sinister Cinema at the old offices of Headliner Productions. Sinister bought the rights to sell it on video in 1993.
So, not much of a mystery on what happened in 1993 to get it released, after all that was the height of the VHS boom. I think the original question and mystery is why it was not released when it was made, and your answer @The_Riddler certainly seems plausible. If one were so inclined, they might look into Headliner Productions, and whether they were the original rights holders.
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That said, Sinister Cinema was pretty niche. Its catalogue was utilized by people like my father, who was a film historian that used it to get films otherwise unavailable. They werenât selling to video stores very much and their catalogue was a couple of xeroxed pages. This was a tiny company.
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I presume Best Brains also subscribed to Sinister Cinema via the HBO Group that catered Comedy Central and similar channels with their movies. Frank Conniff commented heâd receive a box in the mail filled with VHS tapes of possible contenders. I gather the Sinister release was in one such box and the stars aligned.
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Just to demonstrate what a low-budget operation Sinister Cinema was, this was the box and label art on all of their films. The only thing that changed was the name of the film on the label.
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Good catch. Iâm with you. This couldnât be that long ago. Iâm happy to see him. His astonishment is ours. He mentioned distribution and thatâs maybe all it was. No fish ever bit on the line. Then it was forgotten unitl it wasnât. The fate of Manos (1966) was similar. Except Manos had a release. Unlike this.
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This guy looks like a 50s Jerry Orbach
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This one will always be a special episode for me. Mainly because there is the riff in âThe Selling Wizardâ that Crow utters: ââŚto make hot love on.â Young sheltered me didnât quite have a full clue what that meant, and uttered it as a riff to a commercial we were watching at the kitchen table one night. My parents gasped in horror, and I had a stern talking to, and MST3K was almost removed from the household. 
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It would make sense. They shot the whole thing, distribution fell apart (or was never set up because the people behind it didnât know what they were doing), and then it fell through the cracks. Itâs always interesting when those pop up after years in the dark.
But, IIRC, Manos had a âreleaseâ in that Hal called in a favor with the local town theater (part of his intention in making the movie was to boost the townâs tourism prospects), made an event of it, arranged to have them show it for the weekend, showed up in a hired limo dressed to the nines, and then⌠Half the audience walked out, the whole thing was a disaster, and the theater immediately canceled plans to ever show it again.
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Even after that disastrous reception, Manos (1966) âhad a brief theatrical run at the Capri Theater, as well a few screenings at various drive-ins in West Texas and New Mexico towns, including Las Cruces.â
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Awesome box!
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This box implies ROCK CLIMBING âŚNOOOOO!
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Interesting that the directorâs other mysterious picture, âThe Body is a Shellâ did play in theaters in L.A. and NYC, where it even received a review⌠(IMDB gives a release date of '56, but the article was published in '57)
âThe Body Is a ShellââUnbelievable - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Iâd love to know the backstory on these pictures, and the person who directed them, Merle Gould. Iâve dug up bits and pieces here and there (in the 60s he published something call the âCosmic Star Monthlyâ, for example) but thereâs so much we donât know.
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