616. Racket Girls (1951)

MST3K Central
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This episode was streaming last night on the Twitch channel, so it’s fresh in my memory.

During the feature, I remarked that the movie was dull, and someone in the chat room pointed out that while it is dull, it’s dull in a weird way. The acting is stilted in a way that keeps you watching despite the tedium. Nobody behaves or talks the way real human beings would; it’s all clearly lines they memorized.

The short pairs well with it even though they don’t overlap in subject matter. TRIGGER WARNING: drug reference. I said that the actors in “Are You Ready for Marriage” seem to have been directed to behave as if they had huffed a big lungful of airplane glue just before the cameras started rolling. They talk and think so woodenly! It makes me wonder how many people in the target audience would have taken the short seriously. (It also makes me happy that there’s less of a widespread insistence on early marriage nowadays.)

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You know, tonight I commented on someone’s picture on social media that she had some slight Lisa Loeb vibes. Her response-

“That’s borderline offensive.”

To which my natural reaction is a “Huh wha?!?”

The only logical explanation is she’s somehow psychically channeling the MST writers’ room during this episode.

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So, the actors are like pretty much every actor in any of these treacle-infused-guide-to-decent-living turkeys.

I suspect that the target audience was no more impressed at that time than we are now. :grin:

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