Oh my gosh, do I LOVE this episode! As I’ve always said: It’s 90 minutes of pure joy! Everything about this just clicks.
I must give a shoutout to one of my favorite Arch Villains ever featured on MST3K: The Phantom Dictator of Krankor!
Krankor seemingly just loves being evil and says/does everything with enthusiasm (even when he’s clearly failing). He steals every single scene he’s in. Krankor always has great quote or mannerism on hand. And of course, who can forget his majestic laugh?
Krankor is also one of Bill Corbett’s best guest characters!
Fair to say Prince of Space is one of my all-time favorite episodes!
In my opinion, this is the BEST of the Japanese episodes. The riffing is top notch and the host segments going through the wormhole are all entertaining. Krankor is a hoot with his ahem uniform.
Oh, p’shaw, nothing of the sort. You haven’t been over-posting, and there’s nothing to apologize for at all.
This is THE place to discuss MST3K online, and we’re glad to have you here to discuss this episode and the series at large!
Besides circulating the tapes, the one thing that helps to demonstrate that the series still has life? Discussions about MST3K like this. That shows there’s still something about the series that’s so resonant, that keeps all of us engaged with the onscreen shenanigans after all these decades.
Which is to say, thank you for contributing to that here!
As for this episode, every time Prince of Space comes up, I feel that I have to make the following point:
The time warp chicken puppet host segment is probably the single best host segment of the Sci-Fi era episodes, hands down. There’s a brilliance in the writing on display here that can go toe-to-toe with other very intelligently crafted host segments, like the quantum linear superpositioning host segment in Gunslinger and pretty much everything we see in the Eegah sketches.
I don’t know if I’d go quite that far. I’ve never tried to determine which one I’d give that award to. But it is very good. A bookend to the “False Fronts” segment from Gunslinger, kind of.
I dunno, more than most stuff we get with the Sci-Fi era, it just has this vibe that suggests that they really went all out in terms of trying to write a sustained and fleshed-out sketch.
I get that same vibe from the Noh Theater sketch for Invasion of the Neptune Men.
Oh, definitely!
Which was a joy in and of itself. That and the coffin/funeral sketch from the same episode. Despite the morbid focus of the discussion, there’s that feeling of the gang just hanging out and… talking. You know, rather than stuff happening, like with an alien confrontation or an emergency on the SOL or something like that.
But to get back to this episode, it’s neat that this is the only episode with a host segment that takes us to the great outdoors, as it were.
It is eerily rewatchable and captivating as a sequence. Posting it here I played it and played it again admiring how smooth and strong the scene is. I’d volunteer the Ortega Catering Skit and the Stripper and Crooner Host Segments from The Girl in Gold Boots (1968) as on par in the uniqueness and replay department. When you can’t look away? That’s something.
