I love this episode! Both the movie and short are classic! Let’s have your thoughts and memories of this one!
I’m generally not a fan of the Delinquent Teen genre, but I love the off-kilter anti-communist angle at the end.
“Young Man’s Fancy” is one of those bonkers shorts where it’s a thinly-veiled pean to American consumer culture.
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Squishy was one of the best lines from the short.
And “Once a driller, always a driller” From Bakersfield High at the end. They also say Fresno in another one. They should do a follow up on what happened to the letter writer.
What About Juvenile Delinquency was another good short.
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“She died as she lived: failing Algebra.”
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Is mom in the Guardian Angels?
Top ten of shorts, for me. Movie OK…could do with more wanton exploitation. Serviceable.
Main actress is spitting image of a bartender I used to know…something about the eyebrows…it’s uncanny.
Mud butler to you too!
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This felt like one of those scripts written by someone who thinks they know how teenagers act, but has no idea.
Plus, this film might have one of the most judgmental judges ever.
I’m surprised after denying the request to raise the baby, he didn’t just place a revolver and two bullets on his desk, and tell them: “I think you know the only course of action left to take…you utter failures of humanity.”
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I fell asleep and had to stop watching it with BF last night, but I got the best screencap from the opening.
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Gypsy: I FEEL ILL!!!
Poor guys.
Whenever I see something too scary, I’d react the same way. With Crow sobbing uncontrollably.
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Crinkle cut potatoes!
Don’t touch the razor or dad will go ballistic.
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So, Young Man’s Fancy –
I was wondering who the target audience was for something like this. With the Anheuser-Busch freezer film (and who amongst us knew before seeing that instructional short that A-B was once in the freezer business? I did not.) you can at least figure out why and for whom the movie was made.
I don’t know how long the MST3K version is, but the IMDB page for this movie says the short is 29 minutes long. Aha! So this was in fact an early form of TV infomercial. But since Jam Handy & Associates knew people were smarter back then and would not sit through the brain cell murdering banality of one of today’s infomercials, they designed and packaged this as a standard family TV sitcom of the era.
With that in mind, I’d say this is a very well done film. If you were flipping (by physically turning the knob on the set, mind you) through the few TV channels available to you back in the mid-50s and you happened upon this “show”, chances are pretty good you would stop to check it out. It has a vaguely familiar title and looks kind of familiar (intentionally), but at the same time, you might think, “What show is this? I don’t think I’ve seen this one before.” long enough to get you to watch it. By the time you might finally realize it’s a commercial, there might also have been just enough story rolled out to keep you interested in watching to the end. And who knows – in some markets where there were only 3 or 4 other channels on air, this might have been the best thing on at that hour.
This film is from 1952, and if its intended purpose was as a TV infomercial, then hats off to Jam Handy for filming this in color. They could have got by with black & white to go along with the other TV shows of the time. But Jam Handy was an artiste and his creative vision demanded color! Plus, I bet he could soak the clients plenty for the color film stock. I would genuinely love to see a restored & remastered upgrade of this movie.
And then there’s the star of the show Alexan-- oh who am I kidding, of course it’s dear Judy! I’m surprised the actress who portrayed her, Bonnie Baken, doesn’t have other IMDB listings. I thought she was quite good and should have had some kind of a career playing either the best friend or next-door neighbor type in movies and TV.
So while it might seem dated and funny to us now, for what it was designed to be and meant to do, I’d say this is actually one of the better films MST3K has done.
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Well said! Yeah, “Young Man’s Fancy (krinkle-cut potatoes” is IMHO one of the very top, immortal shorts, with stellar riffing.
Apparently, there’s an uncut version from Jam Handy, according to you! I must watch it!
I just love it when the bacon is cooked nice and crisp.
Hamburger Harry’s never did it so good!
And of course it’s in color! It’s a testament to progress, and a prophecy of Curtis Sliwa’s branding of the classic red beret!
Clever!
Still not sure what the mushroom growing “subplot” was about…ahead of its time? Sounded like a neat lecture, though! “Dad” was super into it!
It was a different time. Pineapple juice chilled just right. The way I like it!
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Indeed you must!
Not only are there extra scenes, you also will learn what to expect when some one gives you “the reds” and you will be able to add the word “schnookle” to your vocabulary.
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I think this was probably a film shown in Home Ec classes, or maybe to prospective purchasers of redesigned/updated kitchens.
Its nearest kin would be “Word To The Wives,” riffed successfully by both Rifftrax and by Josh Way at Fun With Shorts. I will say the out-there-brain-vibe in Fancy is less pronounced, but that’s not saying much. 
I still agree wholeheartedly with the late Robert Farrar Capon, who proclaimed the electric stove to be a “tin fiddle” in Supper of the Lamb. (Which is a really fun read if you’re a foodie or love cooking, whether you agree with all his proclamations or not.)
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Say, didn’t MST3K also riff a movie about Home Ec classes? Maybe if we rewatch that movie, we can see the girls in that watching this movie!
I think your theory has some merit. I hadn’t even thought of that possibility. It’s just that 29 minute running time that makes me think this was expressly designed for television broadcasts.
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Oh, and if we can do a Kitchen Brain-Break trilogy of terror, I’d have to add You’re The Judge, too.
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This episode gives me the reds.
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They sure did! They riffed The Home Economics Story in Season 3 (right before Viking Women and the Sea Serpent). That would’ve been a meta touch for the girls in that one to be watching Young Man’s Fancy! But I think HES came out a couple years before YMF.
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Really, behind the cheesiness of A Young Man’s Fancy, it probably really was amazing to a lot of people to have all of those electric time-savers in the kitchen. The dated nature of it helps make it easy to riff, and it is generally silly, but it was clearly not meant to be taken seriously. Out of the many shorts they riffed, this one was one of the most enjoyable on its own merits to me.
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I dunno’. Were electric mixers and ranges really that new and novel by then? Maybe the implication was that it was only at this point that they were truly affordable to a wide swath of the populace. But of course they couldn’t bring up class because Oh Noes Communism!!
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