Which is your favourite decade for MST3k movie to originate from. Similarly, alternatively, which decades seem to jibe best with which hosts?
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I seem to enjoy the 50s a lot. Clunky black and white sci-fi, preferably involving clunky unconvincing monsters, makes me happy.
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Another vote for the 50s here. Black and white, scifi, horror, noir. Sign me up.
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When I look at my list of favorite episodes, honestly, they span all decades and all genres, B&W or color, and the hosts, when given the chance, handle a wide variety of movie quite nicely.
There have been a few times where I wondered what a different era or host would done with a flick. Not so much season 13, where we had all these writing teams, writing for a variety of hosts… but for example - what if peak Joel, season 5, tackled Hamlet? Season 10 was getting pretty low brow -not that the Joel era didn’t do that too- but 10 seem to go there a lot more. Plus, you had Frank and Trace in the writer’s room… so what would they have done with that, how different would it have been riff-wise, sketch-wise?
But aside from that, my answer is everything. I like variety (I wish nu-mst would do a few more Avalanche types, get away from the sci-fi, fantasy stuff and expand the riff canvas.)
Note: Apologize if some of these sentences seem wonky… I’ve tried to fix and clarify - but I’m a little loopy from lack of sleep.
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70s for the made for TV movies and gritty cop dramas
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I’m a 60-something '60s kid, so it’s gotta be movies from the 1960s for me. So many good ones: Secret Agent Super Dragon, The Human Duplicators, Moon Zero Two, Catalina Caper, Village of the Giants, Mighty Jack, The Horror of Party Beach, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Eegah, Gamera, Operation Double 007, Jack Frost, The Batwoman, The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman, The Sinister Urge and The Incredibly Strange etc.
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60’s
The yellowish/orangish look of 60’s films reminds me of the TV movies that were broadcast on TV in the 70’s and 80’s when I was a kid.
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This, and the terrible stilted morality plays with terrible, dated morals. (You can sort of lump the 1940s in there for that same reason.) And, unironically, some of the aesthetic. Those of you who’ve seen my collages know how much I roll around in that stuff like it’s catnip.
MR_Potroast has weighed in with the SUPER-BAD Seventies as his faves, and he throws in the early 80s stuff for good measure.
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I… don’t know?
I guess I’d have to see the list of MST3K episodes/movies listed by date, count the number of episodes I love from each decade?
Besides all the Gamera episodes, I’m kinda all over the map? I… think?
I’m quite happy to go from “The Unearthly” to “Cave Dwellers” to “Time of the Apes” to “Master Ninja” to “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” to “Beyond Atlantis” to “Demon Squad”… without skipping a beat?
Yeah… this calls for a list… or a spreadsheet…
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It’s weird now that I think about it. My two all-time favorite episodes are from 1966 and 1980 (which might as well still be the Seventies. I guess I’m going with what delivers the most overall satisfaction, not just the highest heights. Or somethin’.
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I think that I’m partial to the '70s, but mostly, anything that I would have stumbled across on late night TV as a kid, so, pre-1985 or so, really works for me.
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Every decades has its charms, but I utterly adore the brash, crass, shoulder-padded, massive-haired, hypercoloured shininess of the Eighties.
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Yeah, black & white 1950’s are probably my favorite — any genre. Color and widescreen were huge for mainstream movies, so these were already scraping the bottom of the barrel. They always seem to have lots of room for riffing and eccentric actors
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I won’t break it down precisely by decade, because as we discussed in the 80s thread the aesthetics and mores of each period don’t reset on the ends-in-zero years.
I will say I love the late 50’s early 60’s – dumb alien invaders, cheap monster costumes, oversized bugs on a split screen. And I enjoy the late 70’s to late 80’s stuff – Giant Spider Invasion, Space Mutiny, Overdrawn, Final Justice, The Day Time Ended.
Less a fan of the late 60’s early 70’s vibe – I really can’t stand any of the movies that feature “beatniks” or “rebels”. The 90’s gave us some classics but some of the movies are more cynical (compared to the earnest goofiness of the 50s) – Munchie, Robot Wars, Merlin. And the 2010s are batting 2/3 – yes to Christmas Dragon and Demon Squad, hard no to Atlantic Rim.
I look forward to 10 years from now when we see what the 2020’s hath wrought.
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It’s weird, you know? My favorite decade for filmmaking would be the 1970s, but my favorite EPISODES generally seem to hail from the 1960s.
You had all those great creature features and some of those musical crime capers as well as my all-time favorite Jack Frost. The spy movies, too! If you loved the spy movies, you had to love the 1960s.
It’s, like… it feels like the 1970s, while decidedly groovy and cheesy and whatnot, didn’t seem quite as cheesy as that decade’s predecessors. Still, props for giving us choice riffing material in the form of The Pumaman, Squirm, and Beyond Atlantis.
The 1950s were great, too, because whatever choice creature features and musical crime capers didn’t come from the 1960s, they came from the 1950s. Season 8 in particular found a wealth of fantastic inspiration in the 1950s and 1960s, not to mention the other non-Jack Frost entries in the Russo-Finnish quadrilogy.
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monster movies from the 50s and 60s
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50s for fun, goofy concepts and nutty scientists, and 80s for production design and unironically earnest acting. Though the 60s we’re fun too.
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The most underrepresented decade in my collection in general is the 70s. I don’t know what it is exactly that deters me from that decade. I have recently challenged myself to visit more content from the 70s as a result.
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Sometimes you can find a really fun sweaty and sleazy movie the 70’s that you can’t find anywhere/anytime else. See Rifftrax for Death Promise for a fine example.
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