I looked to see if there was a topic for this and there doesn’t seem to be, but I thought that there was…but I might be losing my mind. If so, let me know (that goes for both losing my mind and if there’s another topic on this topic).
Have you seen MST3K or the movies/shorts they riff show up in other unexpected places?
I was working this afternoon and was just listening to/watching 80s music videos and from the videos suggested, I picked “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel. Who shows up in the music video?
Nuveena! There were snippets of Design for Dreaming in the music video!
In the Yes concert video 9021Live, bits and pieces of Young Man’s Fancy were used—including a line omitted from MST3K that pretty much named their following album.
I know I’ve seen others, but all I can think of are movies RiffTrax has done: Night of the Lepus in The Matrix,Attack from Space in a math documentary I saw on Curiosity Stream, etc.
Oh, I’ve often wished I had a Bingo card for naturally occurring MST3K! I used to have a MSTie bestie whom I basically treated as such - I’d text her whenever I felt I’d run across it. For instance:
A bar called “Le Bar.” I usually order Le Sandwich and have Le Drink!
The sign at a bakery recommending I “Try our Specialty Breads.” What if I have a bread that doubles as a foot ointment?
As I mentioned in the Work thread, the day I had to onboard a new hire named Bix. (sound of me disguising the instinctive blurting of “Big Stupid?!?” as a cough)
I remember Santa Claus Conquers the Martians popping up in an episode of Malcolm in the Middle (albeit with a different soundtrack). I think the evil Cloris Leachman grandma was watching it.
A little while ago I was watching a YouTube video from Toy Galaxy. The host was talking about the old Japanese show Gatchaman and how it was brought to the US and dubbed into English by Sandy Frank.
Yes that Sandy Frank.
Suddenly and without any warning after a few mentions of the name the video went into Joel and the bots singing the Sandy Frank song. This caught me totally off guard and I started laughing like a lunatic loud enough to wake up my wife.
Stephen King’s IT, written a few years before MST started, managed to reference no fewer than four movies that would later appear on the show as Pennywise uses the kids’ fears based on movies they’ve seen. The most prominent is when an entire chapter is spent with them discussing their favorite parts of I was a Teenage Werewolf (King was a big fan of it as a kid and this is pure indulgence for him), and we also get references to The Crawling Eye, The Black Scorpion, and Beginning of the End.
Tangential: The Frank Zappa side of the Zappa/MST3K mutual admiration society was rooted in his childhood fascination with B movies. He didn’t name the exact movies which influenced him but they were obviously exactly the ones that got riffed. In his one song he name-checked Richard Basehart, John Agar, Jackie Coogan and others. In another he sang about the strings on giant spiders, zippers on monster suits and cheap movie sets. I would have been amazed if he hadn’t been a MSTIE.
