Definitely one of my top 5 and it’s not 5. So much to love with this one. The Jack Palance Production Diary sketch always gets a laugh out of me.
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I think some of my favorites are the groups of extras who got me to think ‘oh, this is what the Solid Gold Dancers got up to’; almost as bad as Khan’s crew from ST II.
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Indeed. The Gor books started off as a passable rip-off of the John Carter stories, but the writer decided to double down on turning them into soft-core porn based on his philosophy of How Things Ought To Be.
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The cast was all the same from the first movie since they shot them back to back. This is why the first technically has two Academy Award winning actors in it. Jack appears literally at the very end in his Jiffy Top hat and is looking for a woman to seduce the king. Basically he got tagged in by Reed after his character was killed. For exactly one scene.
As to complaints about hair, is there such a thing as an Italian film in another time/world in which the cast doesn’t have perfect hair, I ask you?
And yes, I saw the original long before Outlaw of Gor. Arnold ‘The Mummy’ Vosloo and The Beast Rabban from Dune were in it as well.
As to the riff, it’s my favorite MST3k of all time. The genre provides one of the best for riffing fodder, and this was the most spot on. Not a dull moment for me. Not a joke that missed the mark. Also my favorite skit of all time with Toobular Boobular.
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Yeah, those Vallejo covers can really make a boy of a certain age feel squishy.
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Every time I see movies like this I’m reminded that “Eye of Argon” is a thing and I have to go re-read the MST riffing of it so I can have a good laugh. At a guess the only reason no one’s attempted to film an Eye of Argon movie is that it’s impossible to pronounce any of the character’s names (seriously, you try pronouncing Grignr). And of course that no one can read the damn thing for more than five sentences without laughing hysterically.
Honestly though I’m amazed any of these types of movies were able to make it into the annals of MST3K history; the amount of skin showing (mainly on the women) in these films makes it difficult at best to keep things PG-13. They’d never be able to riff some of the films out there in this genre, although they snuck in footage from one (Barbarian Queen) in Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II.
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Just rewatched this taut, oiled peach of an episode last night and have nothing to add except
HARRY ALAN TOWERS!!!
He’ll be back in Sweet Sweetback’s Million Eyes of Sumuru.
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Eye of Argon was the first book Mike & Conor covered after dissecting Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and Armada on “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back”, and it’s pretty easily the best of the 17 books they’ve read. I genuinely believe, if he’d had an editor (and maybe a dictionary/thesaurus), Jim Theiss could’ve gone on to be a competent author. His enthusiasm for his story far exceeded the conventions of language and grammar, is all.
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In the 1970s, there was a restaurant in the NY-Metro Area called White Towers (maybe a chain, maybe not). We never went, but there was a peppy jingle, complete with hand claps, which played relentlessly on WCBS every morning before we went off to school. Someday, I’ll commission some surviving free-range Boneheads to create a customized do-over just for everyone’s fourth or fifth favorite awful producer.
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Of all the universes that MST3K has visited, this is the one that has a niche fetish thing attached to it? I’d have totally lost that bet.
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Outlaw of Gor is a minor improvement over Gor, as it has more Jack Palance chewing scenery
The first has the bonus of Arnold Vosloo either with hair or a wig.
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I did notice in watching The Vault version that Mary Jo is not bleeped.
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I really like Gor as a follow up to Ator.
Ator as a film has a lot of heart.
Gor is all butt
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Just in case anyone hasn’t seen it:
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Not to hijack this thread with Ator, and not to give the Ator franchise more credit than its worth but:
Is that the Cave Dwellers villain chilling in the background of Ator?
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Would make sense. Ator was the first movie in the series; Cave Dwellers came after it, but MST3K did Cave Dwellers first and Ator second.
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The Creeping Terror gets into some weird areas…
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When your monster has, uh… marital aids glued to its head. Absolutely. o_0
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Speaking of MSTied fiction, has anyone ever read the Stephen Ratliff Star Trek fanfics about Marissa Flores, a bit character from a single episode of TNG that was never seen again but that Stephen basically made into what amounts to a malevolent goddess?
By the way, I sincerely apologize on behalf of my college alma mater for those; 'ol Stevie-boy and I both went to Radford University.
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