Here’s your discussion thread for spoiler-infused musings on The Million Eyes of Sumuru!
This is the place to discuss and meditate on all points of MST3K Episode 1309: host segments, theater segments, the quotes, the riffs, the movie, all of it!
Remember: this is a spoiler discussion thread, so all points of discussion will not be spoiler-blurred. If you haven’t seen the episode, you’ll want to turn back now!
Regardless of how many eyes were actually in the movie, let’s go!
I love the bit with the acronyms. Also, on the movie, part of me gets the feeling that the central premise could have been very interesting and well done …if not for the frankly disappointing casual sexism. …which to be fair, is also kind of what I thought of The Wild Wild World of Batwoman. Huh.
Sumuru as a character was created because the BBC wanted a radio drama in 1945 from Sax Rohmer and Fu Manchu would be offensive to our Chinese allies. So, yeah. We’re just gone for cultural appropriation instead, it seems.
In reading through the comments during the premiere, I was surprised that ArtCrow was the only one to point out the Maciste ‘MyCheeseSteak’ movie poster, who was the main character in Experiment #605Colossus and the Headhunters. You can see it at around the 19:19 mark of the regular episode.
Great episode but not helped by the movie itself. For a film about a swingin’ group of evil lady spies, it’s all rather dull. Like about as sexist as expected with not a lot of fun to offset it and ladies attracted to… like… the worst dudes.
That was a neat thing Matt did comparing with the KTMA version.
I noticed the movie footage was edited differently. I wonder if that was editing to the KTMA print, the work of our modern era editors, or both.
Right? Like there are some men, questionable, problematic men, where I get it because they might have charm. I’m talkin’ about Connery. But George Nader? This guy?
And look, he was actually a (generically) handsome dude.
But by the time of this movie he’s giving off the blandest white dude vibes. And also women fall for him INSTANTLY. Barely looking at him. He doesn’t even make a sound. They just want to jam their lips into his as if to do otherwise meant they would melt into a goo puddle or something. It’s darn wild.
There must have been a lot of Klaus Kinski edited out. This is from IMDB:
According to director Lindsay Shonteff in a 1994 interview, Klaus Kinski had numerous ideas for unusual behavior exhibited by his character President Boong, including that whenever someone entered a room where he was he would climb out from underneath a huge pile of cushions and that whenever he was talking to a pretty girl an abnormally long tongue would emerge from his mouth and try to lick her face. Sadly none of these made the final cut, but if you watch carefully you can see his tongue starting to come out in some scenes.
In my opinion, this ep of the new season felt the most “at home”. That is, I really felt the soul of the original run in this episode moreso than the others thus far.
I can’t put my finger on exactly why; it just does.
