Also, Oboler was fun on the radio, but he wasn’t any less ridiculous. He has a famous radio story about a chicken heart- as in the organ inside a chicken- that won’t stop growing until it destroys the planet.
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To take this discussion of endings off in a somewhat different direction… for me, the important thing in editing an episode of MST3K is leaving the ending intact.
Sometimes, a great deal of the movie has to be edited down for the episode. That was the case with Marooned and This Island Earth. But those endings were left alone.
By contrast, the ending of The Time Travelers was edited, which kinda sorta somewhat changed the implications of the original ending (and really, that original ending was baller). That’s all to say that I disagree with that kind of editing.
Ultimately, some stuff from the movies has to end up on the cutting room floor for MST3K. That’s the way of it, it’s mostly unavoidable if the movie isn’t ridiculously short like The Beast of Yucca Flats. But I’m always of the mind that the conclusion has to remain intact, since even with all the edits and cuts, that’s where the movie is ultimately heading. I’m okay with there not being credits for the movie (assuming The Bubble had end credits), that’s happened with MST3K. As long as the ending stays intact - for better or for worse - I’m cool with that, and that appears to be the case here, if Wikipedia is any indication.
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… I thought that was an episode of Fat Albert.
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End credits didn’t become normalized until the 70s, before then, most credits were shown at the start (celluloid was expensive, so studios didn’t want to shell out the cash for them at the end).
Movies that ended abruptly could kind of rattle you, as there’s no time or space to cool down and re-enter the real world so to speak. One minute you’re in the movie world, then, snap, it’s over, back to reality.
That’s not an issue in this digital age, and with those special effects heavy blockbusters, there are so many more people to acknowledge.
So yeah, the Bubble was born before that era.
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When I was a kid, we had a Bill Cosby album where he does a whole routine about that very story… and how it scared him so much he almost set fire to his bedroom.
(Oboler was probably sitting at dinner one day, blanking on story ideas, and said “the very next thing I see, I’m writing a story about.”)
I did wonder why the doctor seemed to be more “reachable” than any of the other characters, and even apparently kept it together well enough to deliver two babies. Maybe it was because he was probably the most intelligent and best educated person in town, so he was able to fight through it a little better?
I wonder what movie set that country road lined with old fallen columns and Greek statuary was originally built for…
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The “Tickets” lady did seem to break free once the aliens grabbed her and her baby. And the Can Can Girl did seem to show more animation the longer she spent with others.
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Having her baby threatened may have shocked the Tickets Lady out of her stupor. And I think we even saw Can Can Girl crack a smile at one point, just before Tony’s brilliant stunt with the truck.
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Dude, I am STILL infinitely cheesed off at that.
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This movie was twice as long as it needed to be. Would have made a good episode of the Twilight Zone.
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I wonder if Stephen King saw this as a kid and then somehow his unconscious mind turned it into the Dome.
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Stephen King has cited Arch Oboler’s work (as has Rod Serling), so it seems likely that King was familiar with this story.
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Of course, that just might be because the actress knew her character was getting killed off and she wouldn’t have to be in the movie anymore. “I’m almost free. I’m ALMOST DONE!”
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My thoughts on 1312:
- Now that I’ve had time to think about it and going over it a couple times, I still think this is among the worst featured. Maybe not THE worst, but certainly in the same company as the other “notorious” experiments.
- As freaky and strange as the movie is: Joel and The Bots still keep a steady stream of excellent riffs here! As I’ve said in the Open Thread: This is what makes MST3K so magical. They take your weird and dank movie and make it funny!
- (As an aside: I’m still amazed I get to say “Joel and The Bots” in a 2022 episode!)
- The Host Segments were fantastic!
- Must give a shoutout to all the backers who got to voice M. Waverly! You all did great and all those Morning DJ handles and show ideas were so funny!
- Great to see Dr. Kabahl come back!
- The Shape of Things to Come is still my favorite of Season 13 but The Bubble was still a lot of fun! The movie might be rough, but the goods are there.
- Favorite riff: Servo: “It flew into a plot hole” (It just got a huge laugh out of me
)
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I checked IMDB. This was her only film credit. And she had those can-can moves down, so I assume she was a dancer Arch hired. (“You’re cute, so we’re gonna keep you around after the bar scene. But don’t say anything, I’m not paying for a speaking role here.”)
She did get to be the movie’s only confirmed fatality, though.
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I watched The Bubble in its entirety a few months back and I can confirm the abrupt ending in the episode is the exact way it concluded.
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The Bubble was so traumatic that she swore off film work ever again!
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Dr. No is a notable example - the first Bond film was made on a rather small budget; adjusted for inflation, it would be less than what big American TV shows like House of the Dragon can drop on a single episode. The art director get left off the credits - and it was cheaper to give him a gold pen as an apology than to redo them.
Videotape was also pricey, hence the BBC and ITV wholesale taping over of episodes to reuse the tapes; what survives from that era are the film prints for overseas sales. In an interesting fact I learned recently, some of that distribution was done by a company called Television International Enterprises. Whose founder was a guy named David Stirling, creator of an organisation you may have heard of - the Special Air Service.
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The stinger was one of the goofiest of the season.
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Some scattered thoughts:
Can Can Girl disturbs me because she’s drugged out of her mind, acting completely robotically, saying nothing at all, and yet it’s all but explicitly said that Tony has had his way with her and is basically dragging her around like a mindless living sex doll. And yet, as we see, the townspeople aren’t just mindless clones or Westworld robots. They’re drugged humans capable of waking up if you (quite literally) break the addiction.
I’m not sure, but my assumption in the moment when the beer thing happened was that the aliens or whatever in charge of The Bubble heard Tony say, “Two beers, coming over to you,” didn’t understand how humans work, took him literally, and somehow assumed that meant that beers were supposed to deliver themselves. When that did not get the proper reaction, the beers were returned. Although, if that is the case, they should have floated to Can Can Girl, not towards the camera.
The ending almost works? The shock therapy/feeding tube/mind control drug bed is broken. That breaks the whole “zoo.” And gives Mike a chance to snap everyone out of it. They all decide to leave. And it starts raining. The weather under The Bubble is always perfect. The fact that it’s raining means that The Bubble is gone. That works. What doesn’t work is that we never learn if Mike’s theories are right. Or where they are. Or what happened to the rest of the world.
How many people did we see sucked into the matte blimp? Can Can Girl burned to death when the truck exploded, so the blimp came and cleared the wreckage. Then the woman and her baby (who were not in a car) got pulled off the sidewalk without explanation. (Mike says maybe it’s for population control, but that makes no sense. Why let her have the baby? If you’re really thinking that long-term, wouldn’t you want another generation? If you’re just there to observe, don’t you want to see what happens when a baby grows up? Was it something in a scene that was cut from this version? Is it that the baby isn’t compatible with the mind control bed? I guess we’ll never know.) And then Tony is pulled up with the Jeep, I think because the Jeep broke and was therefore considered debris?
The baby bugs me. Bad enough that we have a newborn baby who never cries and doesn’t seem to need anything other than a very occasional feeding and is perfectly fine being left unattended in a basket on the floor while his parents have a long chat about nothing with him nowhere in sight. But then they’ve been there for months and he hasn’t grown at all?
Me too. And how did she not notice that the doctor said nothing? At that point in the movie, the townspeople are all completely robotic. The newspaper guy just moves his arm back and forth. The bartender just wipes his glass. The cabbie is capable of driving, I guess. But that’s the most complex thing any of them seem capable of. So how did delivering a baby work? How did the doctor know what to do? Or that the baby needed to be in an incubator? Or how to care for the baby for at least an entire week while he was locked in the incubator and the parents couldn’t take care of him?
As for the cast warning us out of character about how terrible the movie is… I see both sides. You can clearly see how deeply Munchie and The Bubble affected the writing teams, and it only makes sense that they’d express that. On the other hand, as a viewer watching the final riffed version, I don’t find it nearly as bad as they made it out to be, which changes my experience of it. But I’ve certainly see Mary Jo riff worse than this on Movie Jo Night.
Hmm. So the entire two-hour movie is just trappings for a moral/philosophical message that got padded out with 3D effects and endless wandering? And that message is the speech Mike gives about how, really, when you get down to it, living trapped in a giant bubble presumably under constant observation while also completely bereft of normal human interaction is no worse than living in a society where authority figures are allowed to tell you what to do? That speech was pretty terrible on its own, but I could at least chalk it up to Mike being at the end of his rope and trying to rationalize accepting the futility by remembering his frustrations. But as the driving message of the whole film (especially when the film lacks any other substance whatsoever), that… Is the first thing I’ve heard that makes me think this really is worse than Manos.
It’s possible the doctor was more reachable precisely because his job requires actual independent thought. The others are just miming their roles, but the doctor really did have to deliver and care for a baby.
Wait, what did we miss?
Well said, on both counts!
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I don’t think that speech is so awful, life is a trap, at least that’s how it feels for me - school was a trap (it was hell on Earth to be honest), so if I can just get past that and move on… but nope, there’s work, there’s this and that.
But what else is that speaking to, what does that say, when you give in to oppressors? In Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat”, the people there represent philosophies and countries… why not let the Nazi lead, he’s strong, he can row and guide us… but what’s the cost, what do you lose (you could also point to the films of Carlos Saura and his commentary on Franco and how powers, including the Church, allowed him to thrive)
Not saying The Bubble comes close to succeeding with that message, or is in league with Hitch or Saura, but that it has an idea, that it makes the attempt at that subtext, makes it better than Manos. It at least tries to have a brain and a philosophy, wonky as it’s expressed and as poorly as it plays out.
Or, I could be wrong and it’s just “vibes” as they said on the livestream. 
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