In today’s Turkey Day confrontation, round-one winner PARTS: THE CLONUS HORROR squares off against HERCULES. Will the godlike Steve Reeves stand up to Peter Graves’ weird science? You must choose!
As a reminder, your votes will be deciding four of the episodes we show in this year’s Turkey Day Marathon, in a single-elimination bracket battle to the death! Or at least to the next round of voting!
New votes will go up on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays by noon ET, and close out 36 hours later. And even when we get to your top four choices, we’ll keep voting anyway to declare a tournament winner.
Herc has never been on TD, while Clonus has been there once
Now this is very close for me. I did watch Herc on a forum watch-a-long recently, so I really don’t need to watch it again, on the other hand, it would be a Turkey Day newbie, and that appeals to me.
I have to be in a certain mood for Hercules movies. (Although precedent has shown that they go down pretty well on Turkey Day.) Parts is always a joy, though.
I will honestly vote for any other episode in the entire pantheon over Clonus. I know its my opinion, but Clonus is one of the worst MST episodes period and full stop. It’s gross, its depressing, and even the riffing has a hard time making this stinkburger anything but a slog. There’s definitely worse episodes … but not many.
It’s a shame how that lawsuit panned out. (Context for those who don’t know: The Island is clearly Clonus, and the Clonus people cried fowl, but the court ruled in favor of the huge blockbuster film.)
However, from what I can tell the suit was “their movie is taking away our audience and hurting our sales” and the ruling was “um, yo, ain’t nobody heard of your movie; if anything you’re getting a boost from this major studio’s ripoff.”
I wonder why the argument wasn’t “clearly there are enough specific details to show this is not just a coincidence; we want credit and moneys for having written their movie.” Seems to me that was not only the correct claim to make, but also the one that would have netted more money (“give us a cut of the major studio’s take” vs “pay us what our sales would have been if their movie never existed.”
The major studio got hurt, though, and how. Because of it’s huge money loss since they only distributed it in the states, Dreamworks got sold to Paramount which now owns all Dreamworks up to 2010. Warner got the better deal with international rights and the movie doing way better overseas.
Oh, I don’t know. On the one hand, Parts is still a bit depressing for Turkey Day, but the only Hercules movies I can tell apart are Moon Men and the most recent one. Does oiled beefcake go with turkey?
