From watching so many subpar movies on MST3K, it’s perhaps easy to overlook the fact that the people who created these turkeys also sometimes – and perhaps frequently – were involved in vastly better projects. For example, long before Space Mutiny, Cameron Mitchell was in the original Broadway cast of Death of a Salesman. Not too shabby.
So this thread is an opportunity to point out a vastly superior project in which some one mired in an MST3k (or Rifftrax) film was also involved. This could be an actor, director, writer, composer, editor, etc. Just pick an individual and point out the better film, play, novel, recording, etc. they also made.
I’ll begin with actor Douglass Dumbrille. He had a long film career, from 1913 (!) to 1964. Long before he starred as rancher Charlie Cooper in Last of The Wild Horses, he was the Marx Brothers’ antagonist in A Day At The Races.
MITCHELL!! Froom is responsible for the urpy soundtrack of City Limits. But he’s also a very well-regarded rock/pop producer and keyboard player who was everywhere in the late 1980s and the pre-Grunge 1990s. Three of his contributions were to Marshall Crenshaw’s Downtown, Los Lobos’ Kiko and Peter Case’s Six Pack of Love. All of which I keep in rotation to this day. <3 <3 <3 Don’t even care how dated the production must sound to modern-day hipsters.
It’s still the last good Marx Brothers movie and it’s easily more watchable than Last of The Wild Horses. Mr. Dumbrile was also in The Big Store with the Marxes, but I wouldn’t recommend that movie to any one.
David “Space Mutiny” Winters was a named character in the classic 1961 version of West Side Story, and also directed Alice Cooper’s concert film Welcome to my Nightmare.
He also directed a couple of episodes of The Monkees.
Mischa Auer, who played Santa’s bookkeeper in The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t, was an acclaimed actor. Got an Oscar nomination for My Man Godfrey and was in You Can’t Take It With You, Destry Rides Again, etc.
To keep building on Mitchell Froom trivia, he has a daughter, Ruby (with Suzanne Vega), thus the Soul Coughing album name “Ruby Vroom.” It’s one of the most sorely overlooked albums of the '90s.
Mel Welles, the actor behind our favorite has-been wizard, Caedmon of Ogg, had a Ph.D. in psychology and was fluent in five languages! He was pretty good in the low budget Roger Corman flick The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) as Gravis Mushnick.
You start at the top of the hill when you go downhill. I like A Night at the Opera, but not as much as their earlier films (The Coconuts excepted, that’s mediocre).