Using your negotiation skills, enormous wealth, genie powers, or some combination of the three you are able to secure the rights to ONE MST3K episode which is currently unavailable commercially.
Which one do you choose and why?
Do you get your favorite Godzilla movie, leaving the others unavailable? Do you get Rocketship X-M so we (officially) have the beginning of the TV’s Frank era? Do you get Diabolik so we have the classic series finale? Do you get Riding With Death to fill the massive, gaping void of mellowness in your life? It’s Rowsdower, isn’t it?
Here’s the list:
Rocketship X-M
Godzilla vs. Megalon
Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster
The Amazing Colossal Man
It Conquered the World
Space Travellers
Fire Maidens of Outer Space
Attack of the The Eye Creatures
Teenage Crime Wave
12 to the Moon
Girls Town
Colossus and the Headhunters
San Franciso International
Kitten with a Whip
The Incredible Melting Man
Revenge of the Creature
The Leech Woman
The Mole People
The Deadly Mantis
The Thing That Couldn’t Die
Terror From the Year 5000
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
Riding with Death
Agent for H.A.R.M.
The Projected Man
The Deadly Bees
The Space Children
The Final Sacrifice
Soultaker
Squirm
Diabolik
Wow. This is so hard! I’d pick one that I love that doesn’t get talked about much, in the hopes that others would view it similarly. So for me, it’d be a coin flip between The Thing That Couldn’t Die or Soultaker. I’ve been lucky to have these on DVD and have watched them more often than the others.
Purely for my own nostalgia, however, I would go with The Amazing Colossal Man because that was the second episode I ever saw.
This would be my choice. Of all the “missing” episodes, I think it’s one that would be on more people’s Top However Many lists if it were publicly available.
Gotta go The Final Sacrifice. Not only because it’s one of the best episodes, but because the rights are apparently very hard to get. So you get that one as a freebie, and then you can possibly acquire some of the others.
A whole bunch of these I don’t even remember what they were about. Yet another sign that it is time for a full series rewatch (from my…less than official DVDs)
My personal choice is of course It Conquered The World. However, for sheer MST3K canon value, it has to be The Final Sacrifice. This episode made Rowsdower a star on par with Torgo. And it’s one of the most consistently funny episodes in the catalogue.
From the “you’ll never get them pile”, the Godzilla films would be great to have.
(I would like to add that if I could throw a net over several from a single season, I would take all the missing Season 8s. That was a super strong season, riff-wise.)
Have some of these rights recently lapsed? I feel like we’ve had riff-alongs of Girls Town and San Francisco International in the not too distant past, but maybe my memory is playing tricks again on me, the infernal prankster that it is.
In some cases it might the difference between broadcast and distribution rights. Alternaversal may be able to show some, but not sell or offer downloads of them.
