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Post by mrmeadows on Dec 30, 2010 13:53:49 GMT -5
I don't know if it's because I was born in the 1970's, but I have a strange fondness for the bad movies featured on MST3K that were released during that decade. It's such a fascinating decade in that it was rather empty. . .dominated by bad presidents, horrid fashion, disco music, cocaine, and John Travolta. On the other hand, it also produced some of the greatest cinema in the history of film: The Godfather 1 & 2, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, The Exorcist, Clockwork Orange, Cuckoo's Nest, Jaws, Annie Hall, Deliverance, Monty Python's Holy Grail.....I could go on and on!
The other side of that coin are the not-so-classic movies from the 70's that we got on MST3K. There really weren't a lot of them, and almost all of them were featured in the Mike era (and most of those were during the Sci-Fi years). And just as the films of the 50's, 60's, and 80's all seem to be a product of their time, the (bad) films of the 70's seem very much grounded in that decade. They seem to capture the 70's like a mosquito in amber, and even films released in 1969 (see Sidehackers, Castle of Fu Manchu, etc.) don't QUITE have the same vibe as, say, 1970's San Francisco International or 1971's Touch of Satan. It's like someone flipped a switch on midnight, 1/1/70 that made America just that much more cheesy, then switched it off on 1/1/80.
Which is to say, I don't see the same thing with the films that came out of Japan in the 1970's. I can't tell the difference between 1973's Godzilla vs. Megalon and 1966's Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster. Similarly, I couldn't place 1968's Mighty Jack any better than I could 1987's Fugitive Alien. The Gamera movies and Time of the Apes look like they could have been filming simultaneously in the studio next to each other. . .except most of the Gamera films--except the one with Zigra--were filmed in the 60's while Time of the Apes was in the 80's!
What's the point? I dunno. Just a long winded way of polling the board as to what their favorite MSTied 70's flicks are. (I included the Japanese flicks, too.) I think my picks would be Laserblast, Riding with Death, and Touch of Satan. Those movies are so incredibly 70's they make me want to put on a Steely Dan album and play the home game version of "Family Feud".
Survey says....!
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Post by mrsphyllistorgo on Dec 30, 2010 14:09:15 GMT -5
America and Japan's versions of "The Future" have always been different, thanks to the fact that we're, you know, two different countries with radically different histories and cultures.
America has always been fascinated by Decades. The Twenties, The Thirties, The Forties, and so on up to The New Century. (We haven't really worked out what to call our current decades yet--that might shake down retrospectively.) So ingrained is this need for decahedonal separation that we have a shock, sometimes, realizing that what we think of as The Sixties--hippies, Woodstock, etc. --didn't really get going until the middle of that decade.
Thus, our culture tends to divide itself pretty clearly along fashion and pop culture lines, so we don't mistake a 1968 collar for one in 1971, or a style of film making defined 1964 as cutting edge must, of necessity, be left by the side of the road by 1974. It's really pretty crucial to the way we define ourselves.
Japan, on the other hand (and in no way am I any kind of expert on Japan, these are just personal observations) has a much, much, much longer history as a nation an culture than America does, and a big part of their cultural identity is tradition and preservation of history. Thus, once a style of film or fashion emerges, it not only has big ties to a past, it tends to be preserved and reworked until it's woven into the national psyche. Once a story has been thoroughly pulped and sucked dry, it's left to wither quietly until a new generation finds it and seeks to define its own current situation through this story, one that's been accepted and worked into the cultural mind as "part of Japan".
The Godzilla movies orginiated as a way for Japan to deal with the ghastly, mind-shattering trauma of WWII and, especially, the atomic bombs. Their country and ways of thought had not only been smashed to smithereens, but literally mutated. So, naturally, something as terrifying as Godzilla would be born to deal with it through a film medium. Godzilla was defeated in the first movie, but he was so vastly appealing to the nation that he was reborn not as as symbol of thier pain, but as a warrior to defeat various outside threats. This was so successful that that version of him was just kept in place and worked over until the whole franchise crumbled to dust. And every couple decades or so, a new series of movies (that get more and more bizarre and outlandish) gets spun around a sturdy, understandable, accepted core--a firebreathing Tokyo wrecking core, to be sure, but one that can be trusted.
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Post by thephillipe on Dec 30, 2010 14:20:19 GMT -5
I have a love for godzilla movies so my vote goes to gdzilla vs megalon.
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Post by mrmeadows on Dec 30, 2010 14:53:38 GMT -5
Nice analysis, Phyliss T!
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Post by Mr. Atari on Dec 30, 2010 15:22:46 GMT -5
Nice poll.
I love me some '70s disaster movies. The more D-grade the cast, the better. So when it comes to enjoying '70s cheese on my MST cracker, I have to go with the KTMA entries, like "Superdome", "SST-Death Flight", or "City on Fire". I'd also include "Hangar 18" and "The Last Chase", even though they were made in 1980.
The later episodes are all great, but other than "S.F. International", The Brains never really tackled the 70s-era "cast of TV actors in a dire predicament" genre outside of KTMA.
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Post by mrmeadows on Dec 30, 2010 15:33:29 GMT -5
Thanks, Atari...sorry I didn't include the KTMA's, but I must confess I've never seen any of them. But you're right: the crew did tackle quite a few 70's disaster flicks in their early days.
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Post by msmystie3000 on Dec 30, 2010 18:05:08 GMT -5
America has always been fascinated by Decades. The Twenties, The Thirties, The Forties, and so on up to The New Century. (We haven't really worked out what to call our current decades yet--that might shake down retrospectively.) So ingrained is this need for decahedonal separation that we have a shock, sometimes, realizing that what we think of as The Sixties--hippies, Woodstock, etc. --didn't really get going until the middle of that decade. Golly, you're right on that one....EEGAH and those gritty Ross Hagen flicks were made in the same decade but seem like two different worlds: EARLY 60s = "Golly, Mary-Sue, let's go to the Malt Shop & party like it's 1955!" REST OF THE 60s = "Far Out, Chelsea, let's fry our brains into a groovy Higher Consciousness with acid & party like it's the Age of Aquarius". Frankie & Annette....Timothy Leary....same decade....Weird, huh? In fact, IMHO, the Real 60s started after JFK's final exit & The Beatles first entrance.
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Post by continosbuckle on Dec 30, 2010 19:32:16 GMT -5
Golly, you're right on that one....EEGAH and those gritty Ross Hagen flicks were made in the same decade but seem like two different worlds: EARLY 60s = "Golly, Mary-Sue, let's go to the Malt Shop & party like it's 1955!" REST OF THE 60s = "Far Out, Chelsea, let's fry our brains into a groovy Higher Consciousness with acid & party like it's the Age of Aquarius". Frankie & Annette....Timothy Leary....same decade....Weird, huh? In fact, IMHO, the Real 60s started after JFK's final exit & The Beatles first entrance. One of the things that I find a nice cultural artifact about the early 60s, although I have no idea of its veracity, having not lived then, was in The Attack of the Eye Creatures, there are all these "young ne'er-do-well punks" out being contemptible on a Saturday night and.... they're all wearing suits and ties. Plenty of reasons to believe it's not an accurate reflection of reality back then, but Occam's Razor suggests that it was probably the most natural thing in the world for the person in charge of costumes.
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Torgo
Moderator Emeritus
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Post by Torgo on Dec 30, 2010 22:09:12 GMT -5
America has always been fascinated by Decades. The Twenties, The Thirties, The Forties, and so on up to The New Century. (We haven't really worked out what to call our current decades yet--that might shake down retrospectively.) . I've heard the last decade refered to as "The Naughties," so I had assumed that was what it was known as. I used to just call it "The Zeroes." But even then I knew that sounded horrible.
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Post by janinthepan513 on Dec 30, 2010 23:37:44 GMT -5
Nice thread idea, I've always been a huge fan of 70s movies, particularly the great horror movies of the decade. As for the poll, I went with Touch of Satan, Track of the Moon Beast, and Parts: The Clonus Horror, the latter two being episodes I always felt were highly underrated despite their really consistent riffing and overall good host segments (in my opinion of course).
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Post by Justin T on Dec 31, 2010 17:18:02 GMT -5
The 70's provided some pretty cheesy and awful movies.
My favorites are Mitchell, Riding With Death, Blood Waters of Dr.Z and Track of the Moon Beast. All four are pretty bad but provide tons of laughs for me, some of my favorite episodes.
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Post by tokiyoke on Dec 31, 2010 17:56:37 GMT -5
Whenever I watch a seventies movies, whether it's good or bad, I just can't get past how unatractive the men were. The oiliness, the horrible clothes and hair, both facial and on the head, just drives me crazy and takes away from the movie. But as episodes go, I do enjoy Laserblast, Touch of Satan, and Riding with Death.
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Post by ArtCrow on Jan 1, 2011 17:27:56 GMT -5
I grew up on 70s tv and also have a great fondness for these eps, among my favs. Hard to pick just 3 but SFI, Laserblast and Riding with Death are the ones that best bring back the essence of that decade for me.
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Post by inlovewithcrow on Jan 4, 2011 13:55:13 GMT -5
I love to hate these, and only in that sense are they really favorites. What I remember about the 70's is being crapped on endlessly for being female, and that reality also shows in these films. The treatment of women in 60's and 70's film/TV was awful, with the incompetent female who can do nothing but get captured or break a heel while trying to avoid capture, or be a loyal wifey waiting at home sewing and shooting Valium, or maybe, if she's lucky, a sex object. (Though I don't count Angels as any sort of feminist victory.) The sisters in Squirm seems like radically advanced creatures out of all these female characters, and of course Barbara Hale rocks as the middle age serious scientist who saves the day in Spider Invasion.
Although, I must confess, in the early 70's, I shook hands the "cool" way, like Ben Murphy. Went to a Jim Stafford concert, too, as I recall. I probably wore a Quiana shirt to it.
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Post by CBG on Jan 4, 2011 15:03:12 GMT -5
Love most of the list, but limited to three they would be SFIntl, Riding w/Death and Track of the Moonbeast. The first two for shear made-for-tv-movie gold, and the last...I haven't quite put my finger on...but IT'S GREAT!!!
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