johnny_burnaway's reviews

"...say the word and I will leave Mel in a heartbeat."

That right there is the line that destroyed this series for me. Call me old-fashioned, but when a man marries a woman and two days later declares his willingness to dump her for someone else, I'm not going to find any merit in anything else that character does. It may not have felt like a big deal to the showrunners, marriage being a pretty cheap commodity in the entertainment biz, but peasants like me see it a little differently.

Personally, I love winter. Summer is about 45 days too long as far as I'm concerned. That said, it's hard to understand just what the purpose of this vintage newsreel-style film was. I can only guess it was commissioned by the government to retain the tax base in states where winter hits with a vengeance, and to boost migration to these frigid climes. Screening it in markets like Arizona and Florida showed the perpetually sun-bound what they were missing in the winter, never mind the fact that a lot of people who migrate south do it because they hate snow. On the other hand, people already living in winter wonderlands may have needed convincing that life in the snow was never-ending fun and games in order to keep them from leaving.

Amid standard and marginally interesting scenes of skiing, skating, and sledding (the narrator checks out for a few minutes at one point, probably assuming we're sufficiently entertained without him), the movie veers into left field to show those Polar Bear Club weirdos who bathe in ice water. I hear it's quite invigorating, and I will absolutely take the word of anyone who has tried it. This must have provoked screams in the theaters where it was shown. It looks even more painful than the footage of ski jumpers and bobsledders wiping out.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 rescues this short from the cultural Siberia into which it otherwise would have disappeared.

Chickens, eggs, and the art of raising chickens for maximum egg production are big business, as this short film notes that egg production takes place in every county in the United States. Even with that type of saturation, apparently the honchos in Big Chicken (Big Egg? Whichever comes first.) decided some advertising was in order. Maybe there was a stigma associated with chicken farming. After all, no one really wants to think about the bloody origins of their Denver omelette or 20-piece bucket of KFC. This was produced in 1948, with the wounds of WWII still fresh; perhaps word leaked that Heinrich Himmler once worked as a chicken farmer in the 1920's.

Still, we're talking about chickens here. The filmmakers do their best to spice up their subject matter, although things take a bit of a left turn when one laying hen breaks the fourth wall with a weird Mae West impression. Otherwise, we get to watch chicks as they're hatched, sexed, and thrown into cardboard boxes like so many Amazon purchases. Farmers weigh the cost of chicken feed against egg production, with the losing chickens condemned to walk the last mile to the ol' chopping block. Someone carves roast chicken breast so incredibly thin we can only assume that bird is dinner for a family of twelve. Perhaps sensing they've run out of material, but contractually obligated to deliver a film of a certain length, the filmmakers close things out with a paean to trucking and its place in the transportation of eggs.

The MST3k crew actually makes the most accurate assessment of everything we're shown in this short: "Eggs are complicated! They should cost $100 each!"

If you hang out with the Ricardos, the Cleavers, or that "Father Knows Best" gang, you'll feel right at home with the...the...come to think of it, we never do get the name of the family in this thing. Let's call them the Cumberdales.

The story is a basic one: Smarmy Bob Cumberdale brings home a college chum, Alexander Phipps, for a few days. Sister Judy falls hard for Alex but he's not having any, being more interested in hydraulics, time and motion study, and mushrooms than girls. Judy brings Alex around by harnessing the power of electric kitchen appliances, and by playing extremely dumb, as was the custom at the time. Convinced at last that Judy can cook, and that she's willing to listen to him prattle endlessly on about the configuration of a modern kitchen, Alex invites her to go dancing. We're spared the jump cut to later in the evening, as Alex goes into his third hour of explaining the art of efficiency and Judy silently wills the car to get her home a little faster.

This is really just a sitcom-shaped commercial for the wonders of electrical appliances. I suppose people needed to be sold on such things in the early 50's, or at least be made aware of their new purchasing opportunities, and the producers must have thought that the new medium of the situation comedy was the way to reach the most people. The MST3k guys pummel it mercilessly, although they fail to capitalize on the line "You'll give her the reds" by making a joke about the anti-Communist hysteria of the time. Regardless, it's a fine time with Mike and the bots.

There weren't a lot of professional options for women in the mid- 20th century. Occupations that extended beyond "housewife" and "mother" were more limited than they are today. With the current of social mores flowing so hard in the opposite direction, it took a little extra to sell girls on the idea of going to college. Hence this film, which extols the value of an education in home economics.

It would have been quite the progressive leap at the time to tell girls they could be doctors, lawyers, or engineers. A degree in home ec was a safer message, shouting "You can go to college!" and whispering "But your place is in the home, or at least in a kitchen somewhere."

Regardless, this message resonates with our protagonist, Kay, who experiences an epiphany as a representative of (presumably) Iowa State College rhapsodizes about the many opportunities afforded by a home ec major. Thus inspired, Kay takes that boldest of steps and enrolls.

We follow Kay and several of her classmates as they earn their degrees in home economics. Highlights include Kay's first big farewell from her emotionally distant parents, avant-garde interpretive dance disguised as a cheerleading routine, and a house full of girls raising a baby purchased on the black market with student activity fees (reviewer's conjecture).

In regards to the filming style, I'm a little curious: are the girls in this short actual home ec students who got drafted to appear in the film, or are they members of the university's drama department? Was it shot silently and overdubbed because no one in it could actually act, or was that just cheaper? The answer is lost in the mists of time.

Anyway, MST3k have a great time with this one, although the jokes about campus shootings haven't worn well. "Hey look! It's Lou Costello in drag!" nearly suffocated me.

Johnny's got a problem. Algebra just doesn't compute in his head, but he needs that math grade or his position on the student council is kaput. Rather than doubling his study time or approaching his teacher for help, he immediately hits on the idea of cheating and runs with it.

In keeping with the sense of nihilism conveyed by the gloomy cinematography, it feels like everyone in this short is out to screw everyone else over. Johnny shamelessly pries test answers from his friend Mary, Johnny's friend Jim pulls him away from his studies despite his protestations, and when Johnny's cheating comes to light, the entire student body exiles him to the farthest reaches of social pariahdom. And the student council? These Young Americans try, convict, and execute Johnny in absentia, thus showing that the status quo of the early 50's must be maintained even at the cost of due process (a subtle but daring criticism of the then-contemporary House Un- American Activities Committee).

Though not as prominent as their handling of the main theme, the filmmakers include a cursory subtextual exploration of guilt and its effects on the psyche. While it's never given any voice other than an incorporeal appearance by Johnny's teacher as he contemplates his crossing of the line, there are hints that the pressures weighing on Johnny have pushed him to the breaking point. His final act of cheating clearly doubles as a cry for help. As humiliating as it surely was to be exposed as a scholastic criminal, a profound sense of relief must have accompanied Johnny on his long walk to Miss Granby's desk to receive his destiny.

In those staid early days, it's possible that cheating on a test may have erupted into the kind of scandal depicted here. Though we leave him at a crossroads (Will he redeem himself? Drop out of school and hit the road a la Jack Kerouac? Start selling drugs on campus?), the implication of this short is that it's all over for Johnny.

Let the MST3k crew guide you through this existential wasteland. You'll love it.

Sit down to dinner with the Whitebreads and learn how taking a meal together is done. No arguing, no unpleasant talk. Mother and Father even greet each other with a handshake so as to keep the emotions in the house on an even keel (and, considering the age gap between Junior and the other two kids in the family, to prevent any more accidents).

This short was probably created to combat the trend of family meals eaten in front of that wonderful new machine, television. Just try to picture Father in his undershirt, his plate on a TV tray and the fights on the tube. You can't, can you? Nor should you try. Get that out of your head at once and get back to the dinner table.

For the gentler sex, the narrator delivers a fantastically vintage line: "The women of this family seem to feel that they owe it to the men of the family to look relaxed, rested, and attractive at dinnertime." Uh...yeah.

I'm all for family dinners and time spent together, but pedantry typically has the effect of pushing people in the opposite direction. Much like warnings about the evils of rock n' roll only make me want to listen to more Black Sabbath, this short just makes me want to eat in front of my laptop so I can watch MST3k shorts on YouTube.

For a quick double feature, pair this short (the MST3k version, natch) with the "Don't hit the hair!" dinner scene from "Saturday Night Fever".

Nick's in a situation most of us have experienced: he's got a crush on a cute girl but he's too nervous to do anything about it. A little push never hurt in a situation like this, and Nick's friend Jeff is there to goad him into asking Kay out. Before Nick realizes it, he and Kay are off to help set up the local scavenger sale at the community center.

During Nick and Kay's Big Night Out, the helpful narrator gives advice on the types of dates young couples might find enjoyable and appropriate. It seems this community center keeps a running list of activities that Nick realizes would be good date fodder, and how he failed to know about it before is anyone's guess.

There was no community center list of activities when I was dating. I was on the hook to come up with my own events, so I was less interested in the advice this short had to offer than I was in the way they presented it.

Most fascinating is Nick, our leading man and the audience's surrogate on this journey. With his dopey speech and general childlike demeanor, Nick seems to exist in a perpetual state of bewilderment. He probably tested just over the intelligence threshold for public education. I suspect Jeff promised Nick's mother back in first grade to take Nick under his wing and keep him out of trouble. That would explain Jeff's condescendingly paternal attitude toward Nick, a position of power he seems to enjoy. Rather than taking comfort in this association like Steinbeck's Lenny, however, Nick senses he's being patronized and pushes back. Their whole "friendship" seethes with passive- aggressive animosity.

Nick also evinces neediness in virtually every situation. Once the date with Kay is scheduled, Nick begins badgering Jeff with questions about the scavenger sale. He asks Kay several times if she is having a good time, if she's glad she went out with him, etc. I was no ladies' man in my single days, but even I knew that bugging your date for constant affirmation is a good way to inspire her to end the night early.

Nick pushes hard for that second date, despite the fact that Kay really doesn't seem to be much of a catch. She puts the kibosh on the movie he invites her to because she's already seen it. When she gets called away at the scavenger sale, she goes! No "Sorry, I'm with Nick, who invited me here," she just leaves him there with a hammer dangling in his hand. You can hear the "Where did I lose control?" in his voice as she disappears into the kitchen.

I suppose teenagers in the early 50's might have been inspired by this flick to think outside the box when planning a date. I hope it didn't give them the idea to stumble around like someone only dimly aware of his surroundings, constantly at the mercy of others.

I've only ever seen the MST3k version and it's wonderful, but I think even standing alone, "What To Do On a Date" has entertainment value that far outstrips its intended purpose.

Writing music for a television show ought to be a glamorous profession but it seems the songmeisters of yesterday's TV variety shows lived in modest houses with outdated furnishings and crappy appliances. Jeff is one such unlucky composer, but he's in a good mood. He and his wife, Mary, are about to set off on a long-delayed honeymoon. That is, until the phone rings. It seems the diva slated to appear on the show wants a new song and wants it now. No honeymoon until new song is in the can! What's a young musician to do? In the face of this bad news, Jeff is up to smoking the better part of a carton of cigarettes but not much more. Luckily, Jeff's flamboyant guardian angel is loitering on the roof with a bag of nose candy, and Mary's got a fixation with telephones...

Phones, and their place in the interior design of the 50's, are about as close as this short comes to having a point. While Jeff struggles with his new assignment, Mary wanders about the house, wishing for updates to her decor. Every upgrade includes a new phone, although I suspect a phone in the bathroom would be a little weird.

This short is good, if pointless, fun. The songs are catchy, and Mary is quite fetching when she's done up in her evening wear. There's no reason given for why Jeff and Mary went a whole year with no honeymoon. However, given that one of the lines in Mary's wishing song is, "I wish that refrigerator door would close and stay closed," maybe they were waiting for a time when neither of them was down with salmonella.

The MST3k gang give Once Upon a Honeymoon a good working over. This was the short that taught me never to drink water while watching MST3k.

This is one of two train safety films produced by Union Pacific (the other being Last Clear Chance). Ostensibly a primer on the finer points of safety while working on the railroad, it is really more of a subtle propaganda piece. If you suffer an accident as a Union Pacific employee, you are the same kind of idiot as the characters in this short. Further, since the narration is provided by a reverend from the First Church of Union Pacific, your accidents are also evidence of your moral failings.

To drive these points home, we're shown three accidents:

Accident #1: Joe Provides His Own Dead Man's Curve

Joe is in love with Helen. He works as an electrician; she slings hash at the local diner. Come 5 pm, some dark urge overtakes Joe, and his desire to be with Helen overwhelms every other thought, even his own instinct for self-preservation. He drives so recklessly trying to reach her that he ends up rolling his pickup truck right over his spinal column.

My questions start where the reverend's narration ends: Why was Joe driving like a maniac trying to reach a girl who isn't going anywhere? Does he drive like this at the end of every shift? If so, why haven't the guys riding in the back of his truck tactfully threatened to kill him if he doesn't knock it off? If not, why is he doing it today of all days? I'm convinced nothing more than Joe's own lack of impulse control is what did him in.

Accident #2: Dead Man Without a Switch

George and Fred, longtime railroad men, are looking forward to their twilight years. Alas, one day, George's diet of whole milk, fried chicken, and Twinkies catches up with him and he suffers a massive heart attack while guiding a locomotive engine. Alone at the controls, he is unable to keep the engine from smashing into the boxcar on which Fred is standing. Fred tumbles to a gruesome demise on the tracks below, possibly beneath the very steel wheels that propel George's twitching body into early retirement.

George now spends his days sulking in a chair. Faced with the choice of losing some weight and getting some exercise, or waiting for that second heart attack to come finish him off, he seems to have opted for the latter.

Of all the accidents presented, this is the one that actually seems somewhat likely. As such, it is also the one that really tests the reverend's assertion that Union Pacific does everything in its power to prevent accidents. There is no dead man's switch in the locomotive, and there is no one there to take the controls once George keels over. Fred is on top of that boxcar with no safety harness. There's gotta be a lawsuit in there somewhere.

Accident #3: Never Light a Cigar with a Welding Torch

Charlie is about to be a new father. As was done in those days, he drops his wife off at the hospital to handle the breathing and pushing and screaming while he goes to work in the machine shop, cigars in hand. The blessed moment arrives and Charlie immediately makes the rounds of his co-workers, including the welder. Excitement trumps common sense as Charlie barrels into his fire-wielding friend, taking (and taking and taking...) a torch to the face and suffering a case of eyeball brulee that leaves him blind.

Seriously, you want to talk workplace safety? Talk about cost- cutting that leads to faulty equipment and unsafe conditions. Talk about workers who take sloppy shortcuts because they're doing something they've done a million times already. Trying to enjoy your life probably won't turn you into a blithering idiot on the job.

Watch this in its original form and you'll feel condescended to; watch the MST3k version and you'll have a blast.

This short is based on a morality play written by a German baker-turned-soldier, Klaus Erlichmann, who was captured by the French during the Battle of Verdun in the First World War. He wrote it in POW camp to thank God for sparing his life, and upon his release at war's end, the play enjoyed wide popularity in the avant garde theaters of Weimar Germany. Unfortunately, it was targeted by the Nazis in the 1930's during their push to eradicate "degenerate" art, and the only surviving copy was smuggled out of Germany hidden inside, appropriately enough, a loaf of bread. It found its way to the United States just as the war broke out and was revived for the stage by Bertolt Brecht in the early 1940's. A representative of DuPont Chemicals was in the audience one evening and, struck by the complex interplay of light and dark, bought the rights to make the film. This is the result.

A devil, Red, and an angel, Whitey, battle for the soul of a bread deliveryman, Bill. Whitey is confident that Bill will walk the straight and narrow, so much so that she dares try to tempt him away herself. Red is never far off, watching as Bill endures Whitey's assault on his work ethic, waiting to welcome him into bad deliveryman Hell. In the end, Bill emerges triumphant, explaining how a good bread deliveryman does his job and why he will never do otherwise. Light banishes Dark. Hope is restored. Bread is delivered.

The movie resonated throughout the world of international cinema immediately. Only a year after the film's premier, Carl Theodor Dreyer unveiled his own meditation on the dichotomy of faith, "Ordet". Ingmar Bergman cited "Out of This World" as a heavy influence on 1963's "Winter Light" in an interview with an obscure Latvian film magazine. And finally, its immortality was ensured when it was picked up by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew for some hilarious ribbing.

Gloryosky, this is a weird film. We've got creepy kid Buzz desiring to fit in with the hep cats in his junior high school. His moping about conjures up the androgynous Mr. B Natural, channeling Peter Pan both in outfit design and by having a woman portray a man a la Mary Martin. Mr. B turns Buzz on to playing a musical instrument as a way out of his social rut, chirping and squealing her dialogue like a tour guide on a massive dose of uppers. And all this is meant to sell Conn musical instruments. Yep, this is another one of those films where the commercial premise comes slathered with a sticky layer of "story", and we take a quick detour through the process of creating a musical instrument the Conn way. So Buzz gets his trumpet, blows through the 10,000 hours it's supposed to take to get good at something (no pun intended), and starts laying down honey- sweet tones while still in jr. high.

The real issue I have with "Mr. B Natural" is that it completely undercuts its own premise. Buzz doesn't have a problem that can be solved by a musical instrument. The hip kids are perfectly willing to have Buzz along with them the way he is. The tipping point of the film is when Jeanie, the one Mr. B identifies as the cutest girl in school, personally invites Buzz to come dancing with her and her friends. She even presses the issue a little when he demurs. The fact that Buzz not only turns down her invitation but also waves off his mother to go be alone in his room tells me his real problem is cataclysmic social withdrawal. We're lucky he's only visited by a musical pixie and not by a shadowy figure that tells him to murder his parents and then move on to his classmates.

Anyway, I'm like Homer Simpson in that when I don't like a movie, I make up my own. My cut of "Mr. B Natural" goes like this:

Jeanie, the cutest girl in school, invites Buzz to come to her house and dance with her friends. He accepts, turns on the ol' John Travolta, she invites him back next weekend, and so on, until he's part of the gang. Buzz and Jeanie cut a rug at all the school dances over the years and even go to the senior prom together. They get married after graduation and Buzz starts a prosperous construction company. 25 years later, he gets the contract to demolish their old middle school and build a new one. The night before the project is set to start, he and Jeanie take a last walk through the old halls, stopping at the bank of lockers where it all began. Jeanie says, "Do you ever wish you'd taken up a musical instrument when you were a kid?" Replies Buzz, "I never really thought about it. I had plenty going on back then." They kiss. The end.

This short was extremely low-hanging fruit for MST3k. It's one of their classic outings.

It's funny how some entities back in the day took the roundabout approach to swaying public opinion. This short is sponsored by the National Dairy Council and the underlying point of it seems to be that milk and other dairy products come from a clean, wholesome environment and should be consumed without reservation. To convey that message, however, we get to sit through the saga of George and Betty's Summer on the Farm.

George and Betty, city kids whose parents apparently REALLY need a break from them, exchange a summer of the usual activities (parks, libraries, movies, endless TV) for a vacation at hard labor fantasy camp in the form of Uncle Jim's dairy farm. George and Betty may have the kind of boundless energy that only farming can burn out of them, or maybe Mom and Dad need some marriage rehab. Anyway, we're headed for the provinces to roll around in hay, good food, and cute baby animals.

I'm sure there's some merit in living close to the land and developing a good work ethic. I didn't grow up on a farm so I have no idea how close to reality this short is. The other reviews here have been enlightening. We never do see Uncle Jim mucking out a stall or calving or butchering one of his cows after it gets hit by a train. We can only speculate if the song "Country Comfort" by Elton John sent George into a violent rage the first time he heard it while on R & R in Saigon.

Watch this one for the MST3k riffing, which is hilarious, and spend a few minutes imagining what George and Betty's parents did while the kids were away for three months.