Discover Top Posts Tagged with #time chasers

10. Episode 821 Time Chasers

I forgot how time-consuming an I-chord bindoff is over here on MST3Knitathon, my attempt to finally finish this blanket while watching the fan-voted top 100 episodes of the original run of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in reverse order from bottom to top. We've finally reached the top ten!

A list of the Top 100 Episodes of MST3K was compiled based on a survey taken of backers of the Bring Back MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 campa

10. Episode 821 Time Chasers

Summary: In 1991 Vermont, a college physics professor (whose actor desperately wants to be Richard Dreyfuss and is not) has invented a device that can take a light engine plane backward or forward in time. Having run out of funding, he tricks an executive from a major technology company and a reporter for the local paper into coming along on a demonstration flight to 50 years into the future so that he can trade access to his technology for a research grant. But when he and the reporter return to the future on a date, they find that whatever the CEO has done with the time travel technology has turned the future city into a post-apocolyptic wasteland! Unable to regain control of his invention due to laws around eminent domain of potential military tech, inventor and reporter head back in time to stop his past self from giving the demonstration. The evil CEO follows to violently prevent them from changing the past, and what follows is theoretically a race through time to prevent or preserve the development of time travel technology. In reality, it's just a bunch of pointless, drawn-out action scenes between each step of plot trying to draw everything out to movie length.

MST3K lore or notable moments: Inspired by the movie, Crow travels back to 1985 to convince young Mike to stop taking temp jobs and focus on his band so that he never winds up in Deep 13 and Dr. F and TV's Frank don't get the chance to shoot him into space. But back on the Satellite, Mike has been replaced by his crude older brother Eddie, who bullies the bots and reveals Mike's tragic early death on stage, bludgeoned by hotel keys thrown by over-enthusiastic female fans. Crow must go back again to undo what he changed, but "Eddie's" in the theater for a bit while this is going on, and Pearl points out at the end that all the time travel shenanigans have left one iteration of Crow in 1985. (Is this how he became Art and met Pearl pre-series?) (Also, Brain Guy attempts a joke by breaking into the movie credits with a fake promo for "Observer News," before rapidly losing all confidence in the bit and breaking down to apologize for it.)

What I think about its place on the list? I really liked the bookend sketches of Mike visiting Pearl in the van like they're Midwestern neighbors coming over to each other's stoops. Extremely fun Mike-and-Pearl dynamic! And the Observer cutting in to the movie credits was a delight! I don't think anything in the "Crow goes back in time" plot actually made me laugh, but it was a reasonably fun and entertaining storyline, and it was interesting watching "Eddie" in the theater segments. (Though I go back and forth between thinking that they could have done even more with the contrast between "Eddie's" style of riffing and Mike's, or if making the contrast starker would have been too jarring over the length of time that "Eddie" was in the theater.) As for the movie, it has something of a sweet community theater vibe to it as the number of locations they were able to film in and the number of extras moving through scenes show a lot of local support behind the film (and the sheer number of people and groups they had to thank!) But unfortunately, the movie can't seem to do anything with the resources that it does have. The movie gets potentially interesting in a couple of places - once where past timeline Lisa and Nick start investigating the time anomalies caused by their future selves trying to reach them, and Lisa's own body is identified in the wreckage of the plane crash she's reporting on. If the script had figured out a way to make the latter half of the movie focus more on the past timeline characters trying to put together what was going on, with past!Lisa using her investigative reporter skills to try to discern what both the villain and their future selves were doing in order to help effect events and past!Nick learning from his future self's mistakes, that immediately would have improved things. The second time it gets potentially fun is when the CEO decides to take future!Nick back to the American Revolution to kill him so that his body blends in among the war dead and its discovery doesn't cause any paradoxes, and a whole slew of Revolutionary War re-enactors who've definitely supplied their own props and costumes show up. When the citizens and officials of Rutland, Vermont give you a veritable army of historically accurate Minute Men, do something with them (besides padding)! They don't even get to shoot the bad guy! I want that man taking a musketball to the shoulder! Which yes, is all great riffing fodder (I especially love Tom Servo doing the countdown along with timer and having to keep going back because they are stretching out the seconds), but this is still the first top ten episode that I'm going to call over-rated. It's a good episode of MST3K - in some moments it's a great episode of MST3K! - but compared to the rest of the top 10 list, or even to everything else that made the top 15, this is the comparatively most forgettable episode. If you watch this episode, you'll probably enjoy it, but I can't really say that there's anything particular you would miss if you skip this one. (There's Eddie in the theater, but we had Pearl in the theater during Quest of the Delta Knights and that only made it to 62 on the list.) The extra Crow lore and Brain Guy's fun break in to the theater just isn't enough to make this one the tenth best MST3K episode of all time (pre-Netflix). At least, not in my opinion. What do you all think? Is this anyone's particular favorite, and if so, what are the things about it that you love that I'm missing?

#mst3k #mystery science theater 3000 #mst3knitathon #time chasers

As one who follows your letterboxd and is a Vermonter, I simply must know: Thoughts on Time Chasers? Have you seen much else by our wacky native son, David Giancola?

I discovered Time Chasers through Mystery Science Theater 3000, which is one of my all-time favorite things on planet Earth. So naturally, I found the movie to be absolutely, positively delightful. "I hope they end up together... at the bottom of a well torn apart by animals"

#mystery science theater 3000 #mst3k #time chasers

The official (however that works) MST3k channel has uploaded Time Chasers, one of the "classic" episodes everyone kind of agrees is awesome.

Yes it had been available on YouTube for years, as fan uploads of various quality. But here is probably the best quality version of it we will ever have, for as long as this lasts.

I've always liked this one specifically because, while the movie is amateurish and goofy, it is absolutely not a Bad Movie. We'd all be lucky and cool if we ever managed to make and release something this okay.

Plus in this case the people who made the movie seem totally into the MST3k fame, including participating in live Mistie screenings of it. Which doesn't negate any bullying that may be going on here. But that is also as good as any of this will ever get.

At any rate, keep circulating the tapes. We would literally not have everything Internet culture is without everything this is.

And I never even went to Castleton.

#mst3k #mystery science theater 3000 #time chasers #Youtube

#ultraman #mst3k #time chasers #ultraman zero #absolute tartarus #astra #dark lugiel #mike nelson #pearl forrester #crow t robot #crow #stage show

On May 5, 2016, the Rifftrax crew did their 19th Rifftrax Live Event Riffing the short Chimp the Fireman and the MST3K classic Time Chasers. The theatrical event used a longer version of the movie that had to be cut down to fit the tv run time when they did it for Mystery Science Theater 3000. The Rifftrax crew actually met with the writer/director and main cast from the movie before the event. ("Rifftrax Live: Time Chasers" Rifftrax Live Event)