Overview

Assignment: Venezuela is a 1956 short film that runs for 24 minutes produced by the Creole Petroleum Corporation, to promote American employees to work in their company in Venezuela. (Creole was the Venezuelan subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, later renamed Exxon. The Venezuelan assets of Creole Petroleum Corporation were nationalized along with those of other foreign oil firms on January 1, 1976.) It shows an American employee of the company arriving at Venezuela to work at the Lake Maracaibo oil fields. His narration serves as the letters he writes to his family. He learns about the country's historic background and sees the country's sights and its cities, which impress him with their modernity. He looks into a temporary housing complex while waiting for a house and learns Spanish while preparing for his family's eventual arrival.

Related Links

IMDB provides an overview of the rather "dry" original short here.

The MST3K version of the short is also on IMDB here

Obscure References

• "Music by Mel Bay!"

​Hardly the only time MST has made jokes at his expense, Mel Bay was a musician who created and published instruction books for guitar.

• "They thought I was Meyer Lansky."

​Meyer Lanksy was an American gangster associated with Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel. After Siegel was murdered, Lansky and his associates took over control of the Flamingo Casino and hotel in Las Vegas.

• "It's just like Levittown honey, only better!"

​Levittown , NY, was the first post-war "planned community" built. It set the benchmark for cheap, anonymous suburban housing by using identical architecture for all the houses built, creating a cookie-cutter facelessness.

• "Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right."

​A bit of advice from the movie Apocalypse Now .