Entertainment
 

The Beatniks

From MST3K

415 - The Beatniks
Air Date November 25, 1992
Movie Director Paul Frees
Year 1960
Cast Tony Travis, Joyce Terry, Peter Breck, Karen Kadler
Short General Hospital, segment 2
Cast Roy Thinnes, Emily McLaughlin
Year 414 - Tormented
Preceded by 416 - Fire Maidens of Outer Space

Contents

The Short

Synopsis

Jessie loves her husband Phil, who is in love with another woman, who is engaged to another man. . . so Jessie decides to host a painfully awkward engagement party.

Information

The Movie

Synopsis

It's 1960 in Los Angeles, and 28-year old petty criminal Eddie Crane (Tony Travis) is headed nowhere. He leads a posse of five smelly, sadistic hoodlums who don Halloween masks and hold up mom-and-pop stores for lush money, then retreat to a one-table "diner" to squabble over the pathetic spoils.

He's quite the cynic ("Nobody does nothin' for nobody for nothin'", he opines bitterly) and he seems to harbor a grudge against the world.

When superannuated talent agent Harry Bayliss (Charles Delaney, who passed away before the film was released - coincidence? You decide) chances to see Eddie twitch, warble, writhe, gesture and smirk to the strains of a jukebox in a shoebox-sized greasy spoon, he - naturalement - wants to sign him to a big recording contract, pronto. "You call that singin'? That was nothin'!" scoffs the jaded Eddie. How true that is. At any rate, his twisted gang goads him into accepting the proposition.

Eddie easily jettisons his thug persona long enough to sensitively render a maudlin love ballad at an audition for one of Bayliss' contacts and then he's on his way to fame and fortune. After a quick cleanup by Bayliss' secretary Helen Tracy and a tentative sharing of intimacies over a quiet lunch with same, Eddie next delivers a couple of somnambulistic "live" television performances that counter-intuitively inspire feverish screams of girlish desire, cause the studio switchboards to be jammed with fans' phone calls and rocket his career skyward.

From the first time he meets her, he is drawn to Helen - perhaps the only decent girl he has ever known and a stark contrast to Iris, the hateful psychopathic harpy and kabuki model he hangs out with. He begins to dimly sense the existence of a better world than the one in which he has hitherto dwelt and starts to view his former running buddies in a starkly malignant light.

As Eddies' star rises, his "pal", the erratic, jealous, semi-psychotic Mooney (scenery-chewing Peter Breck) becomes ever more violent and determined to keep Eddie in his place - with the gang, in the gutter. When Mooney suddenly murders a big-boned barkeep over a ham sandwich, Eddie succumbs to despair and is ready to throw all of his new found good fortune away because, as he tells Helen - "I'm no good... I'm just no good!"

Eddie disappears to sort things out and Bayliss goes to the hotel room of "the gang" to find out what the problem is, where the shrieking, paranoid Mooney promptly slashes him with a razor. He is taken to the hospital in serious condition and the police begin a manhunt for Eddie.

Will Eddie really give up the promise of a new life - the decent, respectable girl, the career, the fame and the money - and stay with his despicable cronies?

Contains some of the worst attempts at songs ever written, plenty of continuity errors and boom shadows, and no beatniks.

Information

The Episode

Host Segments

Prologue: Joel cruelly dominates the Bots in a painful game of rock-paper-scissors, until Gypsy crushes Joel in revenge.

Segment One (Invention Exchange): Everyone recovers from their injuries received the prologue. The Mads have developed Good Luck Troll Costumes, based on those weird little plastic troll dolls that were all the rage in the 90's. Joel demos his literal take on Pocket Pool, though he denies Tom Servo the use of the bridge.

Segment Two: Either you are or you aren't a beatnik, according to Joel and the Bots, and the folks in the movie really aren't. To help the folks at home, they helpfully list ways to tell if you aren't a beatnik.

Segment Three: The Bots hold a slumber party, and discuss dreamy Tony Travis from the movie. Turns out he's a high school pal of Joel's; however, the phone call they end up placing is less than inspiring.

Segment Four: Servo stars in a dramatization of the life of a 50’s rock star based on the movie, from anonymity to overnight stardom to pathetic has-been.

Segment Five: Crow goes nuts like Peter Breck's character Moon. Joel reads a letter in the meantime, and he and Tom debate if "dickweed" a swear word. The Mads find their costumes less than ideal for pushing the button.

Stinger: A crazed Moon throws his gun.

Other Notes

Guest Stars

Airdate Notes

Obscure References

  • "I have seen the best guys of my emanation deployed by badness."

Frank is misquoting the Allen Ginsberg poem "Howl".

  • "...Mrs. Harvey." "She's a big rabbit!"

A reference to the 1950 movie Harvey, in which Jimmy Stewart plays a man with a six-foot-tall rabbit named Harvey for an imaginary friend.

  • "E-O eleven..."

From the theme song to the original version of Ocean's Eleven.

  • "Let's do some crimes!"

A quote from the 1984 movie Repo Man.

  • "Travis Bickle?!" "Sometimes I wish a rain would come and wash away all the scum of the city."

Travis Bickle was the title character in the 1976 film Taxi Driver.

  • "Hey, I was watching 'She's the Sheriff'!"

She's the Sheriff was a sitcom that aired in first-run syndication from 1987 to 1989.

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