MST3K 906 - The Space Children

906 - The Space Children
Air/Release Date	June 13, 1998
Movie Director	Jack Arnold
Year	1958
Cast	Michael Ray, Adam Williams, Peggy Webber, Jackie Coogan, Russell Johnson
Preceded by	905 - The Deadly Bees
Followed by	907 - Hobgoblins

The Short: Century 21 Calling

Synopsis

An informational short featuring two overly-enthusiastic celibate teens who witness the amazing phone of the future! Marvel at the ground-breaking, state-of-the-art features such as call waiting, call conferencing, and touch-tone dialing. Incredible!

Information

Filmed in 1962 during the Seattle World's Fair. A promotional film for the Bell System circuit-switched telephone network, a trademark of AT&T. Directed by Robert W. Larsen. You can view the entire un-MSTied version under the public domain on YouTube here.

The Movie

Synopsis

A glowing, pulsating brain-like alien creature teleports to Earth witnessed only by two boys, establishing base camp in a cave on the beach near a military rocket launch site. It communicates telepathically with the children of the engineers and technicians involved in constructing and flying the latest in Cold War technology, an orbiting H-bomb platform to be launched atop a "six-stage"* rocket (into geosynchronous orbit over Moscow, it may perhaps be inferred). With 12-year-old Bud Brewster as "the leader" (he can immobilize people, prevent them from speaking, etc, etc., with the blob's help), the kids start willingly doing the alien's bidding as the adults try to find out what's what with their wayward waifs. (Wowza).

The blob is powerful. When an enraged, drunken stepfather racing after his wife's kid makes ready to wail on the boy with a three-foot branch, the blob takes him out. When hawk Hank Johnson (Jackie Coogan) discovers the existence of the blob in the cave, his "mind is taken away" and he winds up in the hospital, where he watches tv 8 hours a day, mostly a certain news channel, and spends his money on "amazing" products. When technician Dave Brewster tries to tell his bosses what is going on, his son Bud, who has walked through base security, shows up and prevents him from writing or speaking. And so on.

Will the children stop "The Thunderer" from taking off? If they do, considering that the other side may already have one of their own up there (or nearly so), is that a good or bad thing?

Whether the enemy already has an orbiting bomb platform is unclear to the protagonists and the viewer. Need I say, what is the point of having a doomsday machine if you don't tell the world? Mein fuhrer. But don't let me (or anyone) drone on and on.

"The Professor" from a certain "uncharted desert isle" gets to stretch a bit in a role as a "heavy".

Contains the sardonically amusing line (spoken earnestly by one of the rocket technicians) "In all our history, we (meaning the United States) have never started a war." Ha ha!

*It won't work.

The Episode

The new phone system

Host Segments

Prologue

Servo starts a kissing booth on the SOL to raise enough money to open his own chain of kissing booths. Mike requests a "dry, perfunctory grandma kiss," but complains that it's a little too aunt-like.

Host Segment 1

Pearl sets up a network of telephones for each person on the SOL and down in the castle so everyone can communicate more efficiently via a conference call. The resulting chaos urges Pearl to make Mike and the 'Bots watch the informational short Century 21 Calling... to teach them "how easy the phone of the future is!"

Host Segment 2

Mike gaily portrays the peppy kid in the short to an apathetic Crow and Servo. They decide to stop Mike the only way they know how: by hitting him with a wrecking ball.

Host Segment 3

While Mike and the 'Bots experiment with a model rocket on the SOL, things kind of blow up in Mike's face due to a slight miscommunication. Meanwhile down in the castle, Bobo gets prepped for the first launch of Pearl's very own fledgling space program.

Host Segment 4

Crow forces Mike and Servo to view his new "Fashion Means Coogan" line of lingerie.

Epilogue

The "holy blob" from the movie visits the SOL to coax Servo out of getting rid of the nuclear weapon he bought at a garage sale. Down in the castle, Pearl and Brain Guy successfully launch the rocket--without Bobo in it.

Obscure References

Host Segment 1

• "Dial *69."

In ancient times before caller ID, *69 (pronounced: “star sixty-nine”) was a code you punched into your touchtone phone that would tell you the time and the phone number of the last call you received.

• "Hello." "Hello." "Hello."

The opening to the popular barbershop ballad, “Hello My Baby” by Ida Emerson and Joseph E. Howard. It was often sung by The Three Stooges when they would introduce themselves.

Short: Century 21 Calling

• "They want their little gold jacket back."

Century 21 Real Estate is a real estate company whose employees wear gold jackets as part of their marketing campaign.

• "Look! It's Pearl Jam!"

Pearl Jam is a rock group that hails from Seattle, the city where this short takes place.

• "Is the kid in a Jack Nicklaus cult or what?"

Jack Nicklaus is considered my many to be one of the greatest golfers of all time.

• "Oh boy! Or first visit to Pat Boone World!"

Pat Boone was a commercially successful singer of pop tunes in the 1950s. He was well-known for taking songs recorded by African-American artists and re-recording them with alterations that would be considered more palatable to mainstream Caucasian listeners, thus earning a reputation as a symbol for bland "white-ness". He later went on to become an actor and motivational speaker. He later became notorious for his antediluvian political views.

• "Let's start Microsoft here!"

A riff on the fact that Microsoft headquarters is located in Redmond, Washington which is actually considered part of the Seattle metropolitan area. However, Microsoft was actually founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

• "Did Leni Riefenstahl direct this?"

Leni Riefenstahl was a female film director and actress who filmed propaganda movies for Hitler during Nazi Germany. She also pioneered a few film techniques that especially had to do with background and location shots, hence Crow’s comment on all the different shots of buildings and landscapes. Perhaps also a slide riff on the German-looking kid and the Gifts from Germany store.

• "Celebrating Pride Week at the fair."

Pride Week is an annual event held in Toronto, Ontario, but observed in many parts of the United States as well. It celebrates the homosexual lifestyle and advocates diversity. A major headliner of Pride Week is the Pride Parade which is what’s being referred to in this riff and the subsequent comments.

• Servo's beeping

Near the end of the woman's lecture and right before the close of the short, Servo beeps a short tune. This is the theme for Maxwell House. The blinking tubes here are reminiscent of the percolating coffee.

• "Sounds like something from Side Five of 'Sandinista!'"

"Sandinista!" was a three-disc album by The Clash.

• "...at the Annie Sprinkle show"

Annie Sprinkle is a performance artist known for the bizarre sexual content of her work. The riff comes from the lines “you can see it all.”

Movie Act I

• "It's Linda Hunt!"

This riff is referring to the Linda Hunt’s role as Billy Kwan, a male dwarf in the 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously.

• "Bugsy Siegel and his family arrive to start Las Vegas"

Bugsy Siegel was an American gangster who is widely credited with founding Las Vegas and building the first casinos there.

• "Wow. There’s a selkie stuck in the oil slick."

A selkie is a mythical creature that can transform from seal to human by shedding its skin. It can also revert to seal form by putting the skin back on.

• "Driving on the beach with my kids in the car…"

A reference to a The Cure song called "Killing an Arab" in which the real lyrics are: “Standing on a beach with a gun in my hand…” The song refers to a classic book called The Stranger by Albert Camus in which the main character shoots and kills an Arab man. (The actual reason why the main character commits the act is ferociously debated among literature enthusiasts.) Following September 11th, 2001, Robert Smith, the leader and songwriter for The Cure (also mentioned during the riff), first removed the song from the band’s set and then later returned it with rewritten lyrics.

• "Grendel? You home?"

Grendel is the main antagonist in the ancient Anglo-Saxon novel Beowulf written sometime around the year 800 CE. Grendel is a terrible monster that lives in a cave with his mother and emerges only to terrorize a small community of warriors nearby. He is dispatched by the hero of the story, Beowulf, after the protagonist follows Grendel into the heart of his cavern home.

• "Looks like they're having lunch with Smaug"

Most likely referring to the name of the dragon Bilbo Baggins confronted from J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit.

• "Lord of the Flies action figures!"

William Golding’s 1954 classic novel Lord of the Flies chronicles the lives of a group of children stranded on a deserted island. The children quickly devolve into following their basest instincts to survive on the island including greed and murder.

• "Say, have any of you said the darnedest thing lately?"

Kids Say the Darnedest Things was a feature of Art Linkletter's House Party from 1952-1969 on CBS, books by Linkletter, and later, an early “reality” television show hosted by Bill Cosby in the late 1990s. It consisted of young children (from when they’re old enough to talk intelligently but before they’re old enough to have a fully-developed sense of shame) being asked questions and encouraged to respond with the first thing that popped into their heads.

• "Yes. I will take money from my dad's wallet and send it to Soupy Sales."

Soupy Sales (1926–2009) is a comedian who hosted an extremely popular children’s show called Lunch with Soupy Sales that ran from the early 1950s all the way through the 60s. On New Year’s Day in 1965, Soupy admits in his autobiography that he encouraged children to steal money from their parents and send it to him so he could take a vacation to Puerto Rico.

• "Niels Bohr is using the toaster."

Niels Bohr (1885-1962) was a Danish-born theoretical physicist who was one of the primary developers of quantum mechanics. Later in his life he worked with Americans on the Manhattan Project.

• "It’s Uncle Fester in shorts!"

Jackie Coogan (1914-1984), the actor playing the guy here, is best remembered for his role as Uncle Fester on the 1960s television show The Addams Family. Mike and the ‘Bots make numerous references to this throughout the rest of the movie.

• Servo humming Gilligan’s Island theme

The actor who plays the abusive, dipsomaniacal live-in boyfriend here, Russell Johnson, is best known for his role as The Professor on the mid-1960s sit-com Gilligan's Island.

Movie Act II

• "Must be having Gilligan flashbacks"

In Gilligan’s Island, the Professor was always creating ingenious devices, usually out of coconuts (see later coconut-related riff), that promised to, in some way or another, get everyone off the island. Inevitably, klutzy Gilligan would come around and destroy the device somehow. This often sent the Professor into a comical rage.

• "He's going to use his coconut-powered spanking machine on me!"

As stated in the previous riff, the Professor was always creating devices out of the only widely-available resource on the island: coconuts. So Crow’s riff is blending Russell Johnson’s two roles as the deadbeat dad in the movie and the Professor on Giligan's Island.

• "Imagine having your butt whooped by 'and the rest.'"

Yet another riff off Gilligan’s Island. In the first season of the show, Mary Ann and the Professor were only mentioned in the opening lyrics as “the rest.” The lyrics were rewritten for subsequent seasons to include all the characters.

• "I need you to get a message to Mr. Howell."

Thurston Howell the III and his wife "Lovey" were the millionaires who were shipwrecked on Gilligan's Island.

• "Oppenheimer took my stapler."

Robert Oppenheimer was an American physicist who was deeply involved in the Manhattan Project, the code name for the project that created the first nuclear bombs.

• "Put a lightbulb under his tongue!"

One of Uncle Fester’s trademark gags on The Addams Family was the ability to light up light bulbs just by sticking them in his mouth.

Movie Act III

• "Come on, Minoxidil, kick in!"

Minoxidil is the primary active ingredient in Rogaine, a topical solution that treats baldness.

• "I think I just got the bends from that analogy."

Decompression sickness, commonly known as "the bends," is a condition resulting from a very sudden change in pressure on the body. It is often experienced by divers who fail to surface properly from deep underwater.

• "Bud...Weis...Er!"

Slogan from the wildly successful 1995 Budweiser commercial; in which three frogs croak the name Budweiser pheonetically.

• "At least we got powdered orange drink out of all this hoo-ha."

A reference to Tang, a powdered, orange-flavored drink produced by General Foods Corporation. In 1965, NASA astronauts used the drink during the Gemini space missions and that fact became an intergral part of Tang's marketing campaign.

• "She's been asked so many times by Seinfeld"

References comedian Jerry Seinfeld's dating Shoshanna Lonstein Gruss who was 17 years old when they started dating whereas Seinfled was in his late thirties at the time

• "Mandatory toques and back bacon!"
  • A toque is a type of Canadian hat.
  • Back bacon is a cut of bacon that comes from the back of a pig. It is very lean and tastes more like ham than traditional bacon.

preceded by: Season 8			MST3K Season 9			followed by: Season 10
			1998
901	The Projected Man	1998-03-14	906	The Space Children	1998-06-13	911	Devil Fish	1998-08-15
902	The Phantom Planet	1998-03-21	907	Hobgoblins	1998-06-27	912	The Screaming Skull	1998-08-29
903	The Pumaman	1998-04-04	908	The Touch of Satan	1998-07-11	913	Quest of the Delta Knights	1998-09-26
904	Werewolf	1998-04-18	909	Gorgo	1998-07-18
905	The Deadly Bees	1998-05-09	910	The Final Sacrifice	1998-07-25