New Year’s Eve is my least favorite holiday; it’s a rookie drinking night where average people spend way too much money in over-crowded bars in order to let loose for the first time in their lives, but only end up annoyingly drunk and making it everyone else’s problem. So instead of muscling up to the bar and overpaying for drinks at my local haunts, I skip the whole mess and stay home to watch some sort of television marathon.
You see kids, back before the days of streaming, you couldn’t really binge your favorite shows unless you had physical recordings of the episodes. Cable and network television controlled your ability to veg out on the same intellectual property all day. But, around New Year’s, stations used to load up one kind of show and play it all day—usually something cheap to rerun. My absolute favorites were black-and-white “Twilight Zone” episodes on the SciFi channel and “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ over on Comedy Central.
Nowadays we can stream whatever, whenever, but there’s still something special about binging one thing all New Year’s to me. And I’m not alone. There is a YouTube channel dedicated to streaming “MST3K” around New Year’s to keep the tradition alive, for instance.
So this year, let me introduce you to one of the best scenes in one of the worst movies the gang at MST3K ever covered. If you’re not familiar with the premise of the show, “MST3K” involves three characters—Joel (or Mike) and robots Servo and Crow—trapped on a space station watching terrible movies a mad scientist uses to try and torture his unwilling subject. Joel built robots Servo and Crow to help him keep his sanity by riffing together on the terrible films.
This is the car chase scene from the incredibly bad (and incredibly memorable) film Mitchell and the guys’ commentary on it is a laugh riot. See for yourself:
I lose it every time at the line “This makes Driving Mrs. Daisy look like Bullitt.” The Lincoln Continental has never looked slower. How did a film this terrible get made? Who cares; all that matters is that it was made, and then made fun of, and we are better for it.