Prologue: Crow decides he has a famous catch phrase: "You know you want me, baby!" He's already got LOTS of T-shirts printed up (sure, they're paid for, with Mike's credit card).
Segment One: Following instructions from Pearl, The 'bots try to come up with catch phrases for Mike. He keeps choosing the dullest ones.
Meanwhile, Pearl has decided she has her own public television station, and can make lots of cold hard cash holding a pledge drive.
Segment Two: Crow and Servo order a pet monkey for the SOL from Instant Monkeys Online. The monkey takes an instant dislike to Mike, and keeps throwing things at him. Funny, huh?!
Segment Three: Mike is still having his dominance challenged by the monkey.
Down at the pledge drive, Pearl is calling attention to some of the other fine programming on her public TV station, notably a stunning special starring well, herself. She shows an excerpt: she and Brain Guy performing a lyrcially deficient love duet.
Segment Four: Inspired by the movie, Servo decides to dopple himself down to Nannite world and mess with them. But he winds up in a tough Nanite neighborhood, and gets his dopple-butt syntho-kicked.
Segment Five: The 'Bots have enlisted Bobo to come up to the SOL and talk the monkey down. But Bobo goes over to the other side, and in a show of simian solidarity, begins chucking HUGE things on the bridge.
Meanwhile, Pearl is winding up her pledge drive, counting her greenbacks. She makes sure to tip her phone bank - which consists of Ortega, and only Ortega.
Stinger: Raul Julia: "Mom my nuts." (That's sure what it sounds like.)
The real problem here - rare indeed for our show - is that the lead character is played by an actor who is actually a very good and highly respected actor: Raul Julia. And the recently deceased Raul Julia, at that. So we spent much of the movie feeling a bit worried that we might be besmirching the late Mr. Julia's reputation.
But in the end, we went light on Raul and hard on this extraordinarily dumb movie whose relentless "funny" techno-futuro-jargon was the screenwriting equivalent of water torture. And we felt buoyed by the happy knowledge that Raul's legacy outlived this early career train wreck of a movie (which was shot on horrible cheap-TV-looking video, no less! Not easy on the eyes).
The Public Pearl TV sketches were inspired by the weird and disturbing fact that this movie was partially bankrolled by a New York PBS affiliate, WNET. It's in the credits! Look! They can't deny it! Think about that next time your local public televsion station fires up Riverdance again and tries to guilt-trip you into cutting them a big check!
- Bill Corbett (still no relation to Tom Corbett, Space Cadet)
Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie/episodes availability on videoand on DVD
The best book for looking up movie titles and descriptions is the Movie / Video Guide by Leonard Maltin.
If for some reason Overdrawn at the Memory Bank isn't available on videotape, you can still get Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie while supplies last...
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