By the way, Richard Kiel (MST3000 - Eegah!) is in it somewhere, and it's set in the far-off future year of 1980 ...

Prologue: Mike and the 'bots have an "Andy Rooney-off", pitting their respective Andy Rooney imitations against each other. In the end, no one wins - in fact, we all pay dearly.
Segment One: Down in Castle Forrester, Pearl, Observer, and Bobo unpack the Doomsday Machine they ordered from Spiegel. Turns out it requires some assembly. The radioactive core of the device accidentally gets sent to the SOL, where Servo and Crow want to keep it as a pet.

Segment Two: Servo tries to take the advice of the doomed astronaut in the movie, and fix his attention on "the good and the beautiful". He does this by staring at various combinations of delicious food items and photographs of sexy starlets, thereby missing the point entirely, as Servo is want to do.

Segment Three: On the SOL, Mike takes a space walk and Crow forgets to reel him back in.
Down in Castle Forrester, Pearl and Observer continue struggling to put the Doomdsay Device together. They hear ghastly, ghostly noises echoing through the halls and get all scared. And -- what do you know! - it turns out to be Bobo yawning and accidentally dragging a chain around.

Segment Four: Inspired by the look of the planet's control panels in the movie, Crow and Servo set up an array of water glasses and practice playing. Mike innocently shows them up with his virtuoso playing, temporarily upsetting the 'bots, what with their fragile self-esteem.

Segment Five: Crow dresses as a Solarite from the movie, sending him into a spiral of existential doubt about what he really is all about.
On Earth, Pearl has despaired of ever finishing the device, and her confidence as an evil world conqueror is shaken. But she's cheered by a mob of villagers apparently storming the castle - that must mean she's a threat. Her heart sinks when she learns that the peasants are there merely to welcome them to the neighborhood.

For those of you who follow such things, we found Phantom Planet eerily redolent of the beginning of last season. For one thing, it featured Colleen Grey, otherwise known as The Leech Woman (show #802) playing another devious vixen. And it had more than a passing resemblance to show #803 -- the same tiny fake-cavernous set standing in for an entire underground civilization, and the same old-guys-in-robes factor. In this case, the main old guy was played by Francis X. Bushman, who in his younger days was a silent movie star (featured in the silent version of Ben-Hur). Would that Phantom Planet had retained more of a dignified silence. Though a pretty good movie for the show, I think, it had many scenes of non-stop expositional chat, which gives us all here a collective migraine when trying to write the show. On the plus side of this movie, however: John Agar was conspicuously absent!
- Bill Corbett (No relation to "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet")

Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie/episodes availability on video and on DVD and even books

The best book for looking up movie titles and descriptions is the Movie / Video Guide by Leonard Maltin, it even has a listing for Phantom Planet (1961), which he describes and then ends with "Fascinatingly terrible movie" (yet Crow says he even liked Laserblast). And you can still get Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie while supplies last...