MST3K: King Dinosaur

Episode Rating: 3 stars

Plot: We discover the planet Nova, and thus decide to send two men and two women up there in a rocket. The place looks exactly like Earth, except some things are huge. So after seeing a giant bee, giant crocodile, giant armadillo, they assume the giant iguana is not a giant iguana, but a Tyranosaurus. Then they decide to nuke the whole island for no good reason.

Short: X Marks The Spot - The New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles tells the people back home to stop killing themselves by driving badly. To do this they first bring out the official in charge, who may or may not be a mannequin that can move its lips, and then the story of a guardian angel who tries to keep this nutjob from killing himselves and others.

Opening: Joel does a poetry reading. The bots have pretentious goatees.

Invention exchange: Frank accidentally flattens Forrester while the latter is working on the elevator. The intended invention was for the unicycle with a monster truck tire for crushing mimes, but Forrester just declares himself the invention as the pocket scientist. Joel has incredibly stinky sweatsocks.

Host segment 1: Crow considers whether or not he's qualified. His solutions start from the practical and quickly lead to the bizarre. "Police the lives of those around you and get your sensibilities way out of whack."

Host segment 2: The infamous Joey the Lemur sketch. Joel apparently thinks the Lemus should talk like Gillbert Gottfried.

Host segment 3: The emotional scientist bit crashes as Joel and Crow give up for a while, but finally Joel has a change of heart and they do Enrico Fermi, Dean Martin, and Jerry Lewis.

End: Crow bemoans that he's seen four Robert Lippert films but never seen a Kurasawa film. Joel tries to get them over it by a dedication to Lippert's works, which they stop, and a song and dance, which they also stop. He finally shows them the theremin he made for a while as they read a letter.

Stinger: Blondie screams, Ralph stumbles around and passes out.

Zingers

Crow: If you kill yourself here, we can't kill them over there.

Commissioner: Most of the drivers and pedestrians involved didn't break all the rules. Just once in a while they were careless or inconsiderate-
Crow: Or they didn't want to live in New Jersey any more.

Joel: Hot dog, I've got a date with death!

God: Ah, Joe Dokes. You were born in New Jersey, eh?
Crow: I thought I smelled something.

Angel: I can't say Joe went out looking for trouble...
Crow: But I did see him down by the waterfront once dressed in a Spartan costume going, "Kitty, kitty."

God: Tell me, did he ever drive when he'd been drinking.
[Angel and Joe are silent and uncomfortable]
Joel: Oh Jeez, I need my other scroll for that, that's a doozy.

God: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury...
Joel: Oh that's great, we're stranded in space, and we still have to pull jury duty.

Announcer: There is no margin for error.
Crow: There is a margin for shame, however.

Joel: (as JFK) Before this decade is out, we will land a rocket on a piece of stock footage. Ask not what a process shot can do for you...

Crow: [as the guy treats Ralph's wounds] Hey, your spending a lot of time on that one nipple there...

Blond Scientist: Just relax.
Crow: Relax? There's a bee the size of a moose over there and you want him to relax?

Tom: Thrill to the exciting, the most exciting, fight of the Precambrian Era!

Joel: I might be dead, but I'm ahead on points.

Ralph: I brought the atom bomb, I think we should use it.
Tom: Oh that's your answer for everything!

Joel: [after they watch a nearby atomic explosion] Yeah, let's go home and grow some three-headed kids.

My Thoughts

X Marks the Spot is a great, great short, right up there with the Union Pacific ones. First take the fact you have a hokey safety video with God in a court like a skating rink, a goofy looking angel, and a lunatic driver, and that's already good. Add in the fact that, of any state it could be, it winds up being New Jersey (for foreign visitors: New Jersey is unfairly treated as being a cesspool of a state, home to smelly refineries, garbage mounds, and organized crime) and this is just wall-to-wall jokes. This is the best part of the episode.

The movie is fairly average. I mean, Lippert movies are pretty much standard MST fare, so no real surprise. The thing that brings the episode down really is the rather lame host segments. It's no surprise that in season six they would parody themselves by having Forrester and Frank do the Joey the Lemur bit.

Still Store

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