Season One, Episode One: The Crawling Eye
Network: Comedy Channel
Riffers: Tom Servo, Joel Robinson, and Crow T. Robot
The Mads: Dr. Clayton Forrester and Dr. Laurence Erhardt
Plot Synposis: At a remote Alpine village, mountain climbers are dying in large numbers. The culprit? A One-eyed, tenactled alien that hides in an radioactive cloud (and away from the movie till the last few minutes.) The only hope is scientist Alan Brooks (Forrest Tucker of F Troop fame) and a woman who keeps having 'visions' of what is happening.
Host Segments:
Segment One (Invention Exchange): Electric bagpipes (invented by Joel and the bots) and antiperspirant developed from dogs (The Mads). Despite the flaws of the antiperspirant, it wins this Invention Exchange.
Segment Two: Joel explains to the bots why humans losing their head is a big deal, before the bots argue with each other.
Segment Three: Gypsy unraveled herself. While unraveled, Joel and the Bots try to scratch an itch Gypsy has.
Segment Four: The Bots are scared to death by the horrible acting of Forrest Tucker. Joel then explains to the bots why the eye is creepy.
Ending Segment: Joel gives ram chips to each bot for telling a good and bad thing about the movie. Since Gypsy didn't see the movie, he asks Gypsy what 2 plus 2 is. Her answer? Richard Baseman. Joel gives her a ram chip anyways.
Review:
The movie suffered from bad acting,a laughably bad eye/tentacle monster, and terrible audio quality. Still, it was at least watchable on it's own, what with the silly premise, and mundane plot. A classic case of So Bad It's Good.
The riffs aren't on the same level as the later seasons, in both quality and quantity. Since this was the first episode where they had scripts, it was a decent first time, though at points I think they were still trying to improvise. The problem with the riffs was that 90% of the riffs are about the exact same things. F Troop jokes, fat jokes, bad looking background quips, or eye puns. After a while, it goes from pretty funny to half a chuckle to wanting them to stop talking (though there are long sections of dead air.)
Despite the weak riffs there were a few decent ones at least, and the host segments were pretty amusing. It's not one of the best episodes of the series (hell, it's not even one of the best of season one) but it's a fair start enough start. 5/10.
Favorite Riff: Crow (while imitating the Popeye Theme as a dead guy controlled by the alien chokes another man out through a door): "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man! I got a guy's head in my hand!" - I kinda give this the prop for favorite riff because of how random and out there it was. That, and not being a fat/eye/background/F Troop joke >_>.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoW_OwA0f7g