THE WORST WE CAN FIND - Christmas Advent Calendar: Day 12 - Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

 

It’s Day 12 of The Worst We Can Find Christmas Advent Calendar and we’re half-way to Christmas Day itself. To celebrate, let’s get back to one of the big movies of the Christmas season for riffing fans, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians! But maybe not the version you’re thinking about.

 

The original movie poster and the streaming artwork for the Cinematic Titanic version.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (November 1964)

Program: Cinematic Titanic

Air-Date: November 2008

Plot: Billy (Victor Stiles) and Betty Foster (Donna Conforti) are kidnapped by Martians, led by leader Kimar (Leonard Hicks), the sinister Voldar (Vincent Beck) and the idiot Dropo (Bill McCutcheon). The Martians demand to be told where Santa (John Call) is so they can take him back to Mars to entertain the Martian children like the trained monkey that he is.

They locate him at the North Pole, naturally, freeze some elves and Mrs. Claus, and take Santa, Billy, and Betty back to Mars with them.  (We assume the freeze ray used on the occupants of Santa’s workshop wears off, or Santa is going to have a lot of cleaning up to do in his workshop when he gets back.) There, Santa rolls up his sleeves and gets to work, bringing war toys and consumerism to all the boys and girls of Mars. However, Billy and Betty want to go home, and Santa misses sweet lovin’ from Mrs. Clause, but it appears the Martians may force them to stay. Meanwhile, Voldar makes many attempts to kill or kidnap Santa to stop his rampage on the planet.

Dropo, the laziest man on Mars, helps save the day. Good for him. 

The gang watches as Santa wonders why he's being goosed by a robot.

Favorite Riff:

Todd: We have a gem of a Christmas movie. It is called Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

Trace:  Whaa? A-ho-ho, no, no, no, no, nooooo. Waaaaaahhhhhhhh!

(Trace tries to run off, but is soon captured and returned to the group to watch the movie)

A book and record version of the story. But do we really want to know why they want Santa?

Thoughts:  Paul Jacobson had started a production company in the early 1960s in hopes of producing movies. To get things rolling, he threw together an idea about Santa fighting Martians in hopes of pushing out a cheap family film that would pay back enough money to do more serious work. A script was thrown together and two months and ten days of filming later he had a completed movie.

The film was shot at Michael Myerburg Studios in Long Island, with directing by documentary filmmaker Nicholas Webster (who also did a screen adaptation of Purile Victorious starring Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Alan Alda in 1963). Webster told Newsday during filming that he enjoyed taking a break from making serious documentaries to do the movie. The film was shot in one-to-four takes and shows it. Still, for a cheap, rushed gimmick of a film, the acting actually isn’t that bad, which is understandable as nearly everyone in the cast were out-of-work New York actors. Of course, the biggest name in the cast is Pia Zadora, who would go on to be fun to watch in the original Hairspray. Her film career got derailed with Butterfly in 1982 after controversy that her husband helped buy a Golden Globe Aware for her, but she seems to have settled down to performing showtunes in Vegas. Vincent Beck, Voldar, appeared often on television and in movies in various roles, typically as a bad guy. Also playing to what works was Bill McCutcheon, Dropo, who appeared in various movies in goofy, meek roles, including Steel Magnolias (1989). While Call, Stiles, and Conforti were all from the Broadway stage.

 

Dropo saves the day. And he makes everyone laugh. You won't, but everyone else will.

Any hopes of making money off the movie were soon dashed. Embassy Picture did pick up the movie for release in 1964, but only in regional areas and it was not until the 1970s in some areas of the country that the movie was seen on the big screen, and typically as a one-off matinee during the Christmas season. (I myself saw it as a seven-year-old with my brother in my hometown theater while my parents went shopping for Christmas presents. The main thing I remember was all the kids getting a toy at the theater that was a very cheap light-up top, which broke the moment I got it home. It was still more entertaining than the movie.) Nevertheless, the movie got a lot of airplay in the 1970s and 1980s on television channels around the holidays, leading to it being recognized as a movie in the same category as Plan Nine from Outer Space (especially after a write-up about it in the Medveds’ Golden Turkey Awards book). Thus, perfect for a show like MST3K

The ad for the showing of the movie I saw in 1971. Yeah, I'm still a bit miffed about that "Free Christmas Gift" handed out.

The Riffing: Perfect for MST3k, and usually seen as one of the best episodes of the series. RiffTrax has also returned to the well to cover the movie in one of their excellent live events that later was released on DVD and is on their Streaming channel.

But this gives us a chance to talk about Cinematic Titanic, the seldom seen collaboration of nearly everyone BESIDES the RiffTrax guys in riffing more movies after the original MST3K finished. Born out of talks with Jim Mallon to bring the show back with the original cast that eventually fell apart, Joel, Josh, Trace, Frank, and Mary Jo got together to do a new show that would continue the silhouette concept from MST3K, but in a manner more down-to-earth (no pun … okay, pun intended; I’m sorry; I blame my childhood and I am weak).

Written by the cast, the show was structured with the five members standing (Joel, Josh, and Trace) or sitting (Mary Jo and Frank) on podiums to the left and right with the movie playing in the center, as if it was being projected on a large movie screen in front of them. As mentioned in the previous blog about The Film Crew, it was felt that a storyline was needed to explain why these people were stuck commenting on the movie being shown. Thus, it would be explained in early episodes that the five had been forcibly sent to a type of quasi-military bunker to review movies and have them saved on “nanotated disc” to be placed in the Time Tube at the end of each movie (this was a tube that dropped from the ceiling for Joel to insert the disc into at the end of every episode).

At various times in the movie, one member of the cast would ask for the movie to be stopped in order to present information or even guests related in some way to the film. These segments were almost always staged so that silhouettes would appear to look like various objects, allowing for a cheap illusion similar in some ways to the effects work done by Joel in other projects like The TV Wheel.  It became such a common device that by the time of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians it would be used a punchline to the gag, with Joel bringing out various “gifts” for each member, only to warn them away from actually grabbing them for various reasons.

The first Cinematic Titanic episode, The Oozing Skull (renamed version of Brain of Blood), was done in December 2007, following a live appearance for the Industrial Light & Magic employees earlier that month.  DVD and downloads of the episode became available and soon followed by four more episodes in 2008, including Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. After two more episodes like this in 2009, it was decided to abandon the storyline of the bunker and instead begin releasing selected live performances of the team riffing movies; performances that usually were opened by members of the cast doing portions of their stand-up material (although these segments were never shown on the DVDs or streaming versions of the shows).

The riffing style for Cinematic Titanic is naturally different from MST3K, as the cast is playing versions of themselves and not funneling the jokes through Servo, Crow, and the human host. Thus, more jokes were made directed at each other in the cast and about everyday issues and even politics than permitted in the original series, a humorous aspect that was picked up by the RiffTrax team around the same time. There are also some references to the old show, such as the opening with Trace trying to escape and Josh mentioning he never had to sit through the movie before. The riffs themselves are pretty good, although longtime fans who had seen the MST3K version too many times may struggle with shaking the old riffs out of their heads for the new ones (in relations to that, good on the gang to come up with so much more based on the same material after having gone through it once already).

Live performances and DVDs would continue until the end of 2013 when it was decided to disband the group as it was getting harder to bring the five together to record together and set up schedules for touring. At least there is the evidence of these live shows for fans to return to in the years to come, many of which are still available to watch via YouTube, Amazon, and Tubi, amongst others.

With the project stopping at the end of 2013, everyone was moving onward to other things. Even so, there was still an acorn of an idea of bringing back MST3K floating around, which continued to grow over the next two years until a deal with made with Mallon over the show and Joel began working in 2015 with Shout! Factory to bring the program back with new episodes. All of that and more of which is covered in my book, The Worst We Can Find!