THE WORST WE CAN FIND - Christmas Advent Calendar: Day 21 - THE CHRISTMAS DRAGON

 

It’s Day 21 of The Worst We Can Find Christmas Advent Calendar and we jump forward to the final episode of the most recent season with The Christmas Dragon.

The Christmas Dragon (2014)

Program: Mystery Science Theater 3000

Air-Date: December 16, 2022

 

The movie poster (yes, it did play some theaters) and the MST3K streaming art.

Movie Plot: Um … yeah … um … Oh, there’s this girl and it’s like Middle-Earth times and her name is Ayden, played by Bailee Johnson, who looks like the granddaughter of April from Angels Revenge. Her mother and father are captured by slave-traders and killed by a dragon before Ayden can even say “Packers!”

Years later, she’s in an orphanage with other kids and she gets a rock that lights up from an elf that dies on her, man. The elf lives long enough to tell her that the rock will guide her “to the north” to save Christmas, since no one believes in it anymore. (I know, it seems unlikely in a world with magic, elves, orcs, and dragons, but bear with us.) She and a bunch of other kids escape the orphanage and meet up with Airk (Jake Stormoen), who turns out to be the son of Santa (what a coincidence). Along the way, they save a baby dragon who becomes protective of Ayden and the group arrive at Santa’s place.

Santa is in bad shape, but they realize if they deliver presents for Santa, it will revive him and he’ll be his old self. They do and he does and everyone except the slave traders and the dead creatures along the way are happy. Way it goes.

And for the movie named The Christmas Dragon, you sure don’t see much of the dragon in the movie. Probably to avoid any lawsuits from the How to Train Your Dragon people.

Jonah, Emily, and Joel watch as Santa and the kids torture humans on the ground. Merry Christmas!

Episode Plot: Kinga still has Jonah on one SOL. She also has Emily on a simulation of the SOL, and – with help of Dr. Ekhardt – she has recaptured Joel and the original SOL. Over the course of season thirteen, she has forced each of them to watch a number of movies with their respective Crow, Tom, and GPC, but now it is time for her new experiment where all three human subjects will be sent into the theater without any assistance from the bots.

Joel, Jonah, and Emily used this moment where they are all together to devise a plan to help them escape together through the Time Bag (which had been used to get Joel in an earlier episode). Their plan is told to each other in code, which is done through rhyming and music that Kinga and Max can’t understand.

The three get together on Joel's SOL.

After several segments where each host is in the theater with their respective bots, the final segment of the movie plays with the three hosts together in Joel’s SOL, which he does have limited control over. Using the power of music, which allows the trio to perform a number of earlier MST3K songs, they finally escape with the Mike version of the theme song and with the surprising help of Pearl (who wants to go to a jazz fest from the period) in the Deep Hurting ship through the Time Bag and back to 1991.

Kinga is in tears at the failure of her project. Dr. Kabahl, the “mysterious financier from the future,” withdraws his funding and demands payback for what was already used. Max tries to cheer Kinga up by mentioning that the bots are still around to be used as subjects at least, and there’s still the Gizmoplex that she built. The Gizmoplex is then destroyed by a meteor.

Thoughts: This movie was made by Arrowstorm Entertainment and is one in a series of incredibly small-budgeted movies by the company; many put together through Kickstarter. Most of their films are fantasy films, with a few science fiction and horror films amongst the lineup. And it shows, but not quite in a bad enough way to make you want to hate them for trying. The acting is okay, the makeup is decent on the orcs, the CGI dragon is okay, and it’s obviously a park they’re filming in, but they do a decent job in hiding that fact.

The story is a bit incoherent, however, and it is never quite clear why certain things happen unless you play along (for example, Ayden’s relationship to the dragon is hinted as a bounding because she had been attacked when she was younger by one, but it’s never out-right said). We have this glowing rock to guide her, but it’s a plot point abandoned midway through and everything else is aligned with this really cool black orb that Airk obtains for them. But the movie rolls along and the plot comes to an end that works.  Why the kids would want to be with the old guy who they don’t really know is a question to ponder, but it makes it seem it is a happy ending. There’s certainly worse recent fantasy movies being made for kids. I dunno, maybe I’m just full of the Christmas Sprit.

What’s that? No, I said full of the Spirit.  Not the word you’re thinking of.

Favorite Riff: (after arriving at Santa’s place pretty easily to see a dark, falling-apart workshop) “Well, I don’t know, it’s not very climatic.”

Emily and Jonah introducing the episodes to air in season thirteen.

The Riffing: After a nearly three-year period of the show ending it’s two season run on Netflix, it was decided to do another fundraiser to create a new streaming platform for the show, where fans could not only pick up old episodes to watch, but see new ones created before anyone else. That fundraiser was successful, and we soon were introduced to the White Dot.

Oh, and season thirteen, with thirteen episodes starting in March 2022 and running typically once a month with a new episode and plenty of new shorts featuring a variety of characters riffing over them, along with live events through the year, and the first 3-D movie done (The Bubble). As promised during the fundraiser, when a specific goal was reached, it was agreed that Joel would come back to riff some of the movies in the series. This is why the original SOL was seen with Joel, although it doesn’t quite follow the canon of what happened to the SOL during the Mike years (but I explain more about my own thoughts on that, perhaps too much so, in The Worst We Can Find).

Emily Connors (Emily Marsh) was also introduced into the canon of the television series after appearing on the Cheesy live tour as Emily Crenshaw and then as Emily Connors in the Time Bubble tour and in some live streaming events during the COVID period of 2020.

While there had been earlier instances of the human hosts meeting up in previous episodes, this was the first episode where they riffed a movie together and one of the rare times none of the bots appeared in the theater for a segment of a movie. The concept of the ending, with the trio escaping, was also a way to conclude the season on a type of cliffhanger. As seen in previous seasons, this didn’t necessarily mean that the show would come back the following season with a setting in 1991, however. As earlier cliffhangers have shown (like Jonah being taken away by Reptilicus, and later by trapping the Mads in a version of the theater), the following season would start with Jonah once again captured without much explanation. Nor should we worry much about it. After all, it’s just a show.

The gang goes out the old fashion way - singing!

The episode as a whole is interesting in trying to tie everything up, including the hosts attempting vague goodbyes to their bots, the fate of the Gizmoplex, the “mysterious financier from the future” plot, and how to set up the cliffhanger. The rhyming element isn’t quite as successful and it should have been (one could see it played out more like how Forrester and Frank would have handled it, perhaps with them ignoring things out-right until too late, or having instrument malfunctions, which Emily and Jonah could have easily done in character), but there had to be a way to convey the storyline to viewers, so it does take care of that issue. Having Mike’s theme song be the means to leave is a nice homage as well. The riffing moves along well and it’s an adequate movie for a finale since it was Christmas time anyway, but there is a tinge of sadness about the whole thing because it was the end of the season.

The end of the show? Well, that remains to be seen. MST3K didn’t even exist except in reruns for many, many years and made a strong comeback through the help of the fans. I think there’s still life in the old girl to see another round, or two, or three soon enough. We know enough from the unsuccessful fundraiser in 2023 that a lot of the cast were ready to come back to bring us many of the same characters we had seen before. Something is bound to happen.

Meanwhile, there’s still RiffTrax, and The Mads, as well as other riffing groups around, like Master Pancake, to keep us going until the SOL returns to the sky. Then, we will see where we are and when we are as more movies get riffed in the experiments to come.