SUPERMAN!! BATMAN!! MST3K!! DONNELLYS!! UPRIGHT!! HORROR!! HercVault!!

I am – Hercules!!

Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Vol. 11 serves up another four classic movies to be mocked by puppets pretending to be robots: 1) “Ring of Terror” (1962) (2.6) is about a frat pledge charged with retrieving the ring off a corpse. The Comedy Channel originally cablecast it Nov. 3, 1990. Joel indulges a life-size Operation game. A vacuum cleaner is autopsied. The Will Geer Institute For Truss Research is referenced. “If Chauffeurs Ruled The World” is sung. 2) “Indestructible Man” (1956) (4.9) is about an executed criminal, resurrected by scientists, who seeks vengeance upon his traitorous cohorts. Comedy Central originally cablecast it Aug. 19, 1992. Cereal novels are introduced. There’s trouble in the undersea kingdom. Joel ponders what he would do if rendered indestructible. A cop/donut joke truce is drafted. 3) “Tormented” (1960) (4.14) is about a jazz pianist who finds his upcoming wedding spoiled by the ghost of the woman he killed. Comedy Central originally cablecast it Sept. 26, 1992. The Aunt Catherine Wheel and The Drinking Jacket debut. Joel is blackmailed from inside a duct. Pop singers Michael Bolton and Lionel Ritchie are flung from a lighthouse. 4) “Horrors of Spider Island” (1960) (10.11) is about a giant spider on a deserted island that turns a marooned fellow into a spider-man. The SciFi Channel originally cablecast it July 25, 1999, and it was the antepenultimate MST3K. Crow’s second career as a syndicated newspaper columnist is exposed. Pearl relocates Castle Forrester. The bots trap Mike in a giant web, and he is himself transformed into a spider-man. Amazon has this on the set’s extras:

Extras include theatrical trailers for all of the films save Ring of Terror; a brief interview with Tormented director Bert I. Gordon, his daughter Susan, and star Joseph Turkel, and wrap-arounds from the syndicated Mystery Science Hour, with Mike Nelson as an obsequious Jack Perkins, are also included. However, the best supplement is the second MST3K Jukebox, which compiles some of the show's funniest and most memorable musical numbers, including "Sidehackin'," Joel and the 'bots' garage-rock tribute to The Sidehackers and the incredible "Patrick Swayze Christmas" from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

The New Adventures of Superman: The Complete Animated Series contains the 35 six-minute animated “Superman” shorts Filmation produced for CBS’ 1966-1967 Saturday-morning TV season. These were stiff and crude and cheap (Filmation was the same company that went on to make “The Archie Show” and the animated “Star Trek” and “Fat Albert”), but they gave us our first non-print incarnations of such DC icons as Brainiac, Mxyzptlk, The Parasite and Toyman. Veteran DC Comics writer George Kashdan was among those brought on to script episodes. The voices of Lois and Clark were provided by Joan Alexander and Bud Collyer, the same actors who provided those voices in the 17 far more sophisticated Fleisher theatrical shorts of the early 1940s. “Caddyshack’s” Ted Knight played the 1960s Perry White. “The New Adventures of Superman” morphed into “The Superman/Aquaman Hour” for 1967/1968, then into “The Batman/Superman Hour” for 1968/69. Note please that the 32 “Superman” segments created for these two later Filmation series are not included on the set. The new set comes with a minidoc titled “Superman in ’66.”

The New Adventures of Batman was a Filmation project for CBS that came along in 1977. It was memorable for employing the voices of Adam West and Burt Ward, who played the live-action Batman and Robin a decade earlier. The series also featured Batgirl and revived as a regular character Bat-Mite, a Mxyzptlkian imp from another dimension who was phased out of the Batman comic books a decade earlier. Weirdly, different versions of Batman and Robin, with different voices, were at the same time members of Hanna-Barbara’s “Super Friends” over on ABC. For some reason it was cool for two studios and two networks to share the Caped Crusader and The Boy Wonder, but the two series had exclusives on certain villains: “Challenge of the Super Friends” was not permitted to use The Joker and most of the other Bat-villains while “The New Adventures of Batman” was not allowed use of Scarecrow or The Riddler. All 16 half-hour episodes are included on the new complete series set as well as commentaries on two episodes by Filmation founder Lou Scheimer and Filmation historian Michael Swanigan. The set also contains a minidoc, "Dark Vs. Light: Filmation and the Batman."

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