906 - THE SPACE CHILDREN with short: CENTURY 21 CALLING

Genre:  ’50s era Sci-Fi (S: 1962, Color;  F: 1958, B&W)

Short:  This experiment begins with the first short subject seen in the Sci-Fi era of the show (the previous short was all the way back in ep #702).  This short is about two overly excited teens as they go to the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and then point and get spastic at everything they see there.  The beginning of the short has only a cheesy musical soundtrack, so we don’t hear anyone speak until the kids get to the AT&T/Bell Systems pavilion and we get a demo of all the new phone technologies coming from Bell Labs.  We see call-waiting, which only took 20 years after this short was made to be released to the public, and we see a phone being used to remotely turn off the oven back home, something we still can’t do! (Come on, Bell, what’s taking so long?)   The riffing by M&tBs on this short was fairly good, making it the highlight of this episode.

Synopsis:  The feature is a dated sci-fi film from the ’50s that stars Uncle Fester from The Addams Family, the Professor from Gilligan’s Island, and Mr. Driesdall from the Beverly Hillbillies and is a bit reminiscent of the old Twilight Zone series.  It is about a beachside rocket launch facility in which all of the military personnel and their families live in a nearby trailer park.  The kids there find a glowing blob near the beach and this blob uses telepathy to instruct the kids to totally hose up the launch of the rocket.  So the kids are obeying the growing alien blob while the adults are helpless to stop them – it has now become the Trailer Park of the Damned.  The whole thing ends with some religious mumbo-jumbo about children, suggesting rather pathetically a divine source for the blob instead just simply alien.

Don’s Review:  The riffing on this movie was very disappointing – the vast majority of the riffs are simply dumb and not funny in the least.  This was the type of feature that, in previous seasons, the show used to hum along on all cylinders during.  Instead here, it chokes and sputters a lot – definite proof that the quality of the show is in decline.  So, an okay episode, but really disappointing when compared to what the show used to be.

Don’s Rating:     [ S:   F: ]