Mystery Science Thetre 3000: "Invasion of the Neptune Men" (New Toei, Toei Company, ProPix, 1061; MST3K version, 1997)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at about 9:45 I ran my husband Charles and I a YouTube file of a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode based on the 1961 Japanese children’s film Invasion of the Neptune Men. The plot of Invasion of the Neptune Men, to the extent it has one, deals with the titular Neptune Men invading and trying to take over Earth and the efforts of five Japanese boys (all still far away from puberty, though that doesn’t stop director Kôji Ohta from giving us a lot of mid-snots of their butts – quite frankly, among the few people I would actually recommend this film to are members of NAMBLA) to stop them. Of course they try to alert the authorities and the authorities brush them off and say they couldn’t care less, and all they have in the way of allies that could save the Earth from destruction and colonization by the Neptune Men is a nondescript semi-superhero called “Space Chief” (Shin’ichi Chiba) who flies in on a spacecraft that, as one of the MST3K robots joked, looks like Thomas the Tank Engine developed the capability of interstellar flight. Mystery Science Theatre 3000 was an important part of Charles’ and my history: we video-recorded a lot of the later episodes on the Sci-Fi Channel (where it migrated after its early run on Comedy Central and its even earlier run on a local TV station in Minneapolis, where the people in charge realizes they had a library of utterly awful old science-fiction movies and one way to turn them into viable entertainment might be to have comedians talk over them and make jokes about the movies as they were aired) and watched them together at Charles’s place.

Later he discovered a cache of them available for download from an archival Web site, and we watched quite a few of them – including the earlier episodes with series creator Joel Hodgson as host, before he was replaced by Mike Nelson (who had started on the show as head writer and graduated to star). I also recalled that in the early 1980’s my then-girlfriend Cat and I had watched a quite similar program called Schlock Theatre, which differed from MST3K only in having even cheaper production values, with just two cast members instead of three, four or five (or more, as the show developed later and the interstitial skits became more elaborate and required more people) hosting from a parked car inside the TV studio and with their snarky comments about the movie printed on screen as subtitles rather than spoken over the dialogue. (One Schlock Theatre show I remember especially fondly was a screening of the 1949 film Daughter of the Jungle, in which one of the cast members said, “He’s acting very strangely!” The subtitle read, “This is the only time anyone has ever mentioned ‘acting’ in connection with this film.”) The problem with MST3K is that it only worked with a certain range of film quality: the movie had to be bad enough you wouldn’t mind seeing it mocked, but not so bad that even with the mockery the experience of watching the movie would be too excruciating.

Invasion of the Neptune Men – a sequel of sorts to another Japanese sci-fi cheaple called Prince of Space, which due to different U.S. distributors doing the English dialogue was the same character seen here as “Space Chief” – was dangerously close to the latter. It was excruciatingly boring (a lot of the MST3K “targets” were movies whose badness expressed itself in boredom), so much so that many of the jokes were about how dull the movie was and how little seemed to be actually happening in it. The Neptune Men themselves were a singularly boring group of villains, all dressed in costumes similar to the ones Paul Blaisdell was creating at American International around the same time, with conical heads and antennae sticking out of them, though I’m assuming the Japanese costume designer simply copied Biaisdell’s “look” instead of actually securing his surplus costumes. At one point the MST3K crew started referencing The Magnificent Ambersons for some reason – unless it was as some sort of weird homage imbecility was paying to greatness (much like the horrible overuse of the opening of Richard Strrauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra in various cheap movies and on TV, including commercials, after Stanley Kubrick’s stunning use of it in 2001: A Space Odyssey) – and through most of the film most of their jokes were about how putrid the movie was and how they wished it would end already. (Keep in mind that, as the MST3K theme song told us, Mike Nelson and his robot crew “can’t control where the movies begin or end.”). I was consciously trying to find us a film we hadn’t seen on MST3K before, though I knew I had failed when I recognized one of the jokes from under the opening credits: referencing “ProPix,” the U.S. company that created the English-language version, one of the robots joked, “I used to be violently anti-pix, but now I’m ProPix.”