Mystery Science Theater 3000/Recap/S09/E12 The Screaming Skull

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Films watched: Robot Rumpus (short) and The Screaming Skull

"Remember folks, if you die of boredom you do not get a free coffin. Sorry."
—Crow T. Robot, Mystery Science Theater 3000


The Mystery Science Theater 3000 presentation has examples of:

Servo: AHHH! They hung his head! Oh...
Crow: Now I'm ready for years of powerful Adlerian therapy, Mike.
Servo: They hung his head. Oh-oh, this is worse than Se7en!

Mike: (as Gumby) Hey, you can throw things through dad! I'm gonna get an anvil.

  • Creator Breakdown: In-Universe. After seeing the short, Crow and Servo spend a host segment doing a skit about poor innocent robots being victimized by obnoxious clay creatures. They can't even finish it because they're so distraught.
  • Crusty Caretaker: Discussed.

Mike: You know, have people wised up to hiring people like this?
Crow: Oh c'mon Mike, how is he any different from you?

  • Everything's Better with Penguins: "In the name of all that is good and decent, gentlemen, put on your penguin costumes!"
    • It's really a badly-thought-out and lame plan on Pearl's part.

"All we had to do was call fifty-three costume shops to find one that had three penguin costumes, reserve them eight months in advance with a huge cash deposit, then pay a balance of eight hundred and ninety-nine dollars per costume to rent them for an hour, then put them on, then wait until you guys woke up and finished breakfast, then call you and make believe that we had set up an appointment for you all to wear penguin costumes, and then... you fell for it! It was so simple!"

  • Faking the Dead: In order to try to scam his way to a free coffin, Servo calls up the film's distributors and claims that he his friend died while watching it. He panics and tries to back out, but ends up having to pay shipping both ways on his coffin (on Mike's credit card).
  • Forced Perspective: A gratuitous shot of Bobo being held in Brain Guy's fist, as punishment for dressing up like an ape.
  • Getting Crap Past the Radar:

Jenny: (referring to the book she's reading) It's called Beast in the Jungle.
Servo: It's about what to expect on my honeymoon.

Crow: Wow, did you see that!? He just threw that stool at him. That was a hard stool. He should have at least used some stool softener.
Mike: Okay, okay!

  • Metamorphosis: In the first host segment, Tom Servo has become a beautiful butterfly! By the second segment, he's back to normal.

Servo: I'm still a beautiful butterfly, Mike. I've just had a few unfortunate happenstances, such as my wings being torn off in an industrial accident. Well that depressed me, so I ate a lot of Mallowmars and gained all the weight back, but I was soon feeling better and went back to work. But alas, someone turned on the Extruder while I was cleaning it, and my bottom two pairs of delicate butterfly legs were ripped from me. Again depressed, I hit the Pecan Sandies - hard - and gained my remaining weight back in my remaining arms. My arms, by now in a metabolic frenzy, started to leech fat from my antennae, which made them so thin as to be invisible. But I am still a beautiful butterfly, Mike, and butterflies are free to fly... fly away... high away... bye-bye...

    • Almost normal.

Servo: (brightly) But I still have my proboscis!

Narrator: But on this day, something unexpected happened.
Mike: Gumby was nude.

    • And later when they first see Gumbo:

Servo: So he just goes to work starkers?

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