Mystery Science Theater 3000: JACK FROST

August 24, 2017 1:39 AM - Season 8, Episode 13

AKA "Morozko," or (stupidly) "Frosty." "All the magic of the winter-time wonder-maker to fascinate young and old!" A headstrong Russian guy gets into trouble with a mushroom sprite and his head's turned into that of a bear. Meanwhile a girl has parent issues and is abandoned in the woods. Can Father Frost get these two knuckleheads together? A throwback to the Russian movies of the Comedy Central era, it's another fairly good folktale adaptation made riffing fodder mostly through no fault of its own, the comedy coming from a dreamlike atmosphere, cultural barriers, and the fact that most folktales are pretty dang weird anyway. In the channel-mandated subplot, Pearl's still on her way back from dropping off the space children, leaving Brain Guy and Bobo to bond on Camping Planet. The word is that this movie is shown in some countries on TV around Christmastime, which may explain why it isn't on YouTube in entirety, although there is a 38-minute Best Of reel. If you can find it, it's a classic episode. Promo. Premiered July 12, 1997.

Episode 813 JACK FROST
Satellite News. Notably, Mighty Jack's Episode Review rates this as his favorite episode, saying "In my opinion, it's the best episode from the best comedy series ever aired on TV." War of the Colossal Fan Guide rates it highly as well. TVTropes.

Mary Jo wrote the entry for the ACEG for this one. Her reflections:

This movie had one of my favorite characters ever, the mean step-sister. The step-sister was, how shall I say, a virile woman with a deep, dubbed voice. She was mean and spiteful and spoiled but I daresay she wasn't irredeemable, nor can she wholly be blamed. She was a product of bad parenting! And she made me laugh, especially when she's getting made-up by her mother; when she's trying to fake her way through dinner; and most especially when she brawls with Jack Frost himself.

Movie
Daddy-O's Drive-In Dirt
Wikipedia - TVTropes (as Morozko) Rotten Tomatoes has a 2001 redub, rated Critics N/A, Viewers 55%.
IMDB (as "Frosty") (1964, 6.0 stars)
"A fairy-tale about a conceited young man and a young woman with a tyrannical step-mother, who must overcome magical trials in order to be together."
Directed by Aleksandr Rou. Written by Nikolay Erdman and Mikhail Volpin. Starring Aleksandr Khvylya, Natalya Sedykh and Eduard Izotov.

Notes:
The previous Russian folktale episodes are:

• 422 THE DAY THE EARTH FROZE
• 505 THE MAGIC VOYAGE OF SINBAD
• 617 THE SWORD AND THE DRAGON

Note, this one wasn't directed by Aleksandr Ptushko like the others were.

posted by JHarris (10 comments total)

MST Club is rolling on tonight (Thursday) but it remains to be seen what we're showing if we cannot find an online version of the episode. Whatever it consists of, the show begins at 9 PM Eastern/6 PM Pacific at https://cytu.be/r/Metafilter_MST3KClub, as usual.
posted by JHarris at 1:40 AM on August 24, 2017

The life of the guy who played Ivan, Eduard Izotov, is a sad story.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 2:49 AM on August 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

THIS IS THE SUN. Your call is very important to us...
posted by wittgenstein at 5:02 AM on August 24, 2017

To this day, even with people who have never seen a minute of MST3K, I use the line "Hey lord of the pants, can you tear yourself away from yourself for a minute?"
posted by hobgadling at 5:38 AM on August 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Movies named "Jack Frost": This movie, a Rankin-Bass special, and two movies with dead people coming back as snowmen that it is highly important you never get mixed up.
posted by ckape at 11:27 AM on August 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

two movies with dead people coming back as snowmen that it is highly important you never get mixed up.

Pretty sure I saw both of those. They're memorable enough that you definitely don't mix them up once you've seen them.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 12:45 PM on August 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

No, no, Ivanushka!
posted by Chrysostom at 2:00 PM on August 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

We put in another YouTube Cinematic Titanic, The Doomsday Machine, for preroll but only hobgadling was around to see it really. That movie is excruciating, and it also swiped a lot of its music, it seems, from Project Moonbase!

After that the first few minutes of Roller Blade Warriors: Taken By Force, one of Donald G. Jackson's "Zen Films," showed, but that quickly turned out to be too gross per dose. So we switched to a YouTube upload of 2 Everything 2 Terrible 2: Tokyo Drift, which was almost literally insane. It was the closest to a religious experience (the Subgenius kind) I've ever had. One of the actors in one of the many hundreds of cut-up VHS recordings in the film refers, unironically, to the "Budweiser lifestyle," a phrase that makes me shudder and quail with its incredible portent and dire implication.
posted by JHarris at 8:15 AM on August 25, 2017

I still say "My destiny sucks: it's a swamp!" all the time.
posted by TwoStride at 10:20 PM on August 26, 2017

"Yyyyyyup… magic sleigh."
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 12:40 PM on August 27, 2017