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Horror icons, the stars of numerous classics, and several others have not been spared the sharp tongues of Joel, Mike, Emily, Jonah, and the bots.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been riffing cheesy movies for over 3 decades now, and in the course of that time, they have riffed over 200 movies, ranging from the b-movies of Roger Corman to flop sci-fi and horror films. One might think that in the body of straight-to-video or flop films to get the Mst3k treatment there wouldn’t be respected actors like James Earl Jones or sex symbols like Jane Mansfield. But those people are wrong.
Not only were both of those icons in popular Mst3k episodes, but they are also far from the only ones. Horror icons, the stars of numerous classics, and several others have not been spared the sharp tongues of Joel, Mike, Emily, Jonah, and the bots Tom and Crow.
10 Bela Lugosi
Lugosi’s face and voice will forever be the template for Dracula and all other entries into the vampire genre. Lugosi was the first to play the Count in film when sound was introduced, and his portrayal remains one of the most iconic Universal horror films. Unfortunately for Lugosi, he was typecast into villain roles for most of his career, and his other films are not nearly as impressive as Dracula. Lugosi got lampooned when Mst3k riffed three shorts he starred in called The Phantom Creeps, a cheesy serial about a mad scientist who invents invisibility and robots with giant heads.
9 Ron Howard
Before he was an award-winning director, he was a child actor in shows like The Andy Griffith Show and movies like The Music Man. He was also in a Bert I. Gordon vehicle called Village of The Giants. Gordon was famous for his cheesy special effects, which usually involved mediocre trick photography and gimmicks like putting small animals superimposed over backgrounds (sometimes just postcards) to look like giant monsters. Gordon was one of the most frequently riffed directors on the show, along with Ed Wood, Coleman Francis, and Roger Corman. Funny enough, Corman gave Ron Howard one of his first legitimate directing jobs when the actor wanted to make the jump from acting to his now very successful directing career.
8 James Earl Jones
James Earl Jones has been the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars ever since the first film. The man with the most recognizable voice in Hollywood has done several other sci-fi films, most of which are not nearly as successful. One was City Limits, where he plays a sage old-timer who shelters a motorcycle gang on the lam in a post-apocalyptic world. The movie also features a young Kim Catrall and was the start of a running joke on the show where Crow has a crush on the future Sex and The City star.
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7 Raul Julia
Julia won the heart of a generation as Gomez Addams in The Addams Family and The Addams Family Values. Less well known is his role as a classic-film-obsessed fugitive in a made-for-public television sci-fi film Overdrawn At The Memory Bank. The plot can be thought of as similar to Brazil, if Brazil had a lower budget and a worse script. It is one of the most popular episodes in the show’s history. Fun fact: Lisa Kudrow is an extra in the film.
6 Gregory Peck
One of the most important actors of the 20th century, Peck will forever be remembered for his stirring performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird. He was also in the flop movie Marooned, also titled Space Travelers.
5 Gene Hackman
The former player of Lex Luthor is also in the flop Marooned with Gregory Peck. He might have been terrifying as Lex, but the scene where he stares at a pill contemplatively is cinema gold, fools gold that is.
4 Jane Mansfield
Before her tragic death in a car accident in 1967, Jane Mansfield was a popular actress and a Hollywood sex-symbol dating bodybuilders and other movie stars. One of the films she starred in with her then-husband Mickey Hargitay, The Many Loves of Hercules, an entry in a long line of Hercules films made in Italy. The movie was riffed on in the first season of the Netflix reboot. Mansfield is the mother of Law and Order SVU star Mariska Hargitay.
3 Ernest Borgnine
Borgnine starred in classics like The Wild Bunch and the TV show McHale’s Navy. He also played the grandpa in Merlin’s Shop Of Mystical Wonders. The film is half Twilight Zone, half family comedy, and all bad. Borgnine narrates a series of stories about Merlin’s magic shop and the mayhem that follows his customers. He and the child he narrates to serves as the movie’s framing device, a seemingly unsubtle copy and paste of The Princess Bride. It was also lampooned by the Mst3k spin-off Rifftrax.
2 Lee Van Cleef
Lee Van Cleef’s face is synonymous with Westerns, especially his iconic mustache. Cleef’s career spans decades and includes classics like High Noon, The Good The Bad And The Ugly, and A Few Dollars More. He also played an elderly ninja instructor in the Master Ninja movies, both of which were mercilessly lampooned on the show.
1 Christopher Lee
Christopher Lee was one of the coolest people who ever lived. A veteran of multiple wars and highly secret operations, he was also a great actor with incredible range. He was a horror icon thanks to his roles as Dracula and other classic monsters for Hammer Horror films, and he was a villain in both Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. But that range does not enable him, or any actor, to cross racial lines easily. In a yellow-face role, Lee plays a Chinese man in The Castle of Fu Manchu. Chris Morgan of Paste Magazine called it, “arguably the worst movie Mst3k ever did.”
