504 - Secret Agent Super Dragon

Gotta drain the Super Dragon…

Hate to say it, but his is a pretty mediocre episode. Not to say that I hated it, though. So far, I’ll take a lower-caliber episode of MST3K over just about anything else. But I’ll also take plenty of episodes over this one. I’d only seen this episode once, when I bought the DVD set it came in, and now I remember why.

The movie itself isn’t the problem. It’s a dubbed Italian James Bond knockoff that follows an agent code named “Super Dragon” as he tries to untangle a confusing plot involving drugs, a missing college girl, a dead agent, chewing gum, and Holland. It’s barely coherent (the MST Hour wraps clue in more to the plot than the actual movie does), lots of time is wasted on sightseeing Holland, there are plenty of sultry 60s European vixens, and the main character barely does more than follow people, act smug, harass women, and get in minor fist fights. It’s just the right amount of bad, goofy, boring, and ridiculous.

But Joel and the bots…they are just not feeling this one. There’s none of that palpable tone of disinterest some of the lesser episodes have; Joel and the Bots are friendly and joke often enough. So maybe it’s just me, but man, there were only a handful of jokes that got more than a chuckle out of me.  In the beginning, when Super Dragon is lounging by the pool, Joel says, “You can tell by his lawn furniture he’s a secret agent.” Tom says, of the movie’s man sultry European women, “Don’t worship false eyelashes.” The most that can be said about the movie’s lavishly adorned sets is Joel wondering, “does anyone in this movie know when to stop decorating?” and then Crow saying, “Do you have any art?” Not quite “State Park” joke levels, but not much better.

But like I said, there are a few jewels in there. When Super Dragon wrestles with his fellow blonde female agent Fulton in the pool, Joel says, “Relationships with secretaries were real different back then.” Upon an electrocution, Tom saying, “Watts for dinner?” And, as the main character walks into the bathroom, Crow saying, “Gotta drain the Super Dragon.” And there’s a Tom Waits joke and a Beatles joke within a minute of one another.

But the movie’s plot is so confounding, so little action happens, so many of the men in it are creeps, that it’s just begging for more irreverence, for them to get annoyed and lash back more. Sure, it’s not a terrible movie, one of their less awful ones, but there’s meat in there, they just hardly chew it. That is a weird metaphor.

Thankfully though, the host segments are pretty damn good. Dr. Forrester comes back from a seminar on super villainy (that he, to my love, pronounces, “super villainry” at one point) that culminates in a great super villainy review at the end. Frank’s invention, the “Virtual Comedy” stand up VR machine, is super 90s and creative (as is the adding in of hecklers as difficulty). The Bots, being annoying, make their own annoying little robot, perpetuation the circle of artificial life. And Joel getting ready to bash the crap out of the thing is a joy. And the Secret Agent Super Dragon jazz theme music segment highlights a lot of what I love about the Joel era; like goofing off with friends. Their segment riffing on Post-kill puns is great, as it points out how death softens the blow of puns. And Crow’s writing a more politically correct spy movie is super 90s, and also shows how far politically correct thinking has gone since then (a lot of the things they say are some things I find myself saying at my most oversensitive)

Secret Agent Super Dragon is a pretty middling entry that also really typifies a lot of the movies shown; foreign, weird, incoherent, a little boring, the kind of movie you’d see on at three in the morning. A decent episode to watch n the middle of the night when there’s nothing else going on.

Episode in a Riff
Nobody in this movie knows when to stop decorating.

Random Asides

-I think every kid my age had that robot toy in segment one
-LOL annoying robots making annoying robots. The circle of artificial life
-I'm with Joel and the Bots in that I have NO IDEA what is going on with the plot of this movie. I can follow time travel and parallel dimension plots easier.
 -The dubbing guy for Agent Dragons sounds like voice of Tuxedo Mask in the Design for Dreaming short from episode 524

-I’m glad Joel picked up on the “Oh, they're in America because there s a flag there' thing

-So this spy agency has lost two agents on one case so far? Wow, they suck

-Super Dragon is a terrible secret agent and an a-hole. More like Secret Agent Sexual Harassment. He also has to be among the top 10 smuggest characters from one of the movies they've watched.

-This story is more like a light evening or vacation for James Bond. Like. There's maybe one fight and a lot of hanging around.

-Man, do the MST Hour wraps bring me back. I wish I could watch the episode with them put in.

-Is everyone in this movie a creep? And does every woman have giant evil eyelashes?

-I love frank’s nonchalance at the end

-Man I’ve seen anime with less awkwardly dubbed lines
-I kept wondering why Joel and the Bots sang some funky song after a character is mentioned having fallen to death in an elevator shaft. Thanks to AnnotatedMST, I now know it's because that's the theme song to Shaft! That has to count as a pun, right?   
-As I was watching this, I thought, "Boy, it's too bad this episode aired so early in the 90s, or they could get some mileage out of the main character being named 'Cooper'." Sure enough, a minute later, there's a Hangin' with Mr. Cooper joke!
 -Thanks for the loud, screeching nail sawing, movie

-This is a superbly decorated movie

-Ollie’s costume in the first season of Arrow is more convincing than those masks

-One of the characters not drinking the drug and super dragon being tense about it is the closest this movie comes to being interesting

-The bad guy in this movie is more boring that the one in Mission: Impossible 4 and Quantum of Solace.  I love Forrester’s point on this guy. Though I disagree; I think a personality deformity or strange personality would work just fine.

-"Thank God we’re alive sex, Ted!"

6 Favorite Riffs

Additional Links

Annotated MST for this episode

Satellite News review for this episode