#ironically its both taken place in the villain’s lair and and its both filled with the things people love and care about

[jaybleeps]

Im gonna be cringe for a bit here. Hate me all u want but i like finding things like this

It’s insane how 2 of my long term hyperfixations on fandoms are dsmp and rnm. And maybe im so delusional and ruminate about them constantly that i somehow am starting to find connections.

My recent observations are

“What’s your life without me?”

“Let’s find out”

and

“What am I without you?”

“Yourself”

[mst3kproject]

Serial: Radar Men from the Moon

Like the rest of you, I'd already seen most of Radar Men from the Moon, but the fact that I came to MST3K well after Season One means that before today I'd never actually watched it in order.  Does it make any more sense that way?  Not really.  It's still a pretty scattershot and underfunded alien invasion.

As we begin, stock footage is blowing up all over the place.  The government believes that the culprit is Moon Men, turning their powerful atomic ray against the Earth – they enlist Commando Cody (the title cards occasionally refer to him as simply 'Commando', leading me to wonder if Commando Cody is supposed to be his actual name), inventor of the ‘flying suit’, to go to the moon and check it out.  Turns out it is Moon Men, led by the villanous Retik and Krog, and they're paying a couple of ex-cons on Earth to wreck our shit so we won't be able to defend ourselves from interplanetary attack!  After returning from their moon mission, Cody and his sidekicks, scientists Ted and Joan, take on Retik's toadies on Earth in the hope of heading off the invasion before it begins.

Throughout all of this there's never any clue as to why they are Radar Men from the Moon.  The Moon Men are never called 'Radar Men' by themselves or the Earthlings, and the source of their power is atomic, not RADAR-based.  Surely they should be Atomic Men from the Moon, which sounds significantly more threatening.  Maybe there already was something called Atomic Men and Republic Serials didn't want to step on anybody's copyright toes?  I am mystified.

I am also slightly mystified by what we're supposed to think of Commando Cody's superhero career.  The opening credits repeatedly call him 'a new character', but everybody in the shorts acts like he's been around doing this Rocketeer gig of his for ages and doesn’t bother with a secret identity. The government official who visits him in the first episode asks if he 'still has' his flying suit.  Even Krog knows who he is. Does he have an origin story and prior adventures that we're not privy to?  I suppose it doesn't matter, because his past is never important to the story we're watching, but I do wonder if somebody was hoping to make a franchise out of him.

Having now watched both, it's really quite striking how similar the overall plot of Radar Men from the Moon is to that of Panther Girl of the Kongo.  In both we have a bad guy with two sidekicks who is waging a sort of guerilla campaign to soften up a target in preparation for a larger enterprise.  Each episode includes abrupt reversals of fortune (as, for example, when right out of the gate Cody steals a ray gun from the bad guys only to have it immediately stolen back before he can examine it), furniture-smashing fights, and cliffhanger endings that are rather disappointingly resolved (as when Cody is revealed to have bailed out of the car before it went over the exploding bridge).  Once again I get the impression that Republic had a basic formula in place, and would pick a genre out of a hat to tell them how to fill in the details.  Radar Men from the Moon is a much less-successful version of this formula than Panther Girl of the Kongo.

There are movies that dither around a while before the actual story gets started – in Radar Men from the Moon there's no dithering at all.  The plot is up and running from the opening shot, as we see the destruction Krog and his mercenaries are wreaking and then cut straight to Cody, Ted, and Joan discussing it.  Mere moments later the government official arrives to tell them about the Moon Men.  This at least means we don't waste any time on irrelevant rock climbing, but it also means we never get to know any of our main characters.  In Panther Girl we got a taste of who Jean and Larry were as human beings: she was a competent and adventurous advocate for nature, he an impulsive man of action.  In Radar Men, Ted, Joan, and even Cody himself are pretty much just cutouts.  We learn more about the personalities and even the pasts of Krog's two underlings, Graber and Daly, who are former bank robbers with some misgivings about the job they've now taken on.

The first couple of episodes take us to the Moon (which looks, as Joel observed, an awful lot like Arizona and has surprisingly nice weather) and get us into the attempt to steal and reverse-engineer an atomic ray gun.  After that, the plot starts to get distracted.  Throughout Panther Girl of the Kongo we were watching Larry and Jean try to get proof of the existence of the claw monsters for the colonial authorities, who would be able to do something about the situation.  In Radar Men from the Moon we wander off into kidnap plots, bar fights, and car chases (I have never seen so many car chases in what is ostensibly an alien invasion story) that all seem to belong more in a heist thriller than a sci-fi epic, and never really gets back on track until we return to the moon in episode eight.  Panther Girl had jungles, rivers, and native villages to give us a taste of the exotic, even if all of them were obviously sets.  Other than the Moon scenes, which are shot in a canyon full of cool rock formations, Radar Men is set mostly in laboratories and on country roads.  These simply don't carry the same inherent interest and do less to distract us from the lack of focus in the story.

Another thing that detracts from Radar Men is the fact that the actors are so matter-of-fact about... well, everything.  Nobody seems surprised that the government thinks Moon Men are behind the series of sabotage events.  Cody and his friends are incredibly blasé about going to the moon, never mind the fact that they find a city there, with people who are planning an invasion! I mean, yes, they had advance warning to expect this stuff, but I'd expect just a little more oooh-ing and aaah-ing from the first people on the moon.  This is a story full of cool things like ray guns and flying rocket suits, and yet everybody acts like they're just going to the office.

There is quite a bit of entertainment value to be found in Radar Men from the Moon, though, and that's mostly in the costuming and special effects.  These are cheap and terrible, but often in very funny ways.  For example, the rocket ship.  Rather surprisingly, they don't use stock footage for its sequences: instead, they built a full-scale prop which rather oddly takes off and lands in a horizontal position rather than being stood on its tail.  This is entertainingly impractical, especially the little bounce it does when it lands flat on its bottom, without any wheels or landing legs.  Joan wears some kind of spacesuit for the trip despite the fact that her official job is ship's cook, but Cody and the other men go to the moon wearing shirts and ties.  Cody's 'flying suit' looks like it belongs to Iron Man's less-talented cousin Cardboard Man.  What appears to be a model of the Roman Forum stands in for the Moon City, and according to Wikipedia Cody's laboratory is just an office in the Republic Serials building.  A piece of Krog's equipment in the cave appears to be made out of a garbage can.

The writing is also full of amusing nuggets of illogic, mostly on the part of the thoroughly incompetent villains.  Krog is out of Moon Jewels to pay Graber and Daly in, so they are obliged to rob banks in order to fund the invasion.  Why they agree to this is beyond me. They also keep wrecking their cars and have to call Krog for replacements.  Retik and a flunky just stand around listening to a fight scene rather than intervening in it.  When Graber and Daly realize that Cody's car is filling with smoke in a chase scene, they slow down to see what's wrong rather than taking advantage of the chance to escape.  When they want to hold somebody for ransom, they unbelievably choose Cody himself, despite the fact that he's already kicked their asses... speaking of which, I gotta wonder whether Cody ever worries that his backpack full of rocket fuel will explode in the middle of a fistfight.

MST3K only ever got up to partway through episode nine before deciding enough was enough, so most MSTies never got to see how this story ends.  Well, episode ten was a recap, intended to bring the audience up to speed before the finale..  Then, in episodes eleven and twelve, Cody finally thinks to follow Graber and Daly back to Krog's cave, and gets there in time to learn that Retik has arrived on Earth and is about to step up the campaign of sabotage.  During a fight scene Krog gets fried by his own tesla coils, and Cody narrowly avoids the same fate.  Graber and Daly flee, only to drive off a cliff and explode.  Finally, Retik tries to escape in his rocket ship (which is just Cody’s rocket painted black), but Cody has a ray gun stolen from Krog's lair and blows him up.  The entire Lunar invasion seems to have consisted of four people, only two of whom were actually from the moon, and the serial is over as it began – abruptly and without dithering.

Although Radar Men from the Moon makes for great MST3K fodder, when you try to watch it on its own it just seems dull and repetitive.  I mostly had fun with Panther Girl of the Kongo, but during Radar Men I kept getting distracted and I ended up spending quite a bit of the two-and-a-half-hour run time doing crossword puzzles.  Maybe I would feel differently about it if I'd watched it in its entirety before seeing Panther Girl, but I guess we'll never know.