#the tur key to christmas joy

[gcballet]

Mischief Movie Night In 2024 as Textposts/Tweets

<- | MMNI | ->

[cakemadeofbacon]

My favorite moment i think in all of mmni was Henry Shields losing his fucking mind in the last episode

[act2drama]

HoHR Ep51 'The Last Mindbender': A Listener's Journey

*before listening*: Well, it's only 48 minutes long... Probably just a light breather episode after everything that happened on the 8th layer. 48 minutes isn't long enough for anything too wild to happen, right..?

*midway through the episode*: Well, I stand corrected... What is even happening right now..?!

*after listening*: I have absolutely no idea what the fuck I just listened to...and it's the best thing I've ever heard!

[cakemadeofbacon]

The lesbian turkeys made me cry

[act2drama]

Rewatching 'The Tur-Key to Christmas Joy' and I'm realising that by far the biggest "plot-hole" comes right at the beginning and literally no one in the cast seemed to notice. Which is honestly wild to me.

Like, Jon-Oscar will call out the fact that it clearly takes Dave a second to remember that Helsinki is in Finland, but he completely ignores the fact that literally the entire "plot" (and in this MMNI show, we use that word very loosely) revolves around the turkeys (except the Gunter-Turkey) not displaying human levels of intelligence and Shields' character repeatedly affirming that the turkeys do not understand human speech...yet the turkeys all spend the entire first scene obeying every instruction given to them by the humans and thus clearly demonstrating that they do, in fact, understand human speech!

I realise overthinking any MMNI show is a gateway to madness, and that's especially true of this show, but...what can I say? At this point, I welcome the madness with open arms.

[gcballet]

I think the reason Harry has more collossal fuck ups than anyone is the exact same reason he has more gloriously funny successes, and it's just that he's willing to take more and bigger risks on stage. They pay off probably as often as they don't. So often, it's Harry who will out of nowhere yell something which jumps a plot forward a bit or to a new setting. For example, in Ipswitch It Up he interrupts a bit of dialogue between Susan and Josh which is dragging, the characters are negotiating if they want to go on a date, and he yells 'WELCOME TO PIZZA HUT!' - and then he doesn't even participate in the scene he initiates, he just yells out a new location. If the others didn't pick up what he did and introduce a date scene, that could have made him look an absolute buffoon, and sometimes that's what happens, especially if Jonathan misunderstands and pauses to correct or question.

The other thing with Harry is this thing 🧍‍♂️

And it's objectively kind of funny that mostly he just stands there with his hands clasped, but he doesn't waste energy moving around and doing unnecessary physicality? He does use the whole space really well, especially the foreground/downstage, but he doesn't gesture much. He has a really interesting approach to what he does as an improv actor, and it's very different from the style other Mischief cast go for. Even Lauren Shearing, who's pretty experienced in improv, does something more naturalistic than him. Need to look into if he's ever done interviews about improv and stuff bc I suspect his style is very deliberate, like, holding a fairly neutral pose most of the time give you scope to be 'being' almost anything? It mitigates errors like the bit in The Tur Key To Christmas Joy where Shields enters as an old man, then changes his mind and decides to be a turkey.

Also I think I commented it on your old YT upload that's now gone, I think Harry does the mystery box in the Ashopocalypse trilogy as a specific reference to LOST. The Mystery Box is a storytelling technique coined by JJ Abrams in a 2007 TED Talk, and in LOST it usually means like, a mysterious briefcase, or a locked bunker discovered in the jungle but not opened till the end the season. I'm convinced that Harry does this in response to Niall repeating the original catchphrase from LOST - 'we have to live together or we're going to die alone'. LOST is exactly the sort of thing you'd rewatch over lockdown. It's just a good framework for a long plot.

Rewatching 'Hull School Musical' and am currently wondering exactly how I missed this absolute gem of a line the first time:

The thing I love about Harry Kershaw in MMNI is that occasionally he'll come out with something that's pure genius (and possibly the best thing in the entire movie for that show) that kind of slips by relatively unnoticed and then the rest of the time it's just...Delta Von Tassel and Christmas Bonanza Boy...