#me: oh..well..these are four mutants and their human adopted son. In the apocalypse

[somerandomdudelmao]

Explaining this comic to people is WILD.

Because first you've got to explain the Rise show, the first five minutes of the Rise movie, the fandom's angsty reactions to the movie (devastating fanfics exploring how Raph and Donnie died, Leo's guilt, Mikey's powers, Casey's headcanoned relationships with all of them), and how out of all the fan comics, one rose to be renowned for it's wacky shenanigans and fluff despite being set in the Bad Future.

And THEN you need to go into detail about how it may be fluffy, but there were 'Little Things'TM that we all the sudden started to notice. So by that point the clueless person you are educating on this is invested, and ya hit em with the ol' "Donnie DIES" explanation.

AND THEN you've gotta talk about how 'everything is falling apart'TM, and then Casey going back in time, missing his family, etc etc.

But WHOOPS now you have to explain memory spells and Hamato Ghost Possession and Donnie's pre-existing plans to cheat death for him being brought back to make sense.

So THEN you've gotta explain how much Raph missed not being a robot as you tearfully talk about Hot Soup.

And if course you need to talk about the twin sense and Leo's ninpo and Mikey's magic and all that before finally taking a breath to say "and that's all we've got so far".

And now there is a person who COULD NOT CARE LESS ABOUT TURTLES who is now forcibly invested in Cass's Apocalyptic Series.

(oh yeah after that you've gotta show said person ALL of Tap's animatics)

Like I said, explaining this comic to people is WILD.

YOU'RE SO DAMN RIGHT HAHA

Not gonna lie, one of my favorite things is reading reblogs/replies from people who are like "I showed this comic to my friend/sibling/important person outside of the fandom and documented their step-by-step descent into desperate confusion diluted with laughs and tears."

Good food. Interesting plot. 100% rate on Rotten tomatoes👍

#my mom: so...what is this about? #me: oh..well..these are four mutants and their human adopted son. In the apocalypse #My mom: Cute. I guess. What is the story? #Me: huuuuuuuuuhhhh...you gonna regret this question

[mst3kproject]

315: Teenage Caveman

This is yet another movie that goes under multiple titles, and like several previous examples, the new title is actually an improvement. Roger Corman wanted to call his movie Land of Prehistoric Women, which would certainly have gotten butts in the seats, but they'd have been very disappointed butts by the time the end credits rolled. Teenage Caveman is a much better description of the movie we've actually got.

A primitive tribe – albeit a very clean one whose women are curiously lacking in body hair – lives in Bronson Canyon, hunting taxidermied deer and men in bear suits.  The 'teenage' son of the cave painter wonders why the tribe lives by such strict rules – particularly, why the taboo against crossing the river into the jungle?  Eventually he decides to go see for himself, and finds a world full of monsters: crocodiles with fins glued to their backs, stolen from other movies!  Adorable dogs who want to lick you to death!  Men in dinosaur costumes even less convincing than that one who used to be a Vine star!  The She-Creature in a cameo appearance!  And oh my god... is that... it can't be... but it is... it's the parrot-bear from Night of the Blood Beast!!!

I was kind of surprised to look up actor Robert Vaughn and learn that he was only twenty-six when this movie was made.  I guess everybody just looked ten years older in the fifties.  He's also got really small ears.  I never noticed that before but now I can't stop seeing it.

Before I try to talk about anything in this movie, I'm going to have to deal somehow with the fact that the characters have no names.  Our hero is referred to only as 'the Symbol-Maker's Son', and other characters have signifiers like 'the Fair-Haired Boy' and 'the Blonde Maiden'.  This seems very strange to us, but there are peoples in the world who do not use personal names – the best-known example is the Machiguenga of South America, who address each other by relationships and occupations, just as the characters in Teenage Caveman do.  The lack of names in the movie seems to serve two purposes: it suggests a very small, isolated group, where everybody knows everybody else and there is unlikely to be more than one 'Symbol-Maker' or 'Fair-Haired Boy'; and it tells us that this group values collective over individual identity and survival.

As far as it goes, this an interesting artistic choice and a nice piece of worldbuilding.  The problem for me as reviewer is that it's very awkward to type out 'the Symbol-Maker's Son' or 'the Black-Bearded Man' over and over.  I will therefore adopt Joel and the Bots' informal designation of the main character as 'Travis' and his rival as 'Allen'.  

The movie has a couple of points to make, although being as it's Roger Corman, it makes them with a sledgehamer.  The first is about tradition and asking questions, and this is indeed so heavy-handed that Joel and the Bots actually talk about the movie in these terms during a host sketch.  Travis is constantly questioning the inherited wisdom of his tribe, despite punishments from his elders.  In the end, his curiosity drives him to investigate for himself, which leads him to the film's second point: that if humans are not careful with our technology, we are doomed.

The 50's Caveman Movie is a genre mostly associated with women in fur miniskirts being menaced by plasticine dinosaurs (exactly the sort of movie one might expect from the working title Land of Prehistoric Women), so having a message at all is honestly kind of impressive.  Teenage Caveman's messages are unsubtle, but they are also surprisingly well-explored.  The film tells us that pushing boundaries is the key to progress, but it does not present this as a smooth road.  When Travis and his friends venture into the wilderness, one of them drowns in quicksand, and Travis himself is injured and cannot immediately return with the others.  He comes back having invented the bow and arrow, a new weapon with a longer range than the spears the tribe normally uses, but also having actually seen the God that Gives Death with its Touch, the monster he believed to be mythical.  Much has been learned, but much has also been lost.

At the end, the laws the clan have lived by for as long as anyone can remember (hundreds of years?  Thousands?) are declared null and void, and they must forge a new way of life in new territory.  This is good, in that new possibilities and better food sources are now open to them, but it is also terrifying, in that they don't even know how to begin.  The God that Gives Death has been vanquished, but other perils, such as the wild animals and the quicksand, are still out there to menace them.  The benefits of exploration outweigh the dangers, but Corman does not romanticize it. More of the tribe are going to die on their journey of discovery.

Opposed to Travis and his urge to explore are the various voices of conservatism within the tribe.  The clan's received wisdom, the Word, represents safety but also stagnation, and the desire to stick to it has two different faces.  One is Travis' father, who warns him away from exploration and is quite stern with him at times, but it clearly comes from his love and concern for his son.  He tried leaving the safe area himself and suffered for it, and he doesn't want Travis to repeat his mistakes.  Yet when the clan wants to punish Travis, his father urges them to be lenient in the hope that the boy has learned his lesson.  When asked to choose between his tribe and his son, he chooses Travis.

The other voice of tradition is the Black-Bearded Man, Allen.  At first he encourages Travis to explore and to question what he's been told, but then turns around and demands the boy's death when he actually does so.  His real motive, as we learn, was to disgrace both Travis and his father and step into their family's important position within the tribe.  He wishes to preserve the existing power structure in order to advance within it – Joel remarks that people like this have been with us since the beginning of time, and they will doubtless be around until the end of it. DOes anyoNe Among my Lovely reaDers wanT to pRovide Us with an exaMPle?

At the end of the movie, the God who Gives Death with its Touch is killed, and turns out to be an old man wearing some kind of college football mascot costume that is probably supposed to be a radiation suit.  We get a voiceover from this man, most likely representing what's supposed to be written in the book he is carrying, telling how the world ended in nuclear war and the land of hairless cavepeople and mutant dinosaurs we've been seeing is actually the aftermath of that apocalypse (so it's basically Yor! The Hunter from the Future without Rip Steakface).  He fears that this is destined to be cyclical – that man will simply rise only to fall again and again and again, until we are finally extinct.

Interestingly, and quite realistically, this message goes entirely over the characters' heads.  They have no idea what the book represents, only that there are pictures of human beings and symbols that clearly have some kind of meaning.  They hope to find other people who may know how to read them, but there is nothing to indicate that they will ever succeed.  The one foreigner we see in the entire movie appears to be just as primitive and illiterate as the main characters, and the old man's voiceover suggests that in a life of perhaps thousands of years in length, he has never seen anyone more advanced.

Throughout the movie, we have seen people persist in spite of warnings, but for the most part this was presented as a good thing: if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.  Travis' persistence in the face of his elders' disapproval and his own failures allows him to forge a new way of life for his clan.  But like everything else in the world of Teenage Caveman, tenacity has two faces. The people of the past persisted in making war and brought themselves to a bad end.  The ultimate point of the film is that 'progress', whether scientific or social, is never straightforwardly good or evil.

The reason the movie is about a teenage caveman is because rebellion and pushing of boundaries are what teenagers are best-known for doing.  Another level of the film's story asks parents to stop and think about why their children are asking questions and trying out different ways of behaving, but this, too, has two sides: children are also invited to think about why their parents discourage them from doing so.

That's really a hell of a lot of theme for a fifties caveman movie, and audiences must have been rather confused to get this when they were probably expecting dinosaur fights and screaming women.  Looking back on my review, I realize I've probably made the movie sound much better than it is.  Don't get me wrong, Teenage Caveman is still very, very bad.  The costumes are terrible, the dialogue is stilted, the actors are bored, the animals are fake, and the tribe seems to consist of twenty men, four women, and no children.  But if nothing else, I can appreciate the film for its ambition, and the story as presented manages to have a satisfying conclusion without sacrificing the ambiguity that is so important to its point.

Teenage Caveman was remade in 2002, by people who apparently found the fate of the nigh-immortal scientist far more interesting than bland cave kid angst.  They may have had a point, but they were also utter hacks.  Their movie is an aggressively bad metaphor about STDs, where the original is just a blandly bad mull about progress.  Personally, I prefer Disney's recent version, which ditched the post-apocalypse thing, made the God who Gives Death far scarier and more tragic, and featured a fab glam-rock number by a giant crustacean.

Help me.

#mst3k #reviews #teenage caveman #50s #dinosaurs make everything better #curiously caucasian cavepeople