Season Two: Biker Movies From Hell*

201 Rocketship X-M

202 The Sidehackers

203 Jungle Goddess
with The Phantom Creeps: Chapter One, The Menacing Power

204 Catalina Caper

205 Rocket Attack USA
with The Phantom Creeps: Chapter Two, Death Stalks the Highway

206 Ring of Terror
with The Phantom Creeps: Chapter Three, The Crashing Timbers

207 The Wild Rebels

208 The Lost Continent

209 The Hellcats

210 King Dinosaur

211 First Spaceship on Venus

212 Godzilla vs. Megalon

213 Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster

Season Two had a number of changes that really helped the show take off, mainly the addition of Kevin Murphy as Tom Servo. While Josh Weinstein did reasonably well in the host segments of Season One, the movie segments tended to suffer from the very relaxed, casual pacing of the Season One crew. Murphy’s Tom Servo is hyperactive to the point of manic, and that seems to have been the jolt of energy the cast needed. Also welcome is the addition of Frank Conniff as TV’s Frank down in Deep 13. Fairly stupid and given to bizarre, off-the-wall outbursts, TV’s Frank is the perfect foil to the cracked and weasely Dr. Forrester. Though we get a flash of brilliance from Gypsy in The Wild Rebels, mostly she’s still just stupid this season.

The quality of episodes as a whole comes up for Season Two. Both Godzilla movies and Catalina Caper are the most fun to watch, while the turgid, one-set, black and white movies are the least fun. You could argue that I gave more bad scores in this season than I did in Season One, but if you look at such miserable films as Rocketship XM, King Dinosaur, and those horrible, horrible biker movies and then look at how they made them fun to watch, I’d say they came a long way.

*Includes no less than three ugly, violent biker films. Two of them starred Ross Hagen.