Prince of Space (1959)

Prince of Space (1959)
I'm going to follow up my last post on RiffTrax Live with an episode of the show that started it all, Mystery Science Theater 3000!
Prince of Space is from season 8, which means it's a Mike episode from the Sci-Fi Channel era. I watched Prince of Space back in the fall so it's been a while since I've seen or written about a MST3K episode.
This MST3K fodder is a 1950s Japanese kids show that has been poorly edited together and given a bad English dub. Prince of Space reminded me of another Tokusatsu (a Japanese term for a speculative fiction movie with a lot of special effects) superhero movie featured on MST3K, Invasion of the Neptune Men. Prince of Space is a little better than that movie, which isn't saying much of course!

The silly villain Krankor (pictured above) is pretty memorable. Krankor makes an "appearance" in a host segment and is even featured in this episode's stinger!
Prince of Space is not that far off in tone from American serials of the time though with even cheaper production values. While this movie is pretty bad, it's still watchable for how ridiculous it is.
This episode has some fun host segments, my favorite being the one where Mike gets turned into a robot which looks like a ventriloquist's dummy.
2/10