There can’t be anything more comforting than putting on a good episode of MST3K late at night. I didn’t even like the Overdrawn at the Memory Bank episode at first because my brain kept trying to make sense of the movie. How could a movie starring Raul Julia go this badly? I had to relax before I could pay attention to the jokes and then it became a whole new experience. This is hands down my favorite MST3K episode, at this point in my life.

Here’s the story of the movie itself: Raul Juila plays a data processor in a dystopian future. He has the improbable name Aram Fingal. He gets caught using his computer to watch movies, which is called “scrolling up cinemas” in the parlance of the film. In order to get back to work, in this world where you apparently can’t just go get another job, he has to submit to a mandatory procedure called “doppling,” in which your consciousness is transplanted into an animal. For some reason the people living in the film think of this as a vacation. The idea of body swapping makes me want to cry, or die. I’d much rather relax by scrolling up cinemas. Anyway, Fingal doesn’t have enough money for anything but being put into the body of a baboon, and then his body is lost while his brain is doppling. The tech working on him, Apollonia James, has to try to track him while he starts fantasizing about Casablanca and somehow messing up the computer systems at their work/home, before the future equivalent of Sydney Greenstreet erases him for good. This might sound intriguing to the sci-fi fan, but trust me, you don’t want to watch this without Mike and the robots.

As for the wraparound story, evil Pearl Forrester has started her own pledge drive for a phony PBS. And here is the finest sketch in all the history of the show: Pearl and Brain Guy sing a song called “When Loving Lovers Love.”

My favorite lines from this show are “are you ready to put him back in his own body,” and “I love you this much…I don’t care for you,” but I could type out the whole script and most of the lines would be good. “Here’s looking at you, biquitous,” “never put a good movie in the middle of your crappy movie,” “my nuts,” the list goes on.

You can find this episode on Tubi or YouTube.

Do you have a favorite line in this episode? What’s your favorite episode in general? Is there a movie they’ve shown on the show or on Rifftrax that you like even without the commentary?