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Movie Summary  Short: Speech: Using Your Voice:  The short is one of the great ones. Made in 1950, it features Professor E. C. Buehler, elderly Director of Forensics at the University of Kansas. He advises that we must all be heard, understood, and pleasing. Above all, we must use "plenty of lip and tongue action."  Movie : Earth Vs. The Spider:  The movie tells the story of tiny high school student Carol and her slightly larger boyfriend Mike, who go looking for Carol's missing dad in a cave. There they find Dad "with all the liquid drained out of him," and they find a spider the size of Baby Huey. The townspeople believe they kill the spider with thousands of gallons of DDT (which was good in those days), but they're so wrong. They store it in the high-school gym, where the whitest band you've ever seen wakes it while rehearsing. The spider screeches, sits on houses, wiggles its big ol' legs in a threatening manner. Meanwhile Carol and Mike go to the cave to find a bracelet; the spider heads back there too; the doughty townsfolk get ready to blow up the cave, and everything just barely gets sorted out. — Paul Chaplin Host Segments  Prologue:  Servo is Crow's guest on Inside the Robot Mind. "It's my pleasure, thank you." "Oh, no, thank you." "Thank you." They never get to an interview.  Invention:  The Mads revolutionize the phone industry with the Cheese Phone, which of course Frank keeps eating, (Coming soon: a curdless model.) Joel demonstrates the CD player/hair dryer. With their heads in huge dryers, the 'Bots can't hear a thing: "What?"  Segment 2:  Reader's theater version of Crow's spec script Earth Vs. Soup, featuring a "giant bowl of California Cornucopia Vegetable Jubilee," slithering "on all fours..."  Segment 3:  The crew starts to perform a rock opera as Spy-Dor. Then Mike's in the Hexfield as a crusty Custodian from the Seventh Galaxy. "I'm from the planet Ziffielodian. We provide janitorial and maintenance to most of the universe."  Segment 4:  Joel explains Creeple People, then laments the disappearance of dangerous Sixties toys. Why are they gone, Joel? "I'll tell you why, because some little kids ratted, that's why. Hey, we all got burned! But some kids didn't have the sense to keep quiet...the mommies called the FDA, the FDA called the manufacturer, and before you could say. It's Mattel, it's Swell, the great goop machines of Taiwan were shut down for good."  Segment 5:  Crow and Servo read their essays on the films of Bert I. Gordon. Crow: "My topic was the biography of Bert I. Goron. Bert I. Goron was—" "It's Gordon." "Huh?" Gypsy tries to read the Info Club address. Frank throws up on the Button from eating too much Cheese Phone.  Stinger:  From the speaking Short: "I said mister, I said, this isn't yer seat, y' see I been sittin' 'ere a whole lot longer than you seem to think I have..." Reflections The third host segment, with a janitor, comes before we see the janitor in the movie. This was a mistake. We try to not make that kind of boo-boo, but there it is. We must live with the consequences. I myself was not working here full-time yet, so I had no real responsibility for this obvious blunder; but as a team member, I shall not sidestep any questioning or finger-pointing. As head writer, it is perhaps Mike's job to be aware of this kind of fairly simple detail, but it's not my place to point that out. There's a Rose Kennedy joke in this movie. When you hear a Rose Kennedy joke in any of our shows, please remember that at one time they were not unforgivably tasteless. I like to think that somewhere Rose Kennedy gets a chuckle out of them still. In our own defense, Rose was in fact a big fan of the show. She once wrote to tell us how funny she herself found it that she was so old. — Paul Chaplin