Awesome / Mystery Science Theater 3000

• Santa Claus driving Pitch out of Deep 13: "I came to eat candy canes and kick ass, and I'm all out of candy canes!"
• The defeat of Timmy in Fire Maidens from Outer Space. "Get away from him, you bitch!"
• Tom Servo gets one in The Wild World of Batwoman; during the endless sequence of so-called "dancing" before the end card drops, he screams out with a fury that would have made Jake LaMotta quiver in fear: "END! EEEEENNNNNNNNND!!!"
• MST3K also has a rare double-header CMoA. Mike Nelson beats Pearl in a game of three-card monte, thus earning the right to choose the movie they watch. Mike picks Hamlet - and Pearl promptly turns the tables, sending him one of the worst screen adaptions of the Bard's work ever.
  • Heck, the mere fact that they were able to make Hamlet work with their show's format. This is one of their earliest efforts in riffing a work classically considered great. They continued to riff on classics when they moved to Rifftrax.
• One truly great moment comes after the short Catching Trouble. The short is about a man named Ross Allen who catches animals for zoos and to sell as exotic pets, and it's one of the most uncomfortable shorts featured on MST3K thanks to all the scenes of animals crying in fear, being manhandled, tossed into a bag, and stolen away from their families and homes. So what do Joel and the Bots decide to do after watching this display of animal cruelty? They get out their dolls and film a skit called "Catching Ross", involving nature getting some well-earned revenge on Ross.
  • A sign of just how great this is: the volume of shorts that included "Catching Trouble" received complaints that it's no fun to watch without being followed by the cathartic "Catching Ross" skit.
  • In the same episode, the narrator of "Aquatic Wizards" refers to a Hispanic skier as a "Mexican jumping bean." The bots leap to rip him a new one, with Crow calling the narrator a "white fascist" and Tom making him seem pathetic.
  Tom: "Hah, but what do I know? I'm only a fat hick announcer, mowing down pretzels and pinwheel cookies, and trying to come to grips with the tattered ends of a once-promising life gone horribly wrong, God, God, why, why?!"
• Crow's acknowledgment during The Pumaman that Vadinho is the real hero of the movie. Much appreciated after all the attempts to sell the whiny, pathetic title character as the hero.
• In the opening segments of The Beatniks, a quite out of character Joel torment the Bots by playing rock, paper, scissors, given how their hands don't work. Finally Gypsy has enough and rams right into him, knocking him over. "Gypsy crushes Joel!"
• At the end of The Castle of Fu Manchu, Joel gives Dr. Forrester a "Reason You Suck" Speech. Keep in mind, just a few seconds before, Joel and the Bots were sobbing hoarsely, and the host segment before, they looked to be on the verge of collapse. Then, as Forrester and Frank are celebrating and awaiting the official surrender from the Satellite of Love, Joel comes back with this.
  "You haven't won, Dr. Forrester; you've lost. And I feel sorry for you. You're nothing but a sad little man in a hole in the ground who can only feel power by hurting others. Well, we won because, we survived, and we survived because, well, we're Robinsons, roughly. That's what Robinsons do is survive, basically, and well, if you think it's so easy, well, YOU should try and watch a movie sometime!"
  • Forrester actually takes up on the idea to watch the movie. He can't even make it a full two minutes. Hell, the fact that Joel and the Bots, despite sitting through this movie and crying through the host segments, did not surrender, much less kill themselves, is awesome in itself.
• Tom Servo delivers the longest riff in MST3K history at the end of Manos: The Hands of Fate—a solid minute and five seconds without shutting up, over almost the entirety of the two next victims' car ride. He also manages to name, rapid-fire, celebrity look-alikes for all 30+ people in a crowd shot at the end of Warrior of the Lost World.
• The end of The Girl in Lover's Lane, when Joel and the 'bots reject the screenwriters' pointlessly cruel murder of a likable female character and make up their own ending. With aliens. And pygmies. And dinosaurs. The MST3K staff were just as pissed off as their puppet alter-egos and got some catharsis from the sketch.
• The "United Servo Academy Men's Chorus Hymn" from The Starfighters, in which Kevin Murphy as Tom Servo harmonizes with himself nine times over.
• In one of the host segments during The Mad Monster, Joel pays tribute to the movie's mad science by switching Tom and Crow's heads. At first, they complain, then, out of frikkin' nowhere...
  Tom and Crow: Hey... are you thinking what I'm thinking?
  Tom: Do you like long walks in the rain?
  Crow: Chinese food?
  Tom: Mushing up your ice cream?
  Tom and Crow: Oh, yes! We LOVE us! Our collective brains are more powerful than Joel's! There is nothing that can stand in our way! We have seen the future and it is us! Massage us into your scalp! We are all one! All one! All-powerful! Yes! WE ARE SERVO-CROW-ATION! AND WE SHALL RULE THE WOR-
  [Joel shuts off the 'bots.]
  Joel: My robots. I think I'll keep 'em... turned off.
• In the first episode of The Return, the very first invention exchange has Jonah show off the bubble fan, which actually looks like a lot of fun. Admit it, you want one.
  • The first invention exchange of the new series and it's just about the only one in the show's entire history that's an actual invention.
    • That said, Joel's invention of collapsible buckets are a thing now.
• All the guys' disgust at Rock Hudson's character in Avalanche, including Crow saying he'll kill himself if his wife takes him back at the end after he was relentlessly harassing her throughout the movie's first half.
• Jonah and the Bots figuring out that all of Kinga's inventions have been ripped off from one of their jokes in the previous episode in The Land That Time Forgot. Now there's a Rewatch Bonus for you.
• Any time that Jonah points out something genuinely impressive from the movie:
  • In The Time Travellers, an actor's head appears to be removed and replaced within the same shot that there was clearly someone in the robot suit.
  • In Avalanche the climax has two actual stunt people being dangled over a ravine.
  • In The Land That Time Forgot, the climax involves a bunch of flaming debris actually being thrown around near the actors.
  • In Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, a genuine explosion rather than the movie's typical cheesy visual effects, done near a couple of actors.
  • In The Day Time Ended they're all quite offended that the quality stop motion work has such poor lighting.
• In a word: Crabby. In Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, the riffers ascribe a whole lot of personality to the main villain's hat, turning a piece of wardrobe into an Ensemble Dark Horse in the process, basically taking their known tendency to dip into either Flanderization or Alternative Character Interpretation and taking it to a whole new level. To clarify: in the movie itself, Crabby isn't even a character, but he sure as hell is in the riffed version.
• "Every Country Has a Monster," typically cited as the major crowd-pleasing moment for the revival. It's especially impressive as Jonah had to keep track of all the models on the counter while singing, and he even manages to keep going after accidentally knocking a bunch of them over.
  • The following season openly calls the song out as a Tough Act to Follow, but still manages its own worthy challenger with "Concepts," a fast-paced Patter Song modeled after "Trouble" with Baron ably zipping through the whole thing without a single flub.
    • Even more impressive was that what screened was the second take, and the only reason there were two was that the director decided to bring the camera in for a tighter shot. So that's two performances in a row without a single flub.
• Dr. Erhardt returns, with his life apparently being one long Offscreen Moment of Awesome since he went missing. And he brings the news that Kinga's mother is none other than Kim Catrall.
• Kinga finally figures out how Netflix works, and weaponizes it, making Jonah and the bots sit through "The Gauntlet," binge-watching six bad movies back-to-back-to-back. She also credits herself for "binge-producing" an entire season, and finally, with this relentless assault, succeeding where previous generations of Forresters failed (but see above for how that really turned out). Though she also seems to expect the audience will be similarly forced to do nothing but watch the entire season in one sitting; clearly, she still doesn't quite understand exactly how Netflix works.
• Kingachrome. A pretty ludicrous concept; movies in liquid format. It's got drawbacks that make it basically useless. However, the idea of movies recorded in liquid gives the latest iteration of MST3K a character unique from previous ones, with bubbly "static" and movies being "flushed" up to the SoL. And finally, Kinga (actually Synthia) manages to invent a way to use the Kingachrome so you can drink it and play audio. Her plans to market it to soft drink companies would actually be a huge moneymaker... imagine taking a swig of your favorite soft drink and then being able to play your favorite Queen song just by opening your mouth. Awesome.
• In Killer Fish we get a full-blown musical number in the theater with every Bot, including musical accompaniment by Growler, with great singing chops, witty lyrics, and even as much choreography as the setting can provide. It's easily the most ambitious setpiece ever seen in the theater, and a promising sign of just how confident the new crew has gotten with what they can pull off.
• At the end of The Gauntlet, Jonah turns the tables on the Mads in a way Joel and Mike could only dream of, building a theater in their own base and trapping them in it, all while putting on a perfect act of being mentally crushed by the six movie marathon so that they never suspected a thing. Plus, the implication is that the next season is going to be Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt doing the riffing, and everyone can get behind that. For more perspective: Joel escaped his own Mads thanks to a plan by Gypsy he was clueless about, and Mike escaped thanks to a total accident he also had nothing to do with, and all those Mads were still left free and clear to do it again if they wanted. Jonah, on the other hand, straight-up defeats Kinga and Max and leaves them stuck in the hell they created. Quite a comeback from seeming to be ignominiously killed at the end of the last season.
• Emily's first episode, Beyond Atlantis, became an instant fan favourite, not least for the rap in the final segment, "Mothercrabbers", that challenges "Every Country Has a Monster" for best post-revival song, due to impressive camera work, dancing and the line "three boats in one boat - that's a trimaran".
• Gamera Vs Jiger has Jonah and the 'Bots get through a very long scene of an injured Gamera trying to crawl back to the water by singing a lament song that is basically a kaiju version of "The Strongest Man in the World" from the Superman musical. During the Gizmoplex premiere of the episode, the moment received a lot of applause from those streaming the premiere.
• In The Bat Woman, after learning that the villain's boat is called Reptilicus, Emily and the 'Bots proceed to do a Call-Back to Reptilicus by singing "Every Country Has a Monster" in Spanish.
• At the end of The Christmas Dragon all of Jonah, Emily, and Joel manage to escape to Jazzfest 1991 with a little help from Pearl, Growler and M. Waverly, and getting a little oomph by singing Mike's version of the theme song.

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