Tom Swift and His War Tank is a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfic by John Nowak and Matt Plotecher, riffing on the Tom Swift novel of the same name. The entire text of the original novel was reproduced along with sarcastic comments from Joel, Tom, and Crow.
The entire text of the MSTing can be found here: http://www.keithpalmer.ca/mst3k/favourites/tom-swifts-war-tank.txt
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The Mystery Science Theater 3000 presentation of Tom Swift's War Tank has examples of:
- The Ditz: Ned.
- Fourth Wall Breaking: Ned's stupidity becomes so severe that Joel and the bots run out of ways to riff him and are forced to ask the readers for help.
- Idiot Ball: Ned and Mr Damon keep a firm grip on this at all times, but it seems that everyone who isn't Tom gets their sticky mitts on it at some point.Servo: Ah, it all becomes clear, now. The residents of Shopton, except for the Swifts, share a collective intelligence. Someone else in town must be buttoning their coat and thereby placing a strain on the town's remaining IQ resources.
- Invincible Hero: Tom, lampshaded by Servo:Servo: I've never read any of the books in this series, and I'll bet I know everything there is to know about him already. He's really good at everything that he does, which is everything done by any American of his age and class. Girls admire him, but he only has pure love for one. He's Roger Ramjet played straight. He is, in effect, every bit as annoying as every "Mary Sue" ever penned.
- Obfuscating Stupidity:Joel: Meanwhile, back on the Swift plant, Eradicate and Koku had undergone a change since their Master had been away....Servo [as Eradicate]: I disagree — even given Rossini's questionable reusage of material from his earlier operas, "The Barber of Seville" is one of the greatest Opera Buffas ever written; even the renowned Verdi himself said as much.Crow [as Koku]: True, my friend, but I still think you're downplaying Mozart's "Don Giovanni" too much — that raised the level of Opera Buffas to unknown levels which Verdi himself only matched with "Falstaff," some eighty years later.
- Older Than They Think: The author's end note concludes that "things really haven't changed over the last century", pointing out that Tom Swift, as an over-the-top Invincible Hero, is the precursor to what fandom from the MST's time calls a Marty Sam.
- Overly Long Gag: Crow, Servo and Joel's description of Swift's Cold-Blooded Torture. Justified in that it lasts as long as it takes for Mr Damon and Ned to realize that Tom Swift, inventor extraordinaire and tank engineer, may have possibly been kidnapped by the German spies they know full well are prowling around Shopton.
- Running Gag: "I get paid by the word, you know."
- Stuff Blowing Up: Crow destroys Tom's airfield as revenge for ditching him in a biplane over the no-fly zone in southern Iraq.
- Too Dumb to Live: Ned. Oh boy, NED.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Tom Swift has a tank to test. He wants to see how it fares when driven through a building. He spots a barn in a farmyard. Does he stop and ask the farmer's permission first? No.
