Odd cut from POTLU begins "Stranded in Space"

[MerryWanna]

Just the way the Don Dohler film Galaxy Invader had frames from it cut out and slo-mo-displayed at the beginning of Pod People, directed by someone else entirely, you will notice at the start of Stranded in Space from the third season of MST3K, there's a very similar rip-off from Prisoners of the Lost Universe.  It shows the reporter girl accidentally falling into the dimensionality-portal during the second earthquake.


Now the questions come:

   
• Is there any connection here, between the two instances? Especially considering they were both slow-motioned?
  
• WHY??? Are these directors such morons that they can't use cuts from the film they're about to show as 'under-credit fodder' instead of stuff ripped off from totally unrelated films? In the case of Pod People and Galaxy Invader there is no connection at all...the directors are different, and since Don Dohler died in 2006 he either had to have approved or never noticed - and one wonders why, in either case, that would have happened.

[SJP]

It's not the movie makers, it's the video distributor.  Same thing happened to "Cave Dwellers" (aka Ator the Invincible, Ator l'Invincible, or "Ca-vay Dwellers") and the two "Master Ninja" movies (known as just "The Master" when it was a TV series)...they were all released by the same distributor, who created new titles and credit sequences to sell the movies under, since I guess they couldn't get the rights otherwise (don't know if this is the official reason, but it's the best I can come up with).  However, it's still pretty inexplicable as to why they used scenes from other movies in the first place.  Maybe free advertising for the other films in their catalog?

I do sort of like the phony synth music from the beginning of Cave Dwellers, though, which I guess they paid an intern $12 bucks to put together in his basement.

[RahZilla]

I was just watching the mst3k Stranded in Space and was like, "Hey thats Prisoner of the Lost Universe!"  Made me feel pretty cool, I guess I'm glad other people noticed too