Assignment: Venezuela is a 1950s travelogue picture that extols the benefits of living in Venezuela. An oil company middle-manager is packed off from the USA to go down to Venezuela, and guides show him around and get him acclimated to the culture. Meanwhile, he writes letters home to his family to persuade them that they'll like the coporate housing they'll be in when they join him (and reassure them that he's not getting into any trouble.) An ending occurs that is presented as happy.
This was one of the "lost" shorts of Mystery Science Theater 3000, for a defunct CD-ROM project. It was first exhibited at one of the Conventio-Cons; later on the video was distributed as an extra on the Rhino DVD for The Killer Shrews.
Compare with Progress Island U.S.A., a similar travelogue short about Puerto Rico.
Assignment: Venezuela includes these tropes:
- Scenery Porn: The director wants you to be able to see everything worth seeing.
- Women Are Wiser: The middle manager struggles to learn the local language over the several months covered in the film. When, at the end, his family finally arrives in Venezuela, the wife completely trumps her husband by demonstrating that she (and the kids) has been studying the language back home and is more fluent than he is.
The Mystery Science Theater 3000 presentation contains these tropes:
- Running Gag:
- Jim describing everything as "narrow," gets a lot of mileage from the riffers.
- Jim never actually attending his mandatory Spanish classes during his time in Caracas.
- Shout-Out: A young boy getting an injection to the buttocks and reacting in pain is riffed as saying "Spooooock!"
