Mystery Science Theater 3000: C/D, S/D.

theres a level of contempt and detachment i dont get from the earlier mst3k crew

Right, but as I've harped before, I DO get a sense of contempt from the Rifftrax crew that they didn't seem to display even in the Sci-Fi era of MST3K.

I note Ray is originally from Hawaii, and if they want something of the spirit of the original to come through, some kind of sensibility has to come through, even if it's a regular set of hyperlocal references that still work in general.

maybe i am judging him too harshly. is there any video evidence of this guy being a good host? i looked him up on youtube and listened to his "EP" which was just a comedy podcast chopped up

i was hoping my mans trace would be involved but he seems to be content to just doing what he's been doing at his own pace

nah dude jonah ray sux.

I note he's trying to push back already:

https://twitter.com/jonahray/status/666312032812036096

the reason I couldn't keep listening to the Nerdist was that Jonah and those other guys were such try-hards about getting a joke out every 15 seconds or so, usually incredibly superficially. It was like dopes trying to riff against their own show.

i mean i cant blame joel for picking him hes a popular person w comedy nerd bonafides and is a proven performer. i guess it was out of the question to have joel himself back, which is what i really want.

joel seems more like a film nerd to me than a comedy nerd. hence him not being as comfortable in front of the camera. he created a show where he spends 90% of it in silhouette. i think this is where the soul of the show is and am resisting the idea of a bunch of unfunny comedy nerd people taking over.

http://www.avclub.com/article/jonah-ray-his-intense-burning-hatred-sublimes-what-206997

here is a sample of his riffing, on the band sublime. he goes into detail about his own history listening to cool punk and metal bands. lots of jokes about Guy Fieri

I'm going into denial about this, going to fantasize about what it would've been like if they'd hired the Flop House guys as host & robots.

Re: Jonah Ray: If you hang around in the vicinity of talented people long enough, people will start giving you gigs just because you're in the room.

He seems pretty ILM-friendly to me based on the Sublime thing.

too bad the show is not Music Sarcasm Theater 3000

He's is a movie buff fwiw, especially genre stuff. Listen to the Nerdist episode with Elijah Wood if you want to hear two insufferable people try to one-up each other.

I was going to say he co-hosts the James Bonding podcast but then I realized that was the other Baby Hardwick, Matt Mira.

He's is a movie buff fwiw

Of course he is. He grew up w the internet. Anyone can become a film buff with Wikipedia.

Or with ILX :)

loved the show when it was on, went to the first convention, but i don't need more of it.

Wait, was that the convention in '94? I think I remember seeing photos of that in the Satellite of Love newsletter

A coupla guys I knew from the campus humor newspaper stole the Dr. Forrester standee and kept it in the office for years after.

Separately, there's a note that is appearing on the direct MST sales via Rifftrax (the hook being new Mike intros):

P.S. - A significant share of the profits of all MST episodes sold on RiffTrax will be paid out directly to ALL the principal cast members of MST – Mike, Joel, Kevin, Bill, Mary Jo, Trace, Frank, Josh and Bridget. We feel it’s important that the original artists benefit directly from their awesome work. So if you want to support them, buy your MST here on RiffTrax!

Anyway, they hit $2 million so one way or another, it's happening.

bleah, an internet nerd-celebrity person is definitely not the direction this needed to go, even though all of us internet nerds have probably dreamed of such a position at one point or another and can't really resent jonah ray what must be the phone call of a lifetime. i do think there are structural things about nerd-dom and the internet and the blogger/youtube "i'm really funny when i talk about movies/video games/comics/whatever" culture that sort of guarantee it'd be someone like this. i mean how else would you talent-scout for it?

basically the problem is that mst3k, the quirky homemade "who are these people?" show that's seemingly beamed in from under a rock by people with a sensibility at once weirder, funnier and smarter than basically anything else on TV, is kind of impossible in 2015. even if mst3k the show didn't already exist (and hadn't already inspired so many others to do the kinds of things the show did). with youtube, EVERYBODY and their couch buddies can fashion themselves into a homemade show jockeying for your attention. there's millions of such things (though none are remotely as good or as lovingly crafted or thought-through as MST in its heyday). it can't be special, and mst3k really was special, in the way of great cable access shows (from which roots of course it came) or late-night labor-of-love radio programs or local bands on a mixtape someone gave you that are so good you can't believe how fucking good they are. a consequence of there being so many media choices is that you lose the sense of something weird and genuinely quirky slipping through, to be claimed just by you and the few others you'd find who "got it."

none of this is joel hodgson's fault incidentally, except maybe inadvertently making a lot of people think they're funnier than they are when riffing movies. (funny enough for it to be a blast with your friends and at local riffing type parties, because the social interaction is part of the fun - but this does not transmit to your youtube channel.) i'm a serious curmudgeon with these things though - The Flophouse turned me off in the same way Nerdist turns off president keyes. i've liked a teeny bit of "how did this get made." (though i remain convinced it would be way better if they actually gave a shit about how it got made. and didn't think the only way to be funny about a movie was to point out in as loud a voice as possible the parts that are ridiculous and don't make sense.) redlettermedia (another upper midwestern crew) have a really tough hit/miss ratio with some great and well-edited observations mixed in with tedious beat-up-on-the-movie stuff and some frankly super offensive moves that should not have made it through. (fuck rich evans's "chinese" impression prank phone call, to mock a video which was clearly intended to help english-as-a-second-language chinese immigrants learn to use the internet.) basically i can't think of anybody on the internet, even those people i do enjoy listening to, who i'd trust behind one of the puppets or hosting MST. it's not so much that all these people suck, it's kind of that we're not worthy and don't deserve nice things. (i'd accept ned, though.)

anyway yeah - not joel's fault, but it's the landscape he's got to work with. suddenly it's hard for MST3K to be something other than another geek brand hoping to capture some of your discretionary internet viewing time. obviously i'll look like a real lame-o when it turns out this new show is brilliantly written and effortlessly charming but i just fear for the loss of the ineffable "feel." adam bruneau sums up my worst nightmare: shout outs to his friends podcast and btw courtesy of comedy bang bang here is a special guest star blah blah - god help us. maybe the only way out would be to get people known for non-funny movie podcasts - evaluate based on speaking voice and their love of film rather than their mockery of it. i'm sure there are tons out there but right now i'm thinking of the (sadly recently-defunct) "bonnie and maude" which was so refreshing for just being a couple of people and their guests having an actual conversation, listening to each other, trying to think through something about the movie while they were talking. but again, i'm an old crank and a blowhard.

basically i can't think of anybody on the internet, even those people i do enjoy listening to, who i'd trust behind one of the puppets or hosting MST. it's not so much that all these people suck, it's kind of that we're not worthy and don't deserve nice things. (i'd accept ned, though.)

There's a vision.

i would pony up for a kickstarter that has as its goal demanding joel name ned raggett as the new crow t. robot. or servo as you prefer.

I'd love to think I'm Crow but I'm probably more Servo. Pomposity and all.

i've liked a teeny bit of "how did this get made." (though i remain convinced it would be way better if they actually gave a shit about how it got made. and didn't think the only way to be funny about a movie was to point out in as loud a voice as possible the parts that are ridiculous and don't make sense.)

Yes. It's not like I can't get through an entire episode if I'm invested in the movie they're slamming, but they also cover a lot of movies I frankly don't give a shit about and still I think their default mode is way too bellicose.

xp we all want to be Crow and we're all actually Servo

Tom Servo's personality and puppet design are one of the great achievements in the medium btw. It's Henson-level - all that voice-of-authority pomposity and precarious ego bundled in this oddly dignified, eyeless, chicken-mouthed gumball machine. And his singing!

As for How Did This Get Made... it just typifies a whole genre of non-criticism which in comedy terms translates into cheap, thoughtless laughs. The podcasts of their live events particularly put me off - the audience roars appreciatively at the most under-written and unobservant swipes at the most obviously bad parts of the movie. Like wow, great job guys. For me criticism is generally about making you like something you didn't like before, so stuff like that feels like saying to the audience, "Yup, you were right to think this was bad! Aren't we all just so much cleverer?" I'm fine with a great critic needing to let loose against the crapfests once in a while, but when it's your entire steez, do you even have a frame of reference anymore? One thing that's amazing about MST3K is that while, upfront, the entire premise is that the movies are bad, and most of the riffs are also, at some level, pointing out that, yup, this movie is indeed bad, the joy of making and watching it isn't really located in piling onto the movie's badness: it's the minute-to-minute observational comedy of picking up on just the particular dumb thing you were just noticing, but framing it in an unexpected way, with a particularly apt reference you never would have thought to come up with....

I dunno, I don't think I can actually verbalize it but a lot of the laughs I get watching MST aren't really at the expense of the movie, they're more in delighted appreciation of the riffers. Of course, I do also like relishing the staggering incompetence and cynicism of some of these pictures, and at the same time I'm piling up this mental catalogue of all the ways movies can be bad and go wrong --- the other night we were watching Daddy-O and sussing out the different ways this, Teenage Strangler and Earth Vs. The Spider had all failed to reach the coveted teen hot-rodder market. It just can't only be that.

Yeah, the biggest laughs for me almost always come from the recontextualiztion of what I'm seeing. It's the transformation through riffing of a single film into a different film every 5 to 10 seconds.

"how did this get made" is entertaining but it is people just yelling at each other for the most part. which yes typifies a lot of new nerd critic culture.

it is kind of weird. i guess mst3k is foundational for many people in creating this new critic-based nerd culture. one big difference is the latter has very mainstream tastes. mst3k is all these weird little passion projects or tax write offs for ancient exploitation impresarios. now there is a Bad Movie Canon, thanks to stuff like Nerdist and How Did This Get Made?, and it largely consists of these big budget pieces of crap that have none of the strange weird artiness of true b-movies.

Doctor Casino nails for me many of the key draws. the joy not being in point out how bad it is but the observational humor, the varied tone, the experience of hanging out w three best friends, the gentle midwestern nature of the ribbing, etc.

the movies have a certain charm for me as well personally. I would sit down and watch any mst3k-style movie with or without them riffing if it was on tv.

gentle midwestern nature of the ribbing

Gentle is the nicest way to say passive aggressive. And totally right ... the few times they let themselves get sidetracked onto the "I hated hated hated hated this movie" offramp, it disrupts this delicate balance. Monster-a-Go-Go is one of the only notable tolerable exceptions I can think of because, well, it is the worst movie they ever did. Even Manos doesn't wallow too much in the horribleness of the movie outside of the host segments, nowhere near as much as they do throughout The Wild World of Batwoman, for instance.

i dont know if it was just passive aggressive tho. the tone was pretty varied. they could go from imitating in-scene actors to making a meta reference to interacting w the movie screen itself via silhouettes to singing along silly words to the music to etc.

Even with Monster A-Go-Go the full-on "this sucks" treatment is really confined to a few places IIRC - most notably the ending. The outright booing they give it feels earned, like, they've held back on so many movies, but come on. Similarly, the extreme rarity of host segments where they play up the difficulty of surviving the experiment, we can't take much more of this, etc. etc. Manos has a bit like that, Castle of Fu Manchu has a bit like that and I'm sure there must be a couple of others - but that's not many out of nearly 200 episodes in a show about watching bad movies, where the temptation to do that kind of schtick must have been there.

Also crucially important is the conceit that they're watching the movies for the first time, cold, and can actually muster surprise and confusion (Servo's little "Huh?"s and "Hm!"s are pitch-perfect), so that, in Monster A-Go-Go there's this sense of realizing what's been pulled on the audience, and the confusion curdling into resentment, right before your eyes.

i seem to remember castle of fu manchu had the bots crying inconsolably by the end

ah i see u mentioned it!

On further reflection I'm clearly at least sort of overstating it not being about pointing out that the movies were bad. But it was the way they were about that. I still basically stand by this:

Been watching more and more episodes and I'm becoming convinced - and forgive me if I've already said this in one way or another - but there's a real difference between basically two kinds of episodes...ones where the movies is kind of crappy and lame and goofy and dated, which they make fun of, and movies that were really made with total contempt for their audience, which they hate. Thinking here of Catalina Caper's jokes that are funny to no one, plot that's involving to no one, rock and roll that doesn't rock, etc. Or how the bots clearly loathe Monster-A-Go-Go more than Manos, though the latter is certainly bleaker and more unsettling (though maybe just as empty in terms of nothing happening).

Like, a b-movie or a shoddy dub like Gamera can be good camp material, but you really get the sense of glee when they get to serve justice to a movie that was made specifically and solely so that something could be on-screen at a drive-in and what difference does it make if it's done well. And The Giant Gila Monster's greatest sin is just how lazy and shitty the "giant"-ness is: there's not one damn shot that gets the gila monster in the same frame as the cast, and so as bad as Earth Versus The Spider may be, there's at least some measure of effort there that lets Joel and the bots get into the spirit of things and focus mainly on the absurd Fifties behavior and decision-making of the cast, not to mention that one old guy ("Who ARE you?").

Dunno if this really holds up or if it's just in my head, but it's been bouncing around in my head.

― Doctor Casino, Wednesday, April 10, 2013 4:33 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

... but definitely there's more 'types' than that, and the 'type' doesn't inflect all the riffing by any means. And then you have the really, really low-budget things made by independent creators or direct-to-video type operations that are seriously attempting to make a real movie but just can't achieve it. These take all shapes but they're some of the most interesting (and hilarious) things the show brings to light: Manos, Teenage Strangler, Final Sacrifice. I would really prefer a new MST that doesn't touch anything newer than Werewolf - everything since the internet is sort of tainted either by self awareness, or is already recognized as "awesomely bad" or whatever and has been reviewed a million times on YouTube. Dig up more 50s-80s gems, I say.

Otm there are tons of VHS era gems

Yeah I notice there's some guy involved in or always profiled in those Ballyhoo documentary productions on the Shout Factory MST3K DVDs -- I think his name's Larry something or other -- and he seems to have this schtick of making self-consciously wannabe 50s/60s trash/alien/sleaze films over the past twenty years or so. It may come from a place of love but it all feels so second-hand and obvious, down to the titles.

(Speaking of Ballyhoo, I will note that according to Joel's own Kickstarter account, he's backed one other project on there:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ballyhoomotionpics/celluloid-wizards-in-the-video-wasteland

...and if he wants to do more from those guys, bring it.)

Wait, was that the convention in '94?

I know it was, bcz I couldn't go to a Twins game as there was the baseball strike on.

I think the choice of the Nerdist guy likely means this will be MST3K for millennials--i.e. updated cultural references, faster and more obvious riffing. Some MST episodes have long stretches of silence from the hosts--I doubt that will be happening.

and a whole lot more yelling

I dunno, I feel like the riff-per-minute count is generally very high, almost as high as you can go without making it totally impossible to understand what's happening in the movie. There are definitely some stretches of dead air but sometimes that's almost down to the movie they're stuck with. I always like when they bring in a longform gag that just takes advantage of the space, like the Leonard Maltin thing over the long ending and closing credits of Laserblast, or the Day The Earth Froze opening credit material.

I just hope the aesthetic and style, despite taking advantage of new technology, remains kinda homemade and doesn't look as mobile-site/hashtag/sterile/over-elaborate as I'm worried it might.

needs to be shot on video IMO. the host segments at least. though the sets did look great shot on film for the 1996 movie. hrm.

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As long as we're here -- the guy behind the Manos restoration is doing The Atomic Brain next, as well as funding a documentary on its director, who turns out to have been one of those Hollywood lifers behind the camera that apparently is something of a legend for working cinematographers to the present. And at $16,000 this is, how you say, way cheaper than the revival deal.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/manos/the-atomic-brain-4k-restoration

Meantime, new interview with Joel:

http://mashable.com/2015/11/17/mystery-science-theater-3000-joel-hodgson

Of interest:

Q You've mentioned that you plan to stick to the look that people know but also bring it up a notch. Tell me about your plans to evolve the look of it.

A Well, they were a couple of things built into Mystery Science Theater that worked really good, and that is that it appears to be a live document of a day in time. I was really careful about that; I didn't want to do a lot of post-production on the show. I wanted all the effects to be in camera, and we're seen a lot of that come around, with [the way] J.J. Abrams (did) Star Wars. People are sort of on the other end of [the argument] that seeing everything is the best way to tell a story; sometimes just having a really solid world you're in works really good. So I want to stick with that. I don't want to go too far out with that. But I also don't want to arrest the look of Mystery Science Theater and kind of stick with what we were doing in the '90s, which at the time was really provocative. I think we can move it along a little bit further. I'm not sure if I can, but I'd like to try.

The thing I think will really protect it is that everything has to be done live. No matter what we do, it will have its own kind of charm.

That's promising. I'm glad he seems concerned with maintaining parameters in the overall look and feel.