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

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.

omg dr casino otm x100

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.

So anyway, new update:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mst3k/bringbackmst3k/posts/1423502/

He wants Felicia Day as "Kinga Forrester," MST3K's next Mad… and Dr. Clayton Forrester's daughter!" and "Hampton Yount and Baron Vaughn to become the next voices of Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo!"

Plus a new extra henchman, it seems.

Was holding out for Deven Green.

I've never actually watched any of the Sci Fi Channel episodes. Were there good ones? They looked ... less than.

Oh, they're great! Though I generally feel the "Mad's" stuff from that era went downhill, the riffing was plenty good.

You're doing yourself a major disservice skipping out on those final seasons, poly. Some of them are all-time. Check:

Space Mutiny
Time Chasers
Werewolf
The Final Sacrifice
Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders
Horrors of Spider Island
Diabolik

The Sci-Fi eps more or less require you to skip the host segments.

I'd add Giant Spider Invasion to that list.

The Sci-Fi eps more or less require you to skip the host segments.

― thread of getting sw0le and lena jokes (Eric H.), Monday, November 23, 2015 3:39 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was saying this in a slightly softer way, but to be specific I like the isolated bots + Mike bits of those segments much more often than when the Mads are a part of it, so that distinction is kind of important imo.

Yeah Sci-Fi wanted them to have a continuing plot of some kind so the mads segments are kinda weak.

Final Sacrifice is all-time classic though.

I didn't watch the Sci-Fi episodes for years, but when I started watching them on youtube it was like finding lost treasure

Ditto! Agreed about skipping all Mads segments and most M&TBs ones, but if you can get past new Crow there's lots of good riffing.

I dig having Baron Vaughn on the show

More interviews floating around -- oddly enough, the one via StarWars.com is the best of that bunch; it goes deeper in some directions I haven't seen in the other pieces:

http://www.starwars.com/news/weve-got-movie-sign-joel-hodgson-talks-star-wars-and-mst3k

Good interview- hits on some of our recent discussion upthread.

BTW, doubling back a few posts: some Sci-Fi episodes I'm particularly glad to have seen for one reason or another. None of these stick out in my mind as super all-time classics the way some Comedy Central episodes do, but I've also seen all of these a maximum of one time each, so it's a bit more impressionistic re: memories of laughing fits at particular points, or just a memorably strange movie.

Touch of Satan
Agent For H.A.R.M.
Time Chasers
The Mole People
Invasion of the Neptune Men
Horror of Party Beach
Werewolf
Final Sacrifice

RIP Rex, your headstone movie was too good to be MSTied

http://www.avclub.com/article/rip-rex-reason-star-island-earth-228925

His name was really Rex Reason? Hero.

Anyway, Turkey Day Marathon starts in half an hour:

http://mst3k.com/events/turkeyday15/wheretowatch/

crossing our fingers that the youtube app on our ps3 has updated to allow streaming ...i had to watch it on the ipad last year

your headstone movie was too good to be MSTied

And ranks as possibly one of their worst episodes too, if it ranks.

So excited to force family to watch this yet again!

First up, Outlaw of Gor. The score so far:

Comedy Central: 1
Sci-Fi: 0

One of the first episodes I finally saw as it ran. Glad this is going to be on demand at Yahoo because looks like streaming on my phone isn't happening...

ps3 stream is working! yaaay

This Island Earth was better at the Minneapolis convention. Still a decent movie tho.

mst3k.com stream not working

Ah cool, YouTube on my iPhone IS working. Maybe it just started a little later.