The big news:
Season 11 will be carried on Netflix.
Production news:
The panel revealed never-before-seen concept art and a sneak peak at the evolved version of the show’s-iconic “door sequence.” We’ll post video when we can.
Casting announcements:
Bill Corbett joins Season 11 to write and will have a guest appearance as his character “Brain Guy.”
Kevin Murphy will make a guest appearance in Season 11 as his character “Professor Bobo.”
Mary Jo Pehl will join Season 11 to write and for a guest appearance as her character “Pearl Forrester.”
John Jurgensen of the Wall Street Journal has a story…
The Netflix media center has a release…
Katie Rife at the A.V. Club has a story…
Crave Online interviewed Joel, Jonah Ray, Baron Vaughn and Hampton Yount:
They also interviewed Felicia Day:
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Oh well no new announcements for Volume 37 :-)
So happy that the tensions have thawed with the original cast/writers. Really hoping this also paves the way for appearances from Mike, Trace and Frank.
Hopefully, this allows MSTies that were reticent about supporting the new show to be fully on board.
Also, could not be happier about Netflix! No commercials, easy to stream…..huzzah!!!
I won’t lie, I got up and cheered and then cried a bit at the news. This is literally everything I hoped for.
Must be pretty sweet to get Kevin back in the Bobo mask! Hope the garlic smell dissipated by now. (Any one remember watching The Last Dance where Andrea Ducane told Kevin to hang onto the mask because ‘you never know’?)
Gypsy apparently will be included too, but they didn’t reveal who would be playing her.
Bobo, Brain guy and Pearl? Welp…there goes 3 of the 6 million…
…but seriously…awesome that season 8-10 bad guys will be handing off to the new guys!
awesome!!!!
… just cancelled netflix, but hopefully it comes to blu-ray eventually!
Big news! Glad the new season is on good service like Netflix. It will be good to see Pearl, Brain Guy and Bobo back.
You can already preorder season 11 on Blu-Ray or DVD at the add-on site.
The partnership between Netflix and MST3K is not only important to the not-too-distant-future but to the distant future of MST3K. Congratulations!!
This is thrilling. It’s becoming real. We really did this, folks! Look at what we, a ragtag bunch of MSTies, accomplished! We got our show back!
#BroughtBackMST3k
…now that you mention it, have any of the Netflix “original series” ever made their way to DVD/Blu-Ray? “House of Cards” or “Daredevil”?…is this a problem?
This is almost the best possible news, was kind of hoping for a true series pickup with more original episodes. I guess this is Netflix testing the waters.
Some have, some haven’t. The only two I know have are House of Cards and Orange is the New Black.
Also, the fourth season of Arrested Development and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, to name a few. Eventually Netflix Original Series make their way to DVD and/or Blu-ray.
With Shout Factory being co-owners, I wouldn’t worry. I’m positive the deal includes Shout Factory having rights to DVD distribution. (But they won’t be able to stream the new episodes, which makes future Turkey Days interesting.)
I’ve seen season 4 of Arrested Development and seasons of Orange Is The New Black in stores, so no problem, I believe.
I’m thrilled because I have Netflix (initially for Arrested Development), so great news on my end! Plus, love to see the later Mads add continuity to the new show. No Kinga’s daddy, though.
This is the greatest possible news, though with Netflix I wonder if that means they’ll be releasing the entire season (with the exception of maybe the Christmas special) all at once. Have they ever released a series episodically?
Personally, I’d prefer a weekly release schedule, not only because I know I’d binge watch the entire thing too quickly, but because I think it just works better if you get to sit and savor each episode individually. (it also makes the call-back jokes funnier)
As for getting Pearl, Bobo, and Brain Guy back… this is even more than I could possibly hope for. If anybody came back from the classic series, I was hoping it would be Pearl, to help cement Kinga as part of the Forrester clan, and set up the narrative of why she wants to shoot a guy into space with two robots to watch bad movies. I’m assuming all three are set to appear in the first episode, with “Grandma Forrester” helping set Kinga up in her new lair and get her started on the road to becoming an accredited mad scientist. With Bobo and Brain Guy doing all the heavy lifting of course. Hopefully, if Mary Jo is staying on as a writer, that also means we might get her back for the occasional guest spot, the same way she showed up during Trace and Frank’s run.
So, will Bill and Mary Jo’s writing job on the revival curtail their work with Rifftrax? And do I have to upgrade my Netflix account to include downloads as well as DVDs?
I was wondering that too, Troy – They do have a weekly release schedule for that Chelsea Handler show, so it’s possible?
doesn’t this just screw over all you nerds who donated to bring the show back even more than you’ve already been screwed? (referring specifically to the netflix announcement, not the rest of this news)
Awesome! I’m really thrilled to hear that Pearl, Brain Guy and Bobo will be making an appearance!
I don’t do Netflix, so I’ll have to wait for the new eps to come out on DVD. But I’m very happy that the show has found a home!
YouTube has a Crave interview with the new cast and Joel, that spills a few more beans. The TLDR version is:
* The show will air in early 2017.
* The movies will be entirely from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, and one from the 90’s. We can expect standard MST3K fare, but because of the way people watch television now, they have gone for movies that have widescreen prints and are in somewhat better condition. (so not as many scratches, bad sound, etc.) The widescreen-only thing probably also means no more made-for-TV movies and stitched together TV episodes, which does make me a little sad, since those were often my favorites.
* Continuity-wise, the show will continue on as season 11. It’s not a reboot or going to pretend that the other previous seasons didn’t happen, or there have been 3 other hosts we didn’t see between Mike and Jonah, in case anyone was worried about that sort of thing.
* The Invention Exchange will be back.
* Jonah will work for Gizmonic Institute.
* Jonah will have a slightly different dynamic with the bots than Mike and Joel did. According to Jonah, Crow and Tom have decided they don’t like him and are just going to wait until they send up the next guy.
* Tom Servo will still sing.
* There will be classic callbacks. (As Jonah says, sometimes you see a karate chop, and you just have to say “Hi-keeba!”)
Fantastic news! So excited for this to stream on a service I already pay for, huzzah! Nice work Joel!!
Will Bill and Kevin reprise their roles… nude??? This is the only way the show can continue ;D
The 30’s movies were a bit unfortunate (Mad Monster? Corpse Vanishes?), but to lose the 40’s and and 50’s educational shorts? No early 50’s Ed Wood, Roger Corman or Bert I. Gordon?
Well, they probably don’t have to fill themselves out to a two-hour slot, so there’s no need for shorts…But this still sounds like the naive early days of Blu-ray back in ’08, when studios actually worried they wouldn’t be able to release old movies anymore, because how could you watch an old B/W 4:3 movie on a widescreen HDTV set?….I mean, y’know, it just ain’t DONE! ?:-)
If I remember correctly, I think the Netflix show “Between” was released on a weekly basis, so there is some presidence. I too hope that they release at a weekly interval.
Ha!!
WE DID IT!!!
Best news I heard in weeks!
Thank you fellow backers!!!
:-)
From various Joel statements, it seems like they’re mainly just trying to steer clear from those old muddy looking prints with bad sound where it’s hard to tell what’s even going on, which I fully support. They more or less self-edited for those sort of flicks after the 3rd season anyways. They also didn’t say anything specifically ruling out movies from the 40’s and 50’s, there just aren’t any in this particular batch. (They did say that modern movies just don’t have the pauses for riffing that old movies do, so they’ll be sticking to the same general era of movies that MST3K has always stuck to, which I also fully support.)
There are a bunch of bad movies from the 1950’s that I’d absolutely love to have them do. Top of the list being Phantom From Space (1953), which is in color but contains lots of scenes of wormy looking scientists standing around the Griffith observatory talking at each other while a (mostly) invisible alien wearing the Robot Monster helmet floats objects around on strings, and The Cyclops (1957), which is the only Bert I. Gordon film they haven’t riffed on yet, probably because it used so much of the same stock footage from King Dinosaur. I’d like to see them do The Flying Serpent (1946) too, but I’ve never seen a decent print of it, so I think it’d probably fall into the “too muddy” category for the new season.
In sincerely hope that we’ll still be getting shorts though, and that each episode will still be pretty close to 90 minutes, even if some of the movie run a bit under. Hopefully they won’t do anything silly like put Jonah and the bots’ seats so far to the left of the new theater that their silhouettes will be cut of if they happen to watch a movie or short that isn’t formatted for widescreen, but I’m guessing not, since that would also make it harder for Jonah to point and interact with objects in the movie, and why eliminate one of the few gags that MST3K can do that RiffTrax can’t?
Though since the 60’s are still a go, man, I hope this means they get around to doing Dimension 5.
We all love it when MST3K does a spy movie, and the only thing better than a goofy 60’s spy flick, is a goofy 60’s spy flick that’s also a time travel espionage thriller starring a ton of guest actors from Star Trek and Odd Job from Goldfinger. This movie has just the right amount of cheese, and tries desperately to pass itself off as a sci-fi James Bond on the same budget as an episode of Time Tunnel. Oh, and it was also written by the same guy as The Human Duplicators and Women of the Prehistoric Planet, so it has that going for it.
Since they’ve got Patrick back making props, it would be a shame if he is not invited to jump up Gypsy’s tube, so to speak.
Not really. If your pledge level included downloads, you’re covered. Otherwise, the show was pretty much always going to end up on a cable channel or streaming service, either of which require a fee. I suppose PBS might have been an option, but probably not a very likely one.
As for those lamenting the lack of shorts, I wonder if Shout might not hold something back for their own YouTube? Web exclusive shorts could be a good thing to draw attention to their own channel and tide over fans between seasons.
What I’m saying is Shout/MST3K should hire me to come up with great ideas like that.
If you’re currently on a disc-only plan, then yes you will. I’ve been on the fence about upgrading my own account. This’ll probably tip the balance.
Its funny, but I was kinda looking forward to commercials again. I have found some RT a bit tiring and something of a test of my endurance.It also served as a nice 4th wall type device, sort of acknowledging another layer of suspended (or unsuspended)disbelief. I suppose they will break away to Deep 13 (Bathroom Sign?)to vary the rhythm, but how will a Netflix format fit the plot?
I think Netflix holds a certain window for how long the season remains “exclusive” to them, but after that it’s all up to the studio that makes the actual show to release it to disc. Daredevil isn’t out yet because Disney apparently doesn’t think it would sell well on disc, being on streaming and such.
Excellent news all around. Some news a little sad – I LOVE the older films they used to riff on. And many from the 1950s were made for widescreen but were a shown on TV in 4X3, so they could do some of those if they really wanted (would love to see the riff on Attack Of The Crab Monsters. And I also loved the shorts the most. But most films from the 60s on were longer, so I can see they couldn’t squeeze them in. Of course if the new series is a hit the could do a 1/2 hour Shorts series as well.
But it is good that they’re getting Kevin, Bill and Mary Jo back. I’m really hoping Joel will be on the show as well.
And I figured Netflix would be the place to show the series. It just fits it to a “T.” As to DVD / Blurays – yeah, Shout Factory owns the show. Of course they’ll release it on physical media. Since almost all the shows in the original series have been released on DVD, my thought is they’ll release the entire season 11 as a boxed set, then they will probably try to release all the episodes in season boxed sets. They’ll probably have to make some more deals to get episodes that their contracts have expired for, and some like the Godzilla films will be missing, but I think they aren’t just going to not do anything with them. They didn’t spend all that money on buying the rights just to produce new shows.
Just my 2 cents
This is useless for me. I have cable but have no interest in Netflix.
Dont have Netflix and no plans to get it.
Dont like Felicia, hate Jonah, never head or a couple of them and feel sorry for Patton getting stuck with this lame project.
They just couldn’t let MST3K live in the past could they? No one was clamoring to get the show back, no one.
my thoughts on the whole netflix thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usfiAsWR4qU
*high five* So excited!
Earlier this month Marvel announced a UK release for DD season 1. An American release is likely in the cards as well.
Excellent point! That must be why the $6.3 million raised by fans broke Kickstarter records as the highest-ever funded TV/film project. Because…no one was clamoring for its return?
Damn. Now, I’m going to HAVE to get a new Netflix account…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNsrK6P9QvI
Not even House of Cards forced me to do that, but we’re going to be in line for MST3K!!
I don’t follow the line of reasoning that folks can’t afford Netflix but wanted to buy Bluray’s/DVD’s. As is, 4-episode DVD packs go for around $50. There are 14 episodes in the new season (all already available to backers that selected the Bluray/DVD tier). Following that pricing structure, a full season would be at least $200. A year-long subscription to Netflix is less than $100. Not to mention the additional exposure it provides, the ability to stream from multiple devices and the prospect of additional seasons. For truly die-hard MSTies, it seems totally fair to spend $100 annually (or $7.99 per month) if the show continues past Season 11. If not, backers don’t have to double-dip on spending b/c they’re already getting the eps from the KS.
Plus no commercials.
Honestly, it feels like a dream scenario.
Well it sounds nice on paper. but if they are going to pull some Star Trek non sense and kill all the old mads off or something, i’ll pass. besides seeing the real mads will make the new ones possibly seem that much lamer.
the bad film prints also allowed for some geeat riffs when characters would teleport in jump cuts, that sort of thing. so i hope while the prints may be clear they still,will have some quirks.
So much terrific news here! This is our “Packers won the Super Bowl!” moment.
Let’s not forget this.
I like physical media.
14 new episodes isn’t enough?
actually way back when jonah was first announced as the new host onboard, he did a podcast (i can’t remember the title but i’m pretty sure it’s the dedicated mstie-fancast one), and he did a little bit of a gypsy imitation during the interview – i remember thinking at the time, “he could do gypsy!” (they could probably easily pre-rec gypsy’s dialog – unless j also turns out to be a ventriloquist! ;)
this is all awesome news! although i did miss my guess on the network… ;) s’okay!