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Weekend Discussion Thread: Your MST3K ProjectsAlert reader David writes:
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About three months ago, I was directed to create and implement a sales training course. The material was prepackaged and quite dull; they had worksheets, video examples, and horrible discussion points.
I found unaltered copies of “Hired Parts I & II” and showed them during training. I instructed the class to interject their thoughts and comments during the videos.
I did this for four separate classes; the results were mostly boring, but once in awhile there was a good comment.
I also said that I owed my success to “an amazing mentor named Rando.”
My DeviantArt gallery is full of MST3K fan art. I can’t possibly link to all of it in one post, so I’ll just give you the link to the gallery itself and let you look around (try entering MST3K in the search bar): http://jbwarner86.deviantart.com/gallery/
My most recent one is “Pa-Pa-Pow” http://jbwarner86.deviantart.com/art/Pa-Pa-Pow-120415270 , a tribute piece I did for “Laserblast”. My only regret is that I couldn’t fit more characters in there.
I put up something on my website where two characters make fun of song lyrics. I used the horrendous “Sorry” by Buck Cherry. It sucks, and I did my best to tear it apart MST3K-style.
Back in a high school art class, one of my clay projects was a Tom Servo. I think he came out pretty decently, though I kept myself from going too far: rather than trying to match the proper coloring he became a solid shiny black. So I guess he was more like the theater Servo.
I wrote, or co-wrote, several MiSTings back in the late ’90s and early ’00s.
Plus, on the dedication page of my master’s thesis, I thanked MST3K for maintaining my sense of humor through the process. (And Lord, I needed that. *wry grin*)
Gah! And how could I forget this?
Back in the summer of 2003, my workplace had a cube decorating contest. I decided I may as well go with an MST3K theme, and have some fun with it. I put up the postcards on the wall, along with an old calendar. Put a couple of Rhino videos up on a shelf. Played a snippet of the theme song. And, in a burst of either inspiration or insanity–or both–I created a shadowrama and taped it to the screen that’s used for the indirect lighting system. Word balloons let Tom say, “Geez, can you say obsessive?” Mike added, “Or fanatic?” And Crow said, “Every move we make, every breath we take, she’ll be watching us!” I figured if I’d have them up there, they’d best riff *something,* and that something might as well be me. I even fired up the Torgo screensaver for them–and for me. I’d never seen or heard it before.
Well, against the odds I was thinking of, I *won.* Got some nice 4th of July-themed prizes. *grin*
My friend and I once did our own riffing of “The Day The World Ended”; we placed a video camera at the TV screen playing the movie, while we sat on either side of the camera (offscreen) throwing out jokes at random, something similar to the days of KTMA. When we finished, at the time both of us thought we had done a horrible job, but when I played it back recently there was a joke here and there that cracked me up.
http://www.newshounds.com/mft3k.html
The “Mystery Fandom Theater” site is down for good, I think, and since all the key participants have long since moved away from each other, I don’t hold out any hope that it will return. But it was definitely fun while it lasted.
http://www.rifftrax.com/iriffs/good-table-manners
http://www.rifftrax.com/iriffs/our-hands-how-lose-what-we-have
I’m “Beagle.”
And lastly:
http://www.newshounds.com/mst3k.html
… you could say I’m something of a fan.
You remember MST3K Presents Caption This! on scifi.com? Because of the generally neglectful way SFC ran it and the cappers’ fears that one day we’d wake up and it’d be gone, I built a site that my lawyers tell me is in the same vein, and not a cheap knock off. CT’s been gone for a few years, and a few more imitators have cropped up, but my site keeps chugging along. It was actually one of the first bits of programming of any complexity I did before my brief career as a fully fledged web developer. (I’m now a less than half fledged database programmer).
I also oversaw a few mstings performed by the cappers. The notion was that it would be done as a group effort over a wiki and sort of just run itself. That never happened. I think we peaked around #2 of 3, though #3 was still pretty good, just had about 200% too many riffs.
As a side effect of my capping site, I also have a youtube channel that includes a number of clips (mostly stingers) from the raw movies featured on mst, and a slightly outdated list of the original versions of the movies that are available at archive.org.
I had built a cardboard/spraypaint SOL like set, gotten a DR.F costume, prepared a script for a couple of host segments and riffs for a movie called A*P*E [1976] but sadly it was never filmed. My camera would only show half of the tv screen of the movie during preprodution tests. It made the veiwing unwatchable. :sad:
As has been generously reported here, I’ve been fortunate enough to get Frank and Joel to do voices on The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd, the family friendly podcast I produce. Joel played Blackbeard on two episodes while Frank has been our most reoccurring special guest star playing Buffalo Bill Cody, Patrick Henry, Nikola Tesla and Ulysses S. Grant to name a few.
I’ve also had dinner with Clu Gulager. He likes apple pie with Cheddar Cheese on the top of it.
In this extremely stupid short I made, I made an reference to a Maltese goose.
Example
The link I provided doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter.
I’ve managed to sneak in a lot of references here and there due my whole “school” thing – though I think one of my favorites was being on a coach bus and me and my friend riffing (very loudly) on High School Musical 3. Good stuff.
For Halloween, I dressed up as Dr. F and passed out DVDs of Zombie Nightmare…for AP Art, one of my breadth projects were 9 3×3 squares of my Crow figurine (and he’s actually going to to the College board!)…
Probably my biggest thing, though, was the creation of a weekly chat over at, of all places, an anime website. I pulled two of my friends into it, and our trio hosted the room we decided to call Movie Sign. Back then (August), the chat function was very new and didn’t have any sort of events, so our weekly watch-and-chat about MST episodes started a trend for the thing. Two things that blew me away were how many people knew what MST was (this is a site mainly populated by teenagers and college students, making many of us a bit too young to really remember it on TV), and then how many people we were able to make curious and then become fans.
We’re also the most popular of the two weekly chats (there were others, but they were temporary) – and the other is an anime group. The MST chat being more popular than the anime one at an anime website…that makes me giggle.
When I was in high school my English class was reading Hamlet and I talked my teacher (also a fan of the show) to show my videotaped MST version of Hamlet in class.
I convinced the same teacher to give extra credit to everyone in class who wrote to the sci-fi channel asking them to keep MST3K on the air.
Fun class!
well back in, i wanna say 1997 or 1998. I built a cambot (i had planed to make a crow and a tom but i was unhappy with how cambot turned out.), a mst3k moon, a replica of the movie sign buttons, and a 30oz plastic drinking cup.
out of all these projects the moon came out the best. its also the only project that survived, to this day it still hangs from the celing wherever i live.
eventually I hope to riff my own movies once I get some money together and assemble a cast.(obviously not a direct rip off, more an homage and reinvention, posted free on the internet of corse)
someday.
“jimminy thinks johnny, if only I could get a ride in one of those”
I played Gypsy once. The “Mystery Fandom Theater” site is down for good, I think, and since all the key participants have long since moved away from each other, I don’t hold out any hope that it will return. But it was definitely fun while it lasted.
Two iRiffs. I’m “Beagle.”
And lastly:
… you could say I’m something of a fan.
Double posted because I have no idea why my last one was awaiting moderation other than the fact that the links were not hidden.
Why are my comments awaiting moderation? I put in links, but everyone else has as well.
My biggest project has been one that many people have take on as well: converting my own collection of MST3K episodes from VHS to DVD. I started out with trying to use iDVD to make menus, and a few of them turned out well, but iDVD’s encoding really sucked for longer formats like MST3K so I ended up using Toast. So, I have no nice menus on most of MST3K VHS-to-DVDs but I do have a lot of episodes that I truly love captured to DVD from my own source material.
I have done about 30 episodes including a few that ultimately made it to official release. DANGER: DEATHRAY is one that gets a LOT of play here as is GIRLS TOWN, LEECH WOMAN and OPERATION DOUBLE 007.
I started a few other projects, like covers for DVD cased (abandoned since I live where I have space issues) and a a database to track the details of the VHS-to-DVD project (also abandoned since a table in the my Tiddlywiki was easier, as well as just having a print out with highlighters and color coding).
Long, long, LONG ago, literally in the mid 90s before the web was really even know, I was trying to have what would now be called a blog about MST3K news. I don’t even have a record of that anymore (thank goodness really).
I would love to hear from some of the folks who have put together amazing projects like the STACK-O-LOVE Hypercard Stack (which I would LOVE to see replicated online somewhere) and some of the fantastic Mac OS (Classic and X) icons that people did throughout the years.
MST3K-related projects have been a staple of my life since 1990 or so, when I was ten years old. Back then, I built a few Servo units and even a Crow, but they weren’t very screen accurate. My elementary school let me tour them around to different classroms for who knows why (truth be told, it was about the ONLY good thing I remember from elementary schhol) However, they weren’t very sturdy and have long since disintegrated.
In high school I made some custom MST3K action figures and a small Tom Servo statue, but it wasn’t until several years ago in college that I began bot building again. I havent yet completed the new and much more screen-accurate Crow and Tom I’m working on, but then I’ve decided to make them more challenging to build; I’m trying to make them more articulate and detailed than they were on the show. I got the idea to go that route when I was working on building some parts for crow. Since I wasn’t able to find some of the parts, I’ve had to try and reproduce them in other ways, primarily in wood, like Crow’s shoulders and feet. Anyway, since I have to build some of the parts custom, why not improve them? I’m hoping to be done with both Crow and Servo by the fall of this year, but we’ll see how things go. I’ve got a bunch of stuff up at my Deviant Art gallery, located here…
http://weirdonian.deviantart.com/
There’s a prototype for Crow’s hand, the action figures, and some Tom Servo heads too.
I once wrote up some riffs for the David Lynch adaptation of Dune. I have no idea what happened to them. The only one I remember clearly occurs during the opening credits when it shows that the music was composed and performed by Toto, which goes, “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little composer, too.” A bit obvious I suppose, but worth a giggle.
For a high school powerpoint presentation, I used the “Tusk” medley from Werewolf for the credits. It confused people, but I was happy anyway.
It wasn’t me, but when my ex was in grad school for her Masters in Psychology, she took my copies of the MST-ed shorts (Body Care and Grooming and A Date With Your Family) to her gender studies courses. Apparently they were a hit.
I’m a filmmaker, and I decided a long time ago to sneak references to MST3K in everything I do, you know, something about the right people getting it or something. Anyway, I have about 40+ videos on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/skipfusion. I also created an iRiff for the Rifftrax contest called “Best Friends B-Movie Bonanza” in which my friend and I riffed the 80’s drive-in classic “Deadtime Stories.” We got selected as one of the top ten, but alas our victory was stolen by some guy with glasses…
I also named my cats Rowsdower and Sampo, probably not very original in the world of MSTies.
I drew two pastel drawings, one of Tom Servo and one of Crow, that I ‘signed’ and framed. I wanted them to look like celebrity 8x10s you’d find on the walls of Hollywood restaurants, like the now-defunct Brown Derby, et al, which they do. They always make me smile.
Okay. So my dream box set would go something like this…wait…oh, we’re not doing that. :wink:
I once drew a picture of myself hanging out with the bots on the SOL. I had an intention of putting it as my Facebook profile picture…never finished inking it.
I’ve written a science fiction/detective/comedy novel with a few MST3K references in it including a lackey character based on Torgo. I’m currently in the re-writing/revision stage, but because I’m a hack, I doubt it will ever see the light of day.
Too bad I can’t seem to get my exact mental image of the story and characters down on the page–some of it is damn funny.
When I was in junior high & high school (ten years ago) I worked MST into as many of my art class projects as possible including a bust of Dr. F, my friend did a pretty good bust of Joel.
Also, I’m a bit of a “found object” artist and I owe that inspiration to the
Brains, I’ve made some obvious MST related stuff, such as a ship and a working robot head that would’ve made a nice brother for Crow, mine was silver with a vacuum cleaner attachment that is meant to clean fan blades for beak, and light bulb cage around the whole head.
For 8th grade science we had to make short videos about a planet, I don’t know what the teacher was thinking when he assigned another Mistie and me the planet Uranus. Our video was set up as if we’d been accedtly shot into space towards Uranus, and we sat behind a counter with this toy robot, we didn’t have a camera man so we just set it on a table and left it running, the thing ended up being 20 minutes when everyone elses were under four.
oh and I have a massive MST3K tattoo, which I’ve shared on here before.
I used to make up MST3K quizzes, like matching the character to the movie or the quote to the movie. :mrgreen:
Nobody ever made a 100% on my quizzes. I don’t know if that’s good or bad…..
Well, last year my buddy and I made 5 full length riff-trax style riffs on old public domain movies and posted them online.
Check it out, pdbasement.blogspot.com
We recorded a 6th, but the audio got screwed up and we never got around to re-doing it.
When I was taking German in high school, sometimes we’d have to write brief skits in German and then perform them. Once, I basically just translated one of the host segments from “The Giant Gila Monster” (the one where Joel opens a malt shop and the ‘bots make fun of him,) and a friend and I performed it. He was the one who got me into MST3K in the first place, loaning me tapes because I didn’t have cable back then.
My brothers and I are riffing
“Night Of The Lepus” as an iRiff over at Rifftrax. We have a whole slew of movies
that we are planning right now, and all
in the same ballpark as the original MST3K,
but felt that “Lepus” was going to be the
most obvious film to riff first. What can
I say – we are coming out swinging.
I hope you guys check it out,
we are releasing the lepus on May 25.
http://www.iriffs.com/watchalong
One time me and my sister went to an earth day thing where you were supposed to build something out of old pop cans. We built a robot and named it Crow. We won, too. We won a candy bar.
I also read Hamlet in Senior English class, and we had to do a visual/oral project. I cannot remember what it was, but I asked my teacher if I could slightly modify the project to, ‘alternate versions of Hamlet’ :mrgreen:
First there was a mirror, mirror version, where everyone sports vests and goatees. King Hamlet is an opresive ruler, so young hamlet disowns him, and renames himself Riblet.
Ham/Riblet become power hungery after killing is father, that he kills EVERY character in the story. Except Horatio.
Then of course, the percussion version, with spot on script of that particular host segment.
I wanted to record the drumming part but I did not know how. I actually sad that I wanted to record me and my bloods (sidehackers!) wailing out the percussion version with the bongos and maracas.
Next, the furniture version, again with adherence to the HS, even trying to match voice inflections.
Then scuba version, and bucket head version.
Then I completed it with Servos well spoken monologue, ‘Stick it to all those pretentous bastards who want to do something different with this classic tragedy…’ ‘…modern astract interpretation sort-of-thing’
Lots of laughs, and I passed it. I wanted to show the episode, but then I realised that my teacher would see that I lifted eighty percent of my project from this show. Ah well, you win some, you lose alot.
The name of the fictitious business in my handouts for an ACC101 class I teach is “Mike’s Speedy Transport 3000”, abbreviated MST3K of course. The owner’s name is Mike Nelson, and he has various transactions with businesses such as “Tom’s Stationary”, “Crow’s Appliance Emporium” and “Gypsy’s Radio Shack”. I’ve had one student so far get the joke. As the student body gets younger (compared to me), the pool of people who might get the humor gets smaller.
Randy
Just my website. But I haven’t updated it in years. http://www.picturethisquote.com – Now it’s just an archive of the old entries.
It was fun, but sometimes very difficult to transcribe the audio correctly. Especially since at the time I just had VHS to work with, and no digital copies on the PC to make things easier.
I remember doing some art stuff in a computer photoshop class or whatever, and i used a red/gold bowling pin/gumball/engine block/helmet net motif. I cannot remember for the life of me what the project was.
Back in the day, when I was writing Tiny Toons comics for Warner’s international division, I offered up my services to Valiant/Acclaim when it looked like they were going to make an MST3K comic. (Actually, it was more like begging for a chance to do it.) Talked with some editors, did a sample riff off of a wonderful 50s sci-fi comic name of Lars of Mars… aaand nothing ever came of it.
Look me up on MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/cranberryblogs) and you can see a project I did finish: The complete and utter history of MST3K in haiku form.
Yes, I have no life!
Last year I attempted to iff Space Jam, and even posted some videos on YouTube but they were deleted by WB. I showedmy videos to Billy West (who voicd Bugs Bunny in the movie). He was no happy wth the riff job I had done and wen into Ray Dennis Steckler mode about how low it was for me to attack Space Jam, and if I ddn’t like it, I should tryand make a better movie, etc., etc.
I also made a Servo in a high school ceramics class. It was roughly 6 inches tall, and his hoverskirt had a perforation that made it into a whistle.
Apologies to those who had their comments delayed. I think WordPress is suspicious when the posts have a lot of links. They’re cleared now.
Besides writing various MiSTings (including, it appears, the first-ever Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction MiSTing), over the past year I created a successor site for the long-lost Web Site Number Nine. It’s still got only kind of an awkward interim non-name, and I haven’t had time to add nearly as many MiSTings as I want to (I haven’t even uploaded all the ones I’ve written), but it is up at http://www.nebusresearch.com/mst3000/.
… Er. Hold on. There seems to be some DNS problem. It will be there as soon as I do something appropriate to the appropriate persons. But believe me, it’s there and full of MiSTing goodness.
Garza says:
May 2nd, 2009 at 8:
I teach “Sales Management” at a university and I used the MST3K version of “Hired I and II”. I used the part at the end to reinforce some of the lesson work. The kids loved the riffing.
Those classes they at least didn’t sleep :wink:
Don’t worry, Brandon. From most accounts i’ve heard, Billy West is always a bit of an ass.
I’m not artistic enough to create something physical, but at least once a day I experience the following:
*blank stares*
I sigh and explain “It’s a MST reference. You really should watch Space Mutiny”.
I made this last summer. I’m not sure if it counts, but here it is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxL4qxxn7KY&feature=channel_page
Back in 2003, I started a multimedia “MST3K Quotes” project, in which I listed segments of dialog from various episodes, added notes and/or explanations for the riffs, and included some explanatory images and sound clips. It also includes an all-too-short page of frequent riffs, a very preliminary riff index that riffs and what shows they’re in, and links between callbacks and the original riffs so one can jump either way. I’ve never publicized or let search engines crawl it because it was so unfancy, so you all are the first to take a look if you wish.
I haven’t updated the web copy for a few years now, although I continue working on my home-system copy. The sound clips are missing from the online version because my Internet provider doesn’t give me much disk space, and I haven’t gotten around to getting my own web domain. I once calculated that I have over 10 times the material that Wikiquote has in its MST3K page, but that’s still a far cry from 310+ hours of dialog.
A month or two ago, reading Sampo’s new episode-guide posts, I followed one of his “References” links to find “The Annotated MST”, which does the riff-explanation part of what I’d been working on. Focusing just on the riffs, Annotated has a lot more explanations than I have. I’ve focused mainly on quotes I like, then started expanding around them for various reasons, so I’ve got a lot of dialog with fewer explanations. I like Annotated’s explanations, but mine often have more details and some personal observations, more like Sampo’s ep-guides.
Of course, I still have huge numbers of riffs that I’ve tagged for future writing but never got around to. I haven’t made any attempt (yet) either to incorporate Annotated’s information into my project, or send my information to its author.
Don’t tell Toblerone, but ideally, I’d like to work toward a website that showed the entire dialog of every MST3K episode or other fragment (and now, adding Cinematic Titanic, Film Crew, and RiffTrax materials!), with clickable notes, images, and sound clips about anything that isn’t obvious to any Internet-connected human with a good command of English. (This might help MSTies in Keflavik, Iceland, and other far ports who might have long-circulated tapes on hand.) But it’s still just a pipe dream…
Oh, and I also work MST3K riffs into my everyday life when possible. Once a friend of mine was looking at someone’s framed family portrait. When he wondered aloud who they were, I immediately replied, “Oh, that’s the Came-With-The-Frame family” (“The Final Sacrifice”, ep 910) and he cracked up. But I confessed that I’d lifted the riff from MST3K.
If I may take just a moment to join “Beagle”…
iRiffs, IRIFFS, IRIFFS!!!
If you haven’t checked them out, DO!! There’s some “Classic Commercials” in it for you…
I’m teaching a statistics class this summer for future teachers at a large university. You can bet that we’re watching “Why Study Industrial Arts.” Mr. B Natural might also be shown. And there are a lot of educational film RiffTrax that I might work in.
As far as slipping in a covert MST3K reference, I ended a graduate school presentation once with, “His last words were, ‘Huzzah!'” Sadly, I can’t remember which film that riff’s from. (I want to say “Time Chasers,” but that doesn’t sound right.)
itsspideyman #39 – My mom showed Hired II when she was a coding manager at AT&T. They had their weekly meeting and she listed it on the schedule as “Motivational Video”. She asked for thoughts afterwards and one of the other managers unfolded his donut napkin and placed it on his head. True and hilarious!