News from Joel and the MST3K Live team:
On Sunday, May 3rd at 6 p.m. ET / 3 p.m. PT, join the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 LIVE as they bring a special at-home event to MSTies worldwide! Join Emergency Host Emily Crenshaw (Emily Marsh), Tom Servo (Conor McGiffin), Crow T. Robot (Nate Begle), and GPC (Yvonne Freese), as they perform live via videoconference a Riff-Along of Experiment 111- MOON ZERO TWO. The event will feature new additional riffs, with visits from Joel Hodgson, who will field questions and comments from the Riff-Along audience via social media. The two-hour event will also include a brand new riff of the short film “Circus Day.”
More info here.
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THOUGHTS
• To begin with, I should explain: I planned to see the most recent Live Show, I even bought a ticket. But family issues kept me from attending. So this entire crew was new to me.
• I heard pretty much unanimous praise of the new crew from those attended the Live Show, and I have to admit, the group looks and sounds strong and delivered their lines well. (I don’t really know if any of the on-camera performers are also writers.) I definitely laughed.
• Joel made some news last night, at least for me. IF there is a 13th season, the new host will be Emily Marsh (her character name will be Emily Crenshaw). As Tom Servo, Conor McGiffin will be doing the voice work. As Crow T. Robot, Nate Begle will be doing the voice work. And as GPC (see below), the voice work will be done by Yvonne Freese. Freese will also play a new character, Mega-Synthia, one of Pearl Forrester’s many clones.
• One other change: the newly renamed GPC has been downsized to “more less the same size as Crow and Tom,” just to make her easier to handle. Joel said that, when he built the bot, “I was just trying to build the biggest puppet I could.” Some fans will remember that, to work Gypsy, Jim needed a harness that was normally used in a marching band to carry a tuba. And then in season 11, they built her that complicated rig that only partially addressed her overwhelming size. By the way, during the closing segment of the episode, the old Gypsy appears, and Freese, as the new GPC, quipped: “Ah, my sad dragon phase.”
• What’s with GPC? Several commenters have already explained and Joel himself explicitly stated it during the show. When the show relaunched, Joel began receiving concerns about the fact that Gypsy’s name is now considered a slur. Joel said he took the concerns to heart and this is the result.
• No word on how the efforts to make a 13th season happen are going.
• In the after-show thing on Facebook, Joel expressed frustration with IMDB, which is treating the KTMA season like all the others. Joel insisted the KTMA season is “NOT CANON.”
• The show was a little ragged, but mostly everything went off pretty well, at least on the YouTube channel, which was where I was watching it. In the Facebook chat, Ivan Askwith, the mastermind behind the Kickstarter, said it felt very similar to slightly ragged but captivating live show when the 11th season launched.
• Joel and the cast read letters from doctors, nurses and others on the front line of the pandemic. All of them said despite the awful experiences they’ve had, MST3K has been a welcome distraction. Best wishes to all those folks.
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Already on my calendar.
in honor of Circus Day:
HERE COMES THE DEVIL!
So cool! And in the 6:00 PM Sunday Night spot here- just like KTMA
Riffing on top of an existing episode sounds a little crowded. Even if it *is* a season 1 episode.
GPC??
They have apparently replaced Gypsy with what we used to call generic cigarettes, GPCs (Generic Price Code, the white label). Weird. Just get a new bot at that point, right?
GPC = Gypsy (portable version 2.0, from the recent tour)
So this is streaming on Facebook?
Agreed. The Mad Monster would be a better choice for such a treatment, since it has so much dead air.
….AGAIN with the Circus.
Think we’re getting this one as the “If you missed the Live Tour” at-home concert, since the Circus Tour was the crucial origin-episode of new Jonah-ette “Emily Crenshaw”, that Producer Joel wants to make canon for whatever new later incarnations happen.
Also explains, for those puzzled by PlutoTV’s ads, who the heck this “MegaCynthia” is supposed to be.
I assumed they were riffing the movie, even if it isn’t one of the current PD-orphans on Amazon Prime.
To quote Mike from ‘The Little Unicorn’: “The Circus, because sometimes joy is the most depressing thing of all.”
I value my privacy too much to click on Facebook links. I’m guessing this is streaming on Facebook as well?
No, they are riffing the actual MST3K episode. I am fascinated by this idea! How will it work? Looking forward to it.
Is Emily Marsh named Emily Crenshaw after Old Man Crenshaw??
Probably not, since Joel pays very little attention to the Sci-Fi episodes in general. Most likely it was a tribute to Joel’s friend Crenshaw (I’m sorry I don’t know the gentleman’s first name) who helped Joel by building robots and props for the Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour and who can be seen in many of the behind-the-scenes videos from last summer (2019) at MST3KLive.com. He also accompanied Joel during the Critical Role Kickstarter Finale show when Joel handed over the “championship belt” to them.
Is this streaming on Facebook?
Thanks!
I like how they said the Trump joke transcended time.
Both Twitch and Facebook has no sound (the ads even have only music, no dialogue in them), and the YouTube version is nowhere to be found. I hope a proper version of this will be viewable somewhere! I’m missing all of it.
I am watching it on my tv in my room in youtube.
The reason YouTube wasn’t giving me it was that my Google Chrome has AdBlock and my Microsoft Edge doesn’t (I got it from the MST3K site). Same problem, though. I’ve been trying to watch it on my computer (where chatrooms are full of fans that CAN hear it), with no such luck. Too far into it by now to try the TV.
Just discovered my problem: apparently my headphones weren’t plugged in right. I figured it out going to my usual music streaming and getting odd sound, finally remembering it’s happened before. Still need a replay somewhere, though, to see it later.
just finished on YT
that was fun, even if they were riffing the episode itself and not just the movie
that Circus short was way too short, though. barely even 3 minutes
Just finished watching both the main show and the after-show. I thought they turned out OK. It was a good choice of episode, in that the movie was watchable and there were breaks allowing new comments. I agree that the short was too short, but it was still good. I watched it via Facebook, so I heard the comments between the cast during the commercial breaks. (No, there were no Uncle Don incidents.) I missed the first few minutes of the after-show, but it was very interesting, like at one point in included three of the four official hosts (Joel, Jonah & Emily). One fan asked a question that I had: will the riffed movies from the tour be released on DVD? Joel said they might, which I hope develops into a “yes” some time.
I’m pretty sure both videos will be preserved on the facebook page.
Enjoyed- both by lovely wife and me. We’ve been to a couple live shows, and, like tonight they had an ask the ‘Bots segment. When Joel finds a new platform for episodes 218 and beyond, I hope he has an occasional ask the Bots segment in some experiments. They’re funny.
Per the Facebook aftershow, that’s her name now. People pointed out to Joel that Romani consider “gypsy” to be an ethnic slur, so he chose to change her name.
Did anyone else notice Emily’s riff during the scene when three of Hubbard’s goons attack Kemp and Clem on the moon. When they’re shown to be wearing, respectively, red, yellow and green spacesuits, she riffs, “Joel? Jonah? Mike?”
I did indeed. Had a good chuckle.
I LIKED Gypsy’s Richard-Basehart-obsessed Sad Dragon phase, thank you, compared to her Southern Shrew phase, and her Unfunnily Magic-Voice-Possessed Netflix phase…
And I can take re-riffing the movies themselves, if they’re at least as imaginatively done as Cinematic Titanic’s redo of Santa/Martians. But it’s bad enough that redone movies remind you of the good old riffs, without actually having the old riffs around in re-riffing the episodes.
This was more of a “Watch Party” (that’s become the new Quarantine thing now that Disney+ wants to sell its old streaming movies) than a fan-riff, but I’m not sure if Producer Joel was clear on what concept he was promoting, to sell the new Live Tour characters.
And on a side note, notice how fun Quarentine-era Internet Watch Parties have become, now that–gasp!–we’re all getting together to watch a movie or old show on TV at the SAME TIME across the country? What a concept!
Hello, all! So nice to be connecting with you again. I watched the first hour of the show last night. Basically, enjoyed it well enough. On Twitch, the movie was all but inaudible, though. And Thad Boyd, you were right: it really was “a little crowded” having the new crew riffing on the actual Season 1 episode. I found that distracting, actually; and I got the sense that the new crew didn’t always quite know when to jump in. It was also distracting to see Emily reacting to those 1989 riffs as a fan, not as a performer. I like Emily a lot–she will make a perfect host. As for the others, I found the same problem we had with S11 & 12: the ‘bots don’t have any discernible personalities. If I didn’t see the mouths moving, I couldn’t tell which was talking. I hope Begle and McGiffin can mold something distinctive for Crow & Servo–they can’t just recycle Kevin & Trace or Bill, but they have to do SOMETHING to make Crow Crow & Servo Servo. GPC . . . eh, whatever. I get the need for a name change, but GPC is kind of blah. I’m cool with everything else: the more manageable size, having a woman voice the character, giving her personality a bit more starch, even having her riff on the movies. Do not like Mega Synthia at all. If you can’t/won’t get Mary Jo herself, come up with a new character.
That said, if Season 13 happens, I will be first in line to watch!
Again, it’s Producer Joel–who, as viewer, has watched nothing but SciFi episodes–now in charge of the Marketing Franchise, thinking that he has to “continue the canon narrative” of SciFi into the Netflix season, and then continue the Netflix canon into the Live-Tour season:
Thus, we get MegaSynthia as an extension of the Kinga Forrester canon, and Hampton Yount “has” to sound like Bill Corbett’s Crow to continue the SciFi canon. (Never mind that Bill’s riffing has enough problems as it is without other people trying to do it.)
Um, Joel, it’s…just a show, you should really just relax.
Still, I’m hoping for a S13, especially if it follows up on the abandoned Jonah-era hints of turning it into live-concert episodes. Think the Circus Tour puppets, and the new stage-friendly GPC, was a test run-through for whether they could do “stage segments” for future S13 experiments.
My internet connection was erratic all evening, so only caught bits and pieces. An obscure riff that could have been used whenever Harry got berated for being an idiot is, “I only asked.”
Emily Marsh would be a good host for a Season 13, if there is one, but I wonder why Jonah Ray isn’t returning. Conflicting schedules? For that matter, why isn’t Rebecca returning for GPC?
I am guessing Felicia now being a mother is why she’s not coming back?
Another riff that could have been used is, “I thought I was going to be the Frankenstein Monster.” Bernard Bresslaw (the actor who portrays Harry) had been on the short list of people considered for the role of the Monster in the Hammer Frankenstein films, but lost out to Christopher Lee.
I didn’t hear him say that. Was it on the movie stream, or the after-show?
It was a little better on YouTube, but there was a real problem with the audio levels being uneven. If you turned the movie up loud enough to hear it, the new riffs were *really loud*. I’m hoping they get a chance to fix the audio levels and repost it later.
It occurred to me that the decision to riff over an old episode must have been a time/budget/rights issue. Getting the rights to another movie (or even one of the movies they’ve already done) would have taken time and cost money, and even if they’d avoided that by going with a public-domain film, they’d have still had to vet for video/audio quality and content, and maybe make cuts for time. Plus they’d have to write a lot more riffs.
Using one of the films from the live shows would solve some of those problems — the writing and editing are already done — but they’d still have to pay for streaming rights in addition to the public performance rights they’ve already bought, and it may not be worth it for a show that they’re not getting any money for.
It’s a bit of a mouthful.
If I were the guy making the call, I’d have gone with “Gypsum”; they called her that multiple times over the course of the KTMA season.
I agree, especially since Mary Jo herself expressed discomfort with the whole “Pearl clone” idea on Bill’s podcast.
So now a person’s name is a slur? This PC crap is getting way out of control.
AFAIK Gypsy was originally a male character named “Gypsum” like the mineral, but was changed to Gypsy for the CC series
“Gypsy” may or may not be a slur per se, but it does refer to a specific group of people and thus might not be appropriate. I guess it’s better to play safe than sorry and GPC is a new design anyway so may as well use a new name
Ok, Joel needs to stop his “MST3K is Saturday Night Live, we just keep replacing people” thing. I liked Jonahs first season but now he is out of touch. He is now the new Sandy Frank who needs to lose the copyright.
Depends on the name. I can think of some Mark Twain characters whose names were slurs.
I’m quite partial to Neil Gaiman’s observation that you can replace the phrase “political correctness” with the phrase “treating other people with respect.” This treating other people with respect crap is getting way out of control.
It refers to a specific group of people, and that group is properly called the Romani. The word “Gypsy” is a misnomer; it’s the result of other Europeans mistakenly believing that Romani people were from Egypt. In that way, it’s similar to “Indian” as used to refer to indigenous tribes on the continents we now call the Americas, and it comes with similar baggage in that a lot of people associate that word with dated, inaccurate, and often negative stereotypes.
It’s not really up to Joel whether people choose to stay with the cast or not. Though I do know there are some former cast members who wish he’d at least asked them if they wanted to come back (see my previous link to Bill’s discussion with Mary Jo on his podcast).
Maybe so, but if there were no copyright on MST3K, then not only could Joel do a new version with a new cast, so could anyone else.
Yes, because “NO ONE” wants to work for, and is always looking forwards to quitting one of the iconic staples in pop culture.
I posted on the Facebook page that he also played a couple of Martian Ice Warriors during the Troughton era. I didn’t know he was up for the role as the Monster.
“• In the after-show thing on Facebook, Joel expressed frustration with IMDB, which is treating the KTMA season like all the others. Joel insisted the KTMA season is “NOT CANON.””
This bugs me too. It would be one thing if the KTMA season was labeled as Season 0 or something, but because it’s listed as the first season, I have to mentally add +1 whenever I look up an episode- e.g. “The Final Sacrifice” is listed under season 10.
Even so, “Gypsy” isn’t really a slur any more than “Indian” is, it’s simply not technically (or politically) correct. It certainly doesn’t seem to be on the same level as calling a black person the N-word.
That being said, GPC is pretty much an entirely new character anyway, so I don’t see the name change as being an issue.
You know, this whole conversation reminds of the ACEG where it states: “We had a revelation about Gypsy when it occurred to us that we had only one female character on the show and she was a dim-witted cow-like creature played by a man.”
I’m not quite sure what you’re suggesting. Are you saying that Jonah really wanted to stay but Joel fired him on a whim just to shake things up? Because that sure wasn’t the impression I got when Jonah showed up in the aftershow last night.
I get the impression this thing just sort of came up out of nowhere on the Quarantined spur of the moment, and Jonah couldn’t be asked back in time–
Not that Joel would have likely wanted him back anyway, he was too busy selling the new Circus-Era canon, on which the future of the franchise depended.
Add me to the list of Krull viewers who thought Bresslaw only played big monsters and Cyclopses, because nobody in the US had ever seen the “Carry On” movies.
However, trying to search out the creative roots of “Are You Being Served?” (and a few of “Danger Mouse”) led me to dig up a handful of UK Carry On comedies on Amazon VOD–from which AYBS? was not only baldface-plagiarized, but managed even shamelessly lower humor–and Bresslaw was a comic regular of the series, usually playing the big dumb partner to Sidney James’s East-End crook/swindle schemes. Short guess how he got the job of playing the villain’s comic-relief big dumb goon in MZ2.
(And spent it dreaming about rabbits.)
This dredges up an old memory: I was working at a newspaper and there was a story in the paper about people being arrested in a group and being taken to jail in what SHOULD have been called a “police van” but was referred to in the story as a “paddy wagon.”
Now, I grew up hearing (and perhaps using) that expression without even thinking about it. I’m sure whoever edited the story on the copy desk said something similar when asked.
The next day our ombudsman wrote a newsroom-wide email reminding people that the term “paddy wagon” is an ethic slur–referencing the immigrant Irish who were thought to be carted off by police frequently–and that it was not to be used in the paper.
It was an eye opener to young me, but it’s an example of how words and phrases enter the lexicon and sometimes just get used thoughtlessly, without even an awareness of the offense they are giving.
So, I get it.
That was a very helpful, as well as clarifying, posting, Sampo!
One thing about all of this renaming that no one is bringing up:
Gypsy is a person’s name. No other slur has been used as a person’s name, correct? So, do all people who are actually named Gypsy have to change their name now? When a word transcends to being a name, an identity of a person, doesn’t it cease to be a slur? Words have a lot of different meanings.
If Gypsy was not used as a name for actual people, I wouldn’t have an issue with it being changed on the show. But, they used it in the first place because it was a name, not just a random word that turned out to be a slur.
I really wish their were some MSTies whose names are actually Gypsy, it would be interesting to hear how they feel about this. “Hey, you can’t call yourself that! It’s offensive! – But, it’s my name, I’ve had it all my life! Does this mean my parents were stupid, or something?”
All of this is pretty much futile, as the odds of the show coming back, in episode form anyway, are extremely unlikely. That ship sailed all the way back when they decided to make a movie out of the show; things haven’t been right since.
I do think it’s Joel points out that the show is evolving and moving on, so don’t get too attached to the new performers. By that logic, I shouldn’t get attached to this new cast either, because they’ll be swept away in a few years, too.
I know “Gypsie” can be an actual name, as there was a model with that as a surname.
That said, there have been people that have changed their names upon learning their last names were seen as offensive. For example Rob Gavagan was previously Rob Dyke.