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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No. The show had to play somewhere and I’m glad it’s on a well established service like Netflix. It’s better than being on some new web-based service or a niche cable channel. PBS would be the worst because of the inconsistent scheduling of local affiliates. So, I’m getting my digital episodes, which I will also buy on DVD, and others who aren’t hardcore completists can watch the new season with ease.
Aside from the triple whammy of awesome that is Kevin, Bill and Mary Jo joining, I could not be more happy that Netflix got the show and not Hulu which has loads of intrusive ads even if you’re a paying member. I’m getting the S11 digital episodes anyways as a backer but Netflix is a great option going forward in my opinion and more suited to the show than other services, especially *cold shudder* network and cable channels.
Anyone with some skill could operate her, in contrast to Tom and Crow, except for the weight there’s not much needed besides mouth timing, as new_cornjob said, Jonah could do it and they could add it in post. Or maybe someone else. She’s a pretty easy voice. ;)
Basically, cable channels have become so corporate-insular, and syndication (except for afternoon-barons like Oprah) has disappeared off of free-TV, Netflix has become the Place For Shows That Had To Play Somewhere.
And yes, it is better than Shout deciding it should play on their own PlutoTV, where it would air at unlikely times with no one watching.
Not at all. I donated the maximum amount I could afford, and then some. I don’t regret it. We needed to send a message to the “board room full of executives”, as Joel called them, and $6.3 million has done that. This show would not be back, on any platform, if not for the donations of me and 48,000 of my closest friends.
Netflix is a juggernaut for reasons. Good decisions, good selection, good stability, etc. And I don’t know if you’re trolling or what but MST3K is far from the definition of nerd because of it’s appeal to a broader audience then the typical sci-fi etc.
Hulu is a cesspool. I agree.
Blu-ray? MST3k? *happy tears*
Too bad they didn’t announce Volume 37.
Streaming yes is part of your package I believe with any delivery service. But no, they don’t allow downloading of any kind though because of digital rights.
Very cool to read that Kevin, Bill and Mary Jo will not just appear on the show as there original characters but contribute as writers.
Nope. Not in the least.
Netflix is a powerhouse provider with a vast reach. Their support of MST3K can only be good for the fans as well as the future of the show.
Oh dear. In the video interview Joel has a Grandpa Borgnine Sea Turtle under the sweater vest thing going on.
“Are you Suzie’s boy?”
I’m still wondering how they’re going to explain everything in the “story”. How Crow and Tom Servo go from living in Mike’s apartment at the end of Diabolik to living space again with some new guy. I also hope Bill and Kevin reprise their roles as Crow and Tom, at least temporarily. I also hope they stick to pretty terrible movies. Rifftrax showed that you can riff good movies and it works sometimes but the crappy movies are why I loved MST3K. I heard they’re using Pumaman, Final Sacrifice, Space Mutiny… basically the 80s fan favorites as guides for what to look for. Anybody else sad that we probably won’t get stuff like Starfighters and Red Zone Cuba anymore, though?
Also for those who are asking for reasons to get Netflix, they’ve had some brilliant new shows lately. Lady Dynamite starring Maria Bamford and that Stranger Things show are terrific. They’re the new HBO.
And Mary Jo had a small part on Lady Dynamite.
“palm springs weekend” has been playing the past few hours on TCM; seems like a great one they could do in the future! it’s got everybody, and is “catalina caper” just about, times two. pretty hilarious to riff-at-home! :)
i found at least a twelve-min bit of “sampler” of the start of the mst comiccon here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4aEb3340eg
it is hilarious! and i can’t wait to see the rest of it! everyone’s already “firing on all cylinders”… and, dangit, i’m getting too old to have “fanboy crushes”, but heh! mz. day! ;) (“well-uh-huh-huh! wel’okay… you win! i’m in luuuv with you…”)
what’s coming is obviously so full of great surprises and fun, i’m just about doing backflips.
I doubt they would have Bill and Kevin reprise as that would kind of be bad mojo to the new guys. As for the story I think they’ll probably come up with some plot of Pearl helping her granddaughter (Yes, she is Clayton’s daughter so that makes her Pearl’s granddaughter, god has it been that long?) by kidnapping the bots, Mike then moves on with his life by actually finding a women, job at a hot fish shop etc.
Maybe Mike could guess star one time in the mad’s lab to visit the bots via satellite with a leg iron and under the agreement he would not fiddle with Son of TV’s Frank’s keys for any Hamdinger crates.
8-)
In the early 1990’s, MST3K seemed to be riding a great wave, where every week it seemed it was getting larger and more popular, ready to take it’s place next to The Simpsons as the big juggernaut of the time period. Then Comedy Central dropped the ball. Now, many years later, MST3K will finally take it’s rightful place in pop culture.
Do you realize how many people will watch MST3K once it hits Netflix? We’re talking full renaissance! It will be a bit odd at first, with all the Johnny-come-latelies, but we’ll be here to guide them in to the fandom.
I, for one, look forward to having conversations with non-Msties as they come to the show. It will be fun to point them to older episodes they might like. “Oh, you liked that new Jonah episode this week? If you liked that, check out…”
Yeah, this is going to be good.
And with the power being in the hands of viewers now more than ever with better choices and the cord cutting telling cable where to stick it, and no more ass-kissing to networks of white-haired liver-spotted old vultures, this could be truly chain breaking more than ever.
No, Hulu has ads, Amazon Prime is a cesspool. Just do a search for “Similar Movies” sometime, and see how far you’re afraid to get. :shock:
And like HBO, the “Game of Thrones Channel”, Netflix has been forced to rely on Original Series, now that digital-greedy studios are starving out the competition for old mainstream studio-movie income.
Good god, wait what am I in for with this Amazon Prime thing?
now i find ooohmg, my favorite really… “breakin’ 2: electric boogaloo” playing on a different channel right now… “trumpy, come down from there!”
ohhhh man, i so wish/hope they can do that one someday! :)
Both Hulu and Amazon Prime have the problem that Netflix doesn’t, in that Netflix tries to make exclusive deals with studios and still has a handful of real actual big-studio 20th-cty. movies every month. And I emphasize “handful”–Think they got the Lethal Weapon movies this month, or the Jurassic Parks, can’t remember which one.
HuluPlus, OTOH, never cultivated its Movie section past just getting the Criterion collection, and Amazon used to get a selection of old Paramount and Sony movies but it’s spotty now at best.
In both cases, go deep-searching for movies, and you’ll find the standard struggling indie-fest of relationship dramas, micro-horror and activist documentaries…But go deep with Prime, and you’ll find what you used to find at the back shelves of that little mom-and-pop VHS rental just off the highway:
Shelves and shelves of fourth-generation cheap public-domain 30’s movies and TV kinescopes that the store probably got because they were $5 at K-mart.
Let that be your first warning of what the subscription services will have LEFT after the “Cloud libraries will replace disk!” big-studios are finished with them.
(The “endangered species” of movie availability has started becoming a Bernie-like passion of mine that I’ve been driven to blog about http://movieactivist.blogspot.com/2016/07/july-1-2016-movie-activist-movie.html –Oh, you think I rant HERE…)
No, because I like to own things.
The episodes I got as Kickstarter rewards (the 14 new ones and the 12 old ones, not to mention the soundtrack and other perks) are mine to download, DRM-free, and keep forever, in perpetuity. If the Netflix contract ends, or they lose the rights to any of those movies, or if I want to watch them somewhere where there’s no wi-fi, or if my network goes down, or whatever? I’ve still got those files.
I wouldn’t rule them out; Joel’s said there won’t be any shorts this season but there might in future seasons. I don’t know that “always available in widescreen” is a hard-and-fast rule, it’s just what they’ve gone with for season 11.
What a coincidence. I have Netflix but no interest in cable.
I used to pay $75 a month for a bunch of channels I didn’t watch and couldn’t unsubscribe from, and a truly awful, buggy mess of a cable box that I couldn’t swap for something that worked better. Never again.
You mean no one besides the 48,270 people who contributed $6M to the Kickstarter campaign, right?
If history (say, season 8, for example) is any indication, they’ll explain it with a couple of tossed-off lines in the first episode and move on. Which is the way it should be. It’s important that the show remain accessible to new and casual fans. Those little continuity touches can be fun, but they can also be downright baffling to new viewers. (To use season 8 as an example again: that’s when I started watching, and the continuity between episodes was a confusing mess. Who are these people and what are they doing in ancient Rome?)
It really is amazing how poorly-sorted and -presented Amazon Prime’s video selection is, given that Amazon *invented* the kind of categorization and recommendation algorithms that the Internet now runs on.
I remember the worse part was the cable boxes, they used a weird awful version of java and you would press to go forward and it would just not move, then if you pressed it out of frustration and anger (HULK HATE REMOTE) it would then warp you 200 channels forward.
Wonder if the BTTF delorean or TARDIS did this, what a mess that would be, or good tv.
Great news!
But I really hope Bill and Mary Jo will continue with Rifftrax!!?
So I understand the Gizmonics, Invention exchange will be back- but- will the show still be 90 minutes? Will they still have the same host segment setup? Will there still be a stinger?
It’s not like they’re going to get rid of the past seasons. And nobody’s forcing you to watch the new ones. Watch what you like, don’t watch what you don’t like. It’s just a show…
I’m confused as to why some think that there will not be a DVD and Blu release now. Shout is a physical media company, they fully own MST3K, the show was funded by Kickstarter backers. MST3K is not owned by Netflix or fully funded by them, Netflix is simply the place for the general public to find the show. No TV channel is getting it, no other streaming service is getting it, that is what Netflix is paying for. Exclusive streaming rights. But Shout will stay true to their promise to Kickstarter backers on digital downloads and home video. It’s likely there will be a small window of time before backers get the home video version, and the general public Shout home video release will follow, but it won’t be a bad thing. The home video release was said to contain exclusive bonus features and likely some documentaries.
Gypsy will be getting a bit of a makeover for the new season, so people probably shouldn’t make assumptions based on past seasons. :-)
Hey you just proved his point! Because NO ONE has that kind of money!
(see what I did there?)
You know,I was initially against this whole reboot/11th season. But as the kickstarter progressed I got swept up in the possibilities,
and the fact that Joel is in control,and we know his work. Anyway I ended up going crazy with the downloadable episodes,bluray box set,
both mimobots and I don’t know what all. That said for my own mental health I’m keeping my expectations in check. I can’t imagine it being really bad,
but I’m not going to go all run-down-the-hall-on-Christmas-morning-at-age-seven when I sit down to watch the first episode either. After all,
we trusted George Lucas too. I’m more optimistic and confident as time goes on,but Jar Jar scarred me for life.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but in my case it has nothing to do with cost. I don’t “do” Netflix, or any other streaming service. I rarely even watch anything on cable anymore, and only have cable for my wife. But I love watching MST3K (and RiffTrax) on DVD.
Which is one of the reasons why I prefer physical media.
Just as long as the three letters of the devil* are not included in that makeover… :devil:
* C, G, and I.
Very pleased to see Mary Jo and Bill writing and appearing on the show along with Kevin. Very good news indeed! The attachment to the original cast and crew is important and it certainly has grown the past few months. Now that being said, I believe this brings the total number of writers to about 127. At this rate, I think the correct ratio will be: one riff per writer per show, so that riff better be a real corker.
Yeah, that’s what I’m most curious about at this point, the length. I’m hoping they go back to the old school 97 and a half minutes an episode rather than the 92 minute season 4 onward length. There’s just something about that extra 5 and a half minutes, you know?
I was talking to a friend the other day about this, when he mentioned that it must be hours in between host segments and the movie segments in the show’s timeline sometimes, since they set up these elaborate sketches and whatnot. I thought they did those things during the commercial breaks. Watching with commercials was always a bit frustrating (try it sometime if you’ve never experienced it), but it did kind of fill things out, as if they were really setting up a skit during the break. Part of the reason I love the old promos so much, they were like a precursor to tonight’s episode. Up next, we’re doing this, but first this commercial while we get ready!
That being said, I’m so glad the new episodes won’t have commercials!
If Crow and Tom are still living with Mike theres always Timechasers Crow working at the Cheese factory to be the ‘new’ Crow although they still need another Tom. Its just a show I should relax.
The point of donating was to find the show a home, I would assume most of us living in the 21st century expected/hoped for Netflix to be the heir apparent, so I would say that everything is happening in the best possible way – the Netflix announcement is truly the “mission accomplished” moment. Netflix is still desperately trying to grow their original content and subscriber base, so unless this is an epic failure in terms of popularity, this also likely means more seasons in the future.
I am looking forward to receiving my more tangible Blu-Ray set, but the above brings me to another point – I will definitely be watching my Blu-Ray set but I plan on watching it on Netflix as well. I think it’s massively important for all MSTies to do so to show Netflix that they’ve made a good choice. We’re living in an era where the Nielsens are dead and Netflix can very easily see how many people are watching a particular show, so let’s make it happen!
My guess has been that they’re having a different set of writers each episode.
The real question is whether Bill will shave to play Brain Guy. I think they should do like Caesar Romero’s Joker and just cake make-up over his beard.
At this point with the Mary Jo and Bill as writers announcement I have to assume there is going to be a bunch of home writing (in the vain of Rifftrax or the former Cinematic Titanic) going on given their geographic locations. I’m not sure if that is a good or bad thing. I guess it works for Rifftrax or Cinematic Titanic but I do romanticize the old school writing room.
Netflix: I’m not a subscriber and won’t be one in the near future. I have nothing against Netflix. My problem is that I live in a rural area where only the slowest of broadband options exist. So a streaming service can be quite maddening to attempt to use making a subscription tough to justify regardless of the price. So that brings me to the discussion of a single dump vs. weekly episodes. As a long time reader and lover of Satellite News and its weekly episode discussion, I have to vote heavily in for weekly episodes. There is no way (if I had Netflix) I could ever binge watch 14 of this show on my schedule so commenting on it in a group discussion would be very difficult to follow. I just love the idea of all of us watching the episode at the same time (relatively speaking) and then getting to go into an in depth discussion on it together.
It will be interesting to see if they still shoot for ~90 minutes or if they let the movie dictate length. There are no time slot limits, of course, but I think anything longer than 100 minutes of bad movie is pushing it.
Anyway this is all great news, Netflix is the perfect home for MST3K. The original DVD by mail service allowed me to see quite a bit of MST3K I couldn’t find (legally and/or affordably) elsewhere and in the early days of Netflix streaming there were tons of MST3K eps available. While I think YouTube was the number 1 catalyst in the revival, Netflix planted the seed. Anyone who finds something negative about the show being on Netflix is really digging, IMO. (BTW, there are 7-day free trials for those of you who can’t afford the $10/month, or if you’re cheap like I am, you can subscribe when there’s a show you know you want to see and cancel when you’re done watching it.)
I’ll take Netflix over cable any day. This means there will be no commercials and there will be a lot more flexibility with episode length.
As far as Kevin, Mary Jo, and Bill go, I’m glad they’ll have some involvement. I think the reunion show was a great place for the former Best Brains employees to network with each other.
While I am on board with re-casting the host and the Mads (though also a bit nervous re: it), I did hope against hope that they would have either Trace (my favorite) or Bill back to voice Crow and Kevin or Josh back to do Tom Servo.
I hope that more of the shows alums will also be involved with the writing of the new episodes (at least off and on).
I am going to have an open mind and believe that everyone will do their best to produce a very funny show as always.
One other point, I think they are in error of ignoring the films from 30’s, 40’s and (especially) 50’s. There is a lot of comedy gold left there!
Same here..
Give them time,they will…
The number of insane conspiracy theory “documentaries” I’ve found on Hulu boggle my mind. I’m assuming they have them on there just for the sake of having more content…
My *personal* issue with the Netflix decision centers on the following: I have cable; I don’t subscribe to Netflix; I paid a lot of money to back the project; I don’t want to have to pay more money to see them as Netflix as soon as they “air.”
So, I want to know how quickly Joel and Shout! are going to give access to those new episodes to backers who paid for Blu-rays or digital downloads once they’ve aired on Netflix. I think this is a more than fair concern.
It is. To air on Netflix, all of the episodes have to be ready anyway. They should be giving us access to our digital episodes right away.
I do plan on getting the general retail release of season 11 when it’s on DVD. I just could see paying the extra money on Kickstarter for it. Way too much money.