As I said in my comments on Thursday, I was watching episode 801, and in the movie there is a stock footage shot of an alligator jumping up out of the water and snagging a swamp bird sitting on a log. Crow responds by singing: “Egrets, I’ve had a few…”
Something clicked in me. Despite the loss of Trace, which was clearly a gut-punch to the show, I KNEW they were gonna be okay.
So, what was the moment (hopefully SOMEtime in Season 8) when you knew they were gonna be okay? I know some of you had a hard time with the long string of b&w Universal monster movies they started the season with, and really didn’t come around until almost mid-season with “Giant Spider Invasion.” Or maybe you didn’t come around at all. I know some folks felt that way.
So let’s hear it. What was your moment?
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There was a running gag in the first Sci-Fi show 801 where Crow kept blurting out in a manic manner. At that point, in spite of the many great losses in the cast, I knew that Crow would still be funny and so would the show.
Regarding the black and white Universal movies used in season 8, I love those movies, the good ones and the bad ones, and I really enjoyed seeing them done on MST3K.
Packers!
I’d say somewhere in the middle of the season. They really seemed to have the rhythym back around Giant Spider Invasion, Clonus, TISC, those episodes. I always had a feeling but I wasn’t sure until then.
“Space Mutiny”
i’m a newcomer 2 the show so this question doesn’t really work for me but i always thought that pearl, bobo, and brain guy weren’t that great. however i accepted them once i saw the hobgoblins ep (that’s late in the syfy years but i havent seen too many syfy eps, maybe 10 or so. i also watched the 1st Annual Mystery Science Theater 3000 Summer Blockbuster Review and i thought that Bobo was funny in it. I still like Dr. Forrester and TV’s Frank better :grin:
I knew from the very get-go of season 8 that it would be okay… I think what did it was that, I KNEW Crow’s voice had changed, but I had to go shove in a VHS tape of an older episode to quite prove it to myself HOW it had changed.
Not to diminish Trace’s Crow at ALL, but there’s just something about Bill’s natural voice and personality that just IS Crow T. Robot to me. From the moment he spoke as Crow, I said “Well, it’s different, but it’s definitely Crow.
Also, I THINK it was in season 8 where Pearl asked which was “Slervo, and which one is Cow?” and Crow’s response of “…and I’m Cow!” always struck me as utterly brilliant. :grin:
Well, glad to know I’m hardly alone in not being able to see MST3K on cable until the SciFi era. I’d seen about a dozen season 3 and 4 eps when Detroit’s UPN affiliate ran the MST Hour, but that ended a good year before I actually got cable in January ’97. So while Trace’s Crow was just a distant enough memory that I couldn’t say exactly what was different, I’d actually never seen MIKE host the show until the premiere of Leech Woman! That seems to put me several jarring changes behind most posters here, so my getting into the SciFi vibe was a bit more gradual.
While I consider myself to have essentially seen season 8 in order, I somehow missed 801, 804, 806, 810, and 811 the first time around, ret-conning the reruns into my experience, but missing out on several key moments mentioned.
Leech Woman: The clashing-stock-footage jokes were classic, and let’s just say the gravelly screeching of “Neil! Neeeiiilll” struck a chord with me. But host segments 4 and 5 struck me as so much darker than any skit I’d seen before that I was a tad lost as to what they were going for. (To anyone I freaked by mentioning New York Ripper as “cheering me up” in last weeks thread who finds “too dark” an ironic complaint for me to make, well, this was THE ‘BOTS trying to kill their friends, fer cryin’ out…)
Mole People: Come to think of it, at the time, I’d never seen them do a short either! This means that season eight’s lack of them was totally non-jarring for me (I’ve read some complaints about that), but also that the Gesture-Professor’s lecture on crackpot hollow-earth/geocentricism-via-inverted-universe-perception theories as our price of admission to Ishtar-Land was the closest thing to a riffed short I’d ever seen. You could say I got another piece of the puzzle there.
But the monotony of those early B&Ws was truly broken for me by She Creature. I’m not sure what it was that made Dr. Carlo Lombardi so much fun; maybe the fact that our hero’s inability to interact with anyone left all the protaganists uncentered and made Lombardi the most appealing character by default. No scratch that; KING was the real star. I’d never seen such a nice dog passed off as a potential menace via lip-liner and dubbed snarling. That was the first one I dubbed a personal favorite and went out of my way to watch repeatedly. “Augh, aiee, I am dead, my carotid artery…”
But all too soon summer was starting, I was graduating high school it seemed like anything was possible, and those first 3 color movies really captured the feel. Of course I missed Giant Spider Invasion and “parts”, making the first of those 3 I saw the one destined to be my all time favorite SciFi ep. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies was also my first experience with their treatment of the mid-’60s “oily period”, which I’d learn from ACEG a month later consistently produced the type of incomprehensibly bad movie that they riffed into instant classics. Without having seen even a tenth of the CC era, I knew they couldn’t have lost “it”, because there was no way any previous episode could be so much better as to blow the late RDS’s masterpiece out of the water.
Although less than a year later, Rhino’s third Mike VHS release starring New Mexico’s biggest single-prop plane enthusiast would just barely nose it out…
#46 Finnias Jones: “I stop missing Deep 13, Trace and Frank at this point.”
I did miss Deep 13 and Dr. F & company early into the show’s new run on the Sci-Fi Channel, but when Pearl took off in the Widowmaker with Bobo in tow in “The Deadly Mantis,” I knew that the future of MST3K would be more than all right. Seeing them paired up definitely helped me to get over the loss of Dr. F and Deep 13.
When they introduced the Observers in the next episode (“The Thing That Couldn’t Die”), I got even more enjoyment out of these new characters.
Finally, when Bill Corbett’s Observer joined Pearl and Bobo as the show’s trio of villains, I really looked forward to the future of the show and seeing how they would function as the new Mads.
No, the new villains weren’t Doctor Forrester and Frank; Castle Forrester wasn’t Deep 13, but the thing was – they weren’t supposed to be.
The show underwent significant changes, yeah, but it remained enjoyable, entertaining, amusing, and something to anticipate every Saturday.
I found the first few Season 8 episodes amusing, though I did feel they were still getting into their new rhythm.
But with Deadly Mantis, everything clicked. When the newspaper headline reads “Fear of Mantis Mounting” and Servo mutters, “I’d fear the mantis mounting, too!”…well, it was a stellar moment.
TONIGHT: A TRIBUTARY TO THE UPPER AMAZON!
I was pretty much sold right off the bat. Sure, it took a little getting used to Bill instead of Trace, but I found 801 to be insanely funny. When I ran it for some friends, they felt the same way; and when I told them of the naysayers the episode had, the the circumstances surrounding it, none could understand all the hoo-ha.
When Eastwood showed up, I just about blew a gasket and said, “We are in an whole ‘nother level of awesome.”
Change was never a problem for me with the show, but I admit I was a little unsure about how the show would survive when Trace left. I loved Revenge of the Creature and when Servo said “this guys married and I can’t get a date” I thought “OK, they still have it.”
I was just so happy to have them back, and “Revenge of the Creature” started just fine, with lines like “Well I think I’m gonna go make the lagoon a little blacker”, and “Oh, the Charlton Heston fish locator!” I loved the string of Universal movies they started with, having seen most of them as a kid on Saturdays back there in the late 60s and early 70s. And yes, it just got better with “Leech Woman”, with lines like “Well, we are kind of alone- nursey isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer”, and “I had an affair with Lincoln, you know”. Anyway, I have no preference between Joel and Mike, Deep 13 or Castle Forrester, etc. You can always find things to pick at with anything, but the consistent quality of the show overall, throughout it’s run, far outweighs any complaints I may have. That’s just me, of course. I enjoy reading the comments from everyone- keep ’em going!
The Sci-Fi Channel was not available on the cable service in my city before the premiere of MST3K. However I decided to try my luck and see if I could find it so I tried the channels past the 60 odd channels my service provided that I actually received clearly. I found it, the show was already in progress(later learned the film they were watching in the episode was Terror From the Year 5000) and the picture was little more than a bunch of waving, colored lines, rapidly fluctuating. So really it’s not the first show I ever saw where I thought “They’re back”. It was more like the show I heard. It was also the only time I ever got a headache watching the show.
I don’t get this “i hope they’re gonna be okay” vibe. i was just happy to have them anywhere. i wasn’t so high falutin’ that i’d say, ‘oh, this episode sucks. where’s trace?, et cetera, et cetera.’
I mentioned it in the thread for ROTC, but the riff where they call it “The Creature from Calumet Harbor” due to the fact he’s swimming through sunken I-beams and old sunken tires in what was supposed to be the remote Amazon jungle. I grew up near Calumet Harbor and that riff reminded me why I love MST3k so much. It’s like comedy custom tailored to your humor. Best. Show. Ever.
From the moment I heard “In the not-too-distant future…” again.
What can I say, I’m an optimist. :)
can we chip in and buy this guy an ass?
Mole People:
“This movie is just ropes and asses!”
This is the new “Rock Climbing”, same as the old “Rock Climbing”…
so it goes.
I remember completely going away from MST during the midst of season six for whatever reasons, mostly because my brain at the time still had a niggling problem with the host switch. (Sounds ridiculous even to me now since I now equally enjoy either host’s eps!) Saw the movie and then that was it. Complete cold turkey. Didn’t see another first run episode until I heard that Joel was going to be on the season 10 premiere. I hadn’t seen SciFi episodes at all up until that point. Fortunately Soultaker was a very strong episode and then the act of finding the best way to kick myself for missing out on the first run showings of the 2nd half of season 6 and all of 7,8, and 9 became my goal!
I remember completely going away from MST during the midst of season six for whatever reasons, mostly because my brain at the time still had a niggling problem with the host switch. (Sounds ridiculous even to me now since I now equally enjoy either host’s eps!) Saw the movie and then that was it. Complete cold turkey. Didn’t see another first run episode until I heard that Joel was going to be on the season 10 premiere. I hadn’t seen SciFi episodes at all up until that point. Fortunately Soultaker was a very strong episode and then the act of finding the best way to kick myself for missing out on the first run showings of the 2nd half of season 6 and all of 7,8, and 9 became my goal!
I’m sorry to say, it never happened for me.
The loss of Joel was quite a blow to the feel and tone of the show, but when Trace left, something was missing that they tried and tried to get back, but never could.
That said, I watched every episode. Liked some more than others, but it was just never the same for me.
My local cable provider at the time didn’t carry the sci-fi channel. I didn’t get to see any new MST until several years later when a friend in college let me borrow Several tapes which included Jack Frost, Devil Doll and Invasion of the Neptune Men. After watching those 3, I knew they were gonna be o.k.
The Unibeefer #56:
Also, I THINK it was in season 8 where Pearl asked which was “Slervo, and which one is Cow?” and Crow’s response of “…and I’m Cow!” always struck me as utterly brilliant.
I’m afraid you’re incorrect. That was from the Season Nine Episode Touch of Satan and it was Steffi the Babysitter who was getting the names wrong.
I echo # 1- The Giant Spider Invasion. Right from the beginning of that movie it felt like MST again for me.
The Bolem- Nice to know I’m not the only one who was introduced to MST via channel 50 in Detroit!
Honestly I was won over by the opening host segment of 801. I don’t think I was ever worried about them losing it in the theater segments, and the host segments were as good as they ever were with Mike. Honestly after the cataclysmic departures of Joel and Frank Trace’s leaving didn’t worry me all that much. I loved Trace and Dr. F. but that character didn’t work as well after Frank left. I was never a big fan of the Dr. F/Pearl, mother/son dynamic, so I wasn’t as sad about seeing that whole aspect go. Season 7 had already gotten me into a mode of thinking where as long as the movie riffing was still funny I was happy enough. I do think that Pearl grew into a fine replacement for Dr. F in the Sci-Fi era, and enjoyed the relationship between her and Brain Guy and Bobo a great deal. And after that trio of new “Mads” was complete that aspect of the show was great again. As for Crow I wasn’t as much worried about losing Trace in that role as I was worried about them finding a funny replacement. I think I stopped being worried shortly into the first host segment of the first season 8 episode, when they are all returning from their energy forms and we find out that Crow has been back for hundreds of years already because he quickly got bored exploring the universe. Bill won me over incredibly fast, almost from the first moment crow started talking. The voice was different, but still seemed familiar enough, and in fitting with the character, so I was quickly relieved on that point. And I was laughing right away at how he claimed he couldn’t remember Mike. The rest of the episode didn’t disappoint me at all, and I went into the rest of season 8 mostly just excited to see if they could keep it up rather than worried about whether they would “get it back” in any way. It was sad at the time to lose Trace on the show, but I remember quickly feeling that Bill was an excellent addition to the series. He definitely filled the hole Trace had left well enough, and brought a new and fun sensibility to the show as well, which helped rejuvenate it in a big way. To me the Joel years will always be the “golden years” of MST3K, but the Sci-Fi era is kind of like a second golden age. When I think about my favorite Mike era episodes they almost all come from the Sci-Fi seasons. I think that the changes to the show in season 8 finally made me see Mike simply as the host of the show rather than always seeing him just a little bit as “Joel’s replacement”. It was definitely still MST3K, but it had finally become a show naturally centered around the new host rather than feeling like it was trying to be the same old show just with a new host. Even though it was still a great show, the Comedy Central Mike years always had a tinge of that. Of course this is mostly host segment stuff, and to me the theater segments were the thing that kept me loving the show as much as ever.
For me, it happened about the time of Leech Woman, when I realized that I had gone for a while without noticing that Crow’s voice was different. In fact, I grew to like Bill’s darker Crow quite a lot. Looking back, season 8 was classic stuff. A lot of people didn’t like the story arc, but I found it amusing.
“38 Although that would’ve meant we’d never have met the Observers and experienced the sublime, best-ever-MST3K song, “When I Held Your Brain in My Arms.”
=================================
What! Over the duet “when Loving Lovers Love”?
For me it was Episode 802: Leech Woman, which in my opinion was hilarious from start to finish and for me ranks among the best episodes in the show’s history. They also did a better job in the host segments developing Crow’s new character and Pearl’s role as the SOL’s new antagonist.
I became a fan in the late 1990’s, ’97 or thereabouts, so I never watched any new shows with Trace. I must say that I came to love Crow and didn’t know or care who moved and voiced him. Later I watched some older shows and I could barely tell that someone else was voicing Crow, but I didn’t care. I realized that both guys did a great job and captured the spirit of Crow so well I couldn’t really tell them apart. I’m amazed that two different guys communicated one character so well.
The first Sci-Fi era episode I saw was The Screaming Skull. The Gumby short was more than enough.
77: What! Over the duet “when Loving Lovers Love”?
———————-
YES! Absolutely. I frakkin’ hate that song. Sorry, but I am not a fan of Pearl’s singing. At all. “When I Held Your Brain in My Arms” is MST3K at it’s sublime best musically.
Its, not it’s. Sorry. I hate making the simplest of grammar mistakes.
When the show returned, I knew we were ALL going to be okay.
Randy
Season 8 was fantastic from the beginning! What brand of grain alcohol have you been drinking?
One word:
“JEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDDDDDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
“Woo, Packers!!!” and “When I Held Your Brain in My Arms” also helped seal the deal for me.
But as awesome as the Sci-Fi era eventually became, I will always, always, always have a special place in my heart for Joel, Trace’s Crow, Dr. F, Frank, and Deep 13 – basically the whole CC era.
I was never too worried. Deep Ape was funny, and as soon as the riffing started I knew all would be well. The Charlton Heston Fish Locater riff might have been the first one to totally crack me up. By the time they rolled out The Mengele Institute for Marine Research I was in riffing Heaven.
I got right into it with the “Tributary to the Amazon” which I thought was a great running riff, but when Crow says “Al Gore!” I was hooked. Yeah, I was a little spooked by the opening host segment, but when I heard Crow just chiming in, yeah, everything’s gonna be alright.
@ #48, you hit the nail on the head for me. The show was great till the end compared to everything else on TV. But, compared to itself from the earlier years, it was not the same. Each major loss in the writing and cast pool, starting with Joel and working along to Frank and Trace, really diminished the show. It was especially easy to spot in the host segments. Those really got to be uneven for me starting with the loss of Joel.
That said, I was still glad to have the show as it was the last few years over not having it at all, and we did watch it till the very end. But when it comes to massive repeat viewings, I go to the earlier years most often.
I never felt like it was going to be “pkay” after season 7. First Joel left, then Frank, then Trace. The show should have just ended right then and there. The host segments were lame. Bill SUCKS as Crow. The characters are idiotic; I mean, come on, Professor Bobo, a damn talking monkey, come on!! Not to mention that he was way over-acted to be almost “too dumb of a being”. Brainguy was just as horrible and the premise was weak. It almost seemed like they had to watch the horrid movies for no real reason. It should really be a no-brainer as to why the show lasted only three seasons during the Sc-Fi Channel era.
Having only found MST3K just as it ended on Comedy Central, I was just glad to have it on TV again.
For season 8 , I really liked the movie selections they did. After Trace left, I would fast forward thru the host segments, just don’t care for the Pearl, Bobo, and Observer charactors.
The question being “when did you know they’d be okay” rather than ‘when were they running on all cylinders”. I know what that moment was for me.
801, I was chuckling over the 2525 gag and they’d gone onto the PLANET OF THE APES jokes. Mike is emoting like Heston at the end of the film. “You finally did it!”
Bobo responds “damn us all to hell”. But he says it in such a weary and bored manner, like he’s heard it twice a week for his entire life.
Since I only got round to watching the Sci-Fi channel shows until years later, and then didn’t watch them in any particular order, I can’t give a good answer to the question. Looking over the list, though, I doubt whether I would have felt any comfort until “The Deadly Mantis”, and even then it’s a good dry spell afterwards until “Incredibly Strange Creatures”. That was the first time in the 8th season that the new crew demonstrated that they could turn a movie with zero entertainment value into something that you’d actually want to watch more than once. You can’t say that about…oh, almost every episode before that, especially not stuff like “The Leech Woman” and “The She Creature” and other episodes I’d never dream of screening again.
I had been watching since early in the comedy central era but my local cable co. didn’t have scifi available for about a year and a half after MST3K switched, so when we finally got it back I was just incredibly happy. Thank god for directv I’ll never own cable again. I do love “Giant Spider Invasion” I have a brother-in-law from Wisconsin and he laughed until he cried watching that episode with me. :lol:
I’d agree, around 809 – I Was A Teenage Werewolf and 810 – Giant Spider Invasion.
I must be crazy, because I thought the big hit the show took was when Joel left. Season 5.5 and 6 I thought was the low point. I loved Season 8 immediately. Come on – a Creature from the Black Lagoon movie on MST3k? Awesome! And Mole People may be Mike’s finest episode ever, in my book.
I think the Scifi years started strong, then tapered off except for a few gems like Boggy Creek, Werewelf and Rowsdower.
and I was always in the camp that Bill should do a new robot and NOT Crow, but he converted me immediately and I’m still surprised that having a new Crow NEVER bothered me at all.
Trace, of course, is still the man.
The opening bits were a bit shakey at the start but the riffing was always great. Then Once the it settled in with Brain-Guy solo it was all good.
So I never really lost hope, just kept hoping the bits would get better and they did :smile:
I was excited to see that MST3K was picked up by Sci-fi, mostly because I had access to that channel in my house. Previously, my brother in law (at the time, girlfriend’s brother) was really into the show and taped quite a few CC episodes. We’d end up watching a good mix of Mike and Joel episodes. But I was excited to be able to watch the episodes whenever I wanted and to be able to tape them myself (and not risk some of the host segments getting cut).
Well, the first episode of season 8 didn’t do much for me. I thought the movie was slow, the riffing OK, and the host segments confusing (I hadn’t seen any of season 7, and didn’t know Trace had left). I stuck with the show, but the next few episodes only seemed to continue in the same vein – slow movie, OK riffing and mediocre host segments. At episode 807 – Terror from the Year 5000, I stopped taping and watching the show. The movie was such a huge slog and while the Observers were funny, I just felt like the whole thing wasn’t clicking.
Still my brother in law continued to tape the new episodes. One day, shortly after it aired, he insisted we watch “Jack Frost”. He described it as a crazy dubbed movie with a guy who turns into a bear. I was hesitant, but he didn’t give up, and popped the tape in. He hadn’t rewound it, and it started off where the witch was in her her chicken legged house. That image alone did two things – made me laugh out loud and say, “Hey, this is based off a Russian fairy tale!”. Since I enjoy that kind of thing, I decided to watch some more.
When the wooden pig sled shot out of the house and went racing into snow. Someone (Crow I believe) yelled, “Babe! No!!” I was cracking up and I asked him to rewind the whole thing, so we could watch it from the begining. He did, and it was the first Sci-fi episode I loved. The movie was fun and colorful, the riffing was top level and the host segments were random, but funny. This was MST3K like I remembered it. I tuned in for “Riding With Death” next week and was happy to see Mike and the bots having weathered the storm of massive change – but seeming to thrive in it. MST3K was back.
I fell right in with the words “In the not too distant future.”
he movie was such a huge slog and while the Observers were funny, I just felt like the whole thing wasn’t clicking.
It wasn’t. I don’t understand the movie choices for the start of Season 8. Here was a new show, essentially: new network, a new format, new characters, and a new Crow. The revamped show wasn’t proven yet and should have gone with safely entertaining, goofy fare. Instead they pick a bunch of movies that would be difficult to watch even with the best riffing: long, grey marches through padding like The Mole People; the second-rate cynicism of dispiriting sci-fi like Teenage Werewolf and The Clonus Horror; loathsome, unwatchable slogs through human misery and sickness like The Leech Woman. Only later did they pick the kind of silly, over-the-top inanity that would have been fun to watch even with second-rate riffing.
The fact that individual riffs may have been funny in early Sci-Fi era episodes doesn’t really mean much. Even the worst MST3K episodes always had some good jokes in them. One good riff, though, or even a dozen of them in a row, isn’t enough to lighten up a movie that either puts you to sleep or makes you want to slash your wrists.