For example, in many posts over the last year, I have seen a number of people note that, in season 11, it was sometimes difficult to differentiate between Tom Servo’s voice and Crow’s. I’m going to put this more on Baron than Hampton. I think he needs to deepen his Servo voice a bit. (Tim Ryder, who did the voice of Tom in the live shows last summer, did a great job of making Tom’s voice distinctive.)
So, what movie would you like to see them do? And what tweak would you suggest for the new season?
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No matter what we all think, if we presented any of this to the people working on the show we’d be dismissed as being idiots and not knowing anything, no matter how long we’ve been watching MST3K.
Upon further reflection, I would also like it if they could make TV’s Son of TV’s Frank funny. Because he just wasn’t, IMO. He didn’t really do anything at all compared to his TV Dad.
Agreed. Can Patton match the timing and, some might say madness, of Frank? I can’t see him doing the “Chinderwear” invention exchange or being something like Auntie McFrank. Could he play at genuine excitement if the show Vicky is on? I doubt it, but how can we know when he hasn’t been given any material to work with?
In general I think they will get better on their own, especially where the riffing is concerned. Season 11 laid a really strong foundation – especially if you think of it as a first season – and I think the gang will naturally improve just as a byproduct of getting more comfortable with what they do.
My only specific suggestion would be to move the camera every once in awhile during the SOL host segments so it feels like a three-dimensional space. I suspect the reason those scenes are exclusively static is because it’s more commodious to the more sophisticated puppetry involved, but the fact that it makes the set look so much like a flat backdrop is a real problem and a surprising regression. Even in the earliest seasons, we got to see other parts of the bridge (the floor and the sides), but in the revival Jonah may as well be standing in front of a green screen. It’s the wrong kind of low-fi.
Oh, and if we get a Mike cameo this season, it would be nice if he were depicted alongside the Murphy version of Tom and the Corbett version of Crow in that same apartment. The implication that Jonah is accompanied by the same bots with completely different personalities – while admittedly in keeping with tradition – seems like an unnecessary undermining of the bittersweet ending of Diabolik. Mike and his versions of Servo and Crow deserved their ending. Since Kinga presumably had the SOL rebuilt, it makes sense that she would have made new versions of the bots as well. I also like to believe that the original Gypsy is still running ConGypsCo, and giving Steve Jobs type keynotes in exchange for enormous speaking fees.
If Joel decides to stick with widescreen and color, I would not rule out shorts. They are harder to find, but there are a lot of shorts available in widescreen and color – Rifftrax has done a few. You just have to dig a little deeper to find them.
On a similar subject – I notice a lot of people here and elsewhere on the Internet think HD and widescreen are the same thing. They are not. HD is a measure of resolution. Widescreen is a measure of aspect ratio, or image size. You can have a 4×3 film in HD, and a widescreen film in standard def. The more you know…
That’s not what the new show is about, though, is it? It’s about a guy who is delighted to be there (not my opinion or preference, but the opinion and preference of numerous posters as expressed while the new show’s episodes were being discussed), and who happily watches bad movies over & over while bantering with his ironic hipster robot bros (who do not, in fact, care: if WARRIOR OF THE LOST WORLD had been shown during the new show’s run, there would have been no tears shed for Megaweapon — just a couple of TRANSFORMERS references).
I think Gypsy could work if they really went with over-the-top, Marge Gunderson-type Minnesota persona, like Bridget and Mary Jo did with the Amazons.
Baron & Hampton (and maybe Tim) need a little practice, but that’s the one thing that came out of Joel producing his “own” version again now that it’s back to being his ownership-baby:
Joel Robinson was a “regular guy” who, despite being trapped by Evil Overlords, didn’t mind watching movies, and told the bots “C’mon, guys, we’ll give this one a chance…”–And then soon wish they hadn’t. Even with Mike’s second movie, before they found a hook for his character and thought he was an invention-exchanging Joel II, Mike brings popcorn into Wild World of Batwoman…What, it’s a movie, looks like fun!
That made J&tB’s reactions to Rock-Climbing or Happy-King Dances that much funnier, because like us, we both didn’t know what we were in for. And if Crow starts getting a crush on Kim Catrall, or Servo expresses his love for the Creepy Girl, that’s more comedy about the characters’ own reactions and trying to find whatever silver-lining they can about the movie.
The new “We love his cruelty!” kids, who literally grew up on the SciFi era, think the Mike-era has to be about mean-spiritedness, and “giving the movie what it deserves!”, but that’s because MK&B don’t REALLY seem to like movies that much:
They come out of the standup comics’ mentality that any annoying popular trend of the Sheeple is there to annoy them personally and deserves whatever anger-catharsis the comic can lay into it with–And movies, of course, are obnoxious Hollywood things with robots, superheroes and elves, that attract geeky basement-dwelling fanboys who want to watch Shia LaBeouf act, subsidize Michael Bay’s eight-figure salaries, and pay Ben Affleck some more money to be pretentious. It’s not the movie that RiffTrax wants to “punish”, it’s The Movies.
And in the S6 and SciFi host-segs, M&tB seemed to be more interested in getting out of the theater, and getting back to self-aware comedy sketches about Living On a Spaceship with a Mad Scientist & Her Monkey. They don’t want to BE in the theater, and they don’t exactly express a wide range of emotions about what’s on screen.
Jonah the character is, yes, maybe too nice and easygoing of a guy, and Jonah the comic is a little too ironic, aloof and deadpan, but he “gets” Joel’s idea of being trapped in a movie you thought was going to be good when you walked in. Maybe Cineplex kids today don’t have that unique experience–and harbor murderous vendettas at being forced to pay $12 to a corporate chain for it–but some of us do.
I find it interesting to see people complaining about some of the weird elements of the rebooted MST, most notably the entirely unexplained container Gypsy drops off and picks up in the theater. I’m sure this is just the result of Joel’s inherent weirdness. It’s worth remembering that there were unexplained weird elements in the original run of the show (e.g., Joel eating grapes, later revealed to be behavioral conditioning imposed by the Mads) that, to the best of my recollection, were never addressed within the show.
Joel’s just a weird guy, and that leads to creativity.
As to S12, I’m sure they’ll build on what worked in S11.
A long, long time ago I worked with a team of archaeologists on a field project. It was truly astounding to me as a novice trained in the scientific method how these experts could take an ounce of evidence and spin it into fifty kilograms of speculation. And then publish it. And then rebuke all who disagreed with them. Astounding.
Not sure why this poster keeps quoting my posts and then posting completely unrelated thoughts, but whatever.
Nobody is, littleaimishboy. Nobody is.
Another awful, truly bizarre, factually inaccurate take in which you attempt (and fail) to convince us that you have some keen insight into Joel’s mind. You don’t.
I would like Season 12 to not have any movies that appear to have a strobe effect on them, like every other frame is missing. Starcrash and Carnival Magic, I’m looking at you. I was hoping that was just Netflix, but the blu-ray has them too. This is a new phenomenon isolated to Season 11. Seriously, if you can’t find a copy of the movie in better condition than what looks like an mpeg, pass on the movie. I did really enjoy those episodes, but that strobe effect really makes the show look low-rent.
That’s got to be some video problem that’s inherent to digital. Analog, while it had it’s own set of problems, never had anything that odd.
I’d like to see one of the Zoro movies. Love Bert I Gordon movies so maybe Food of the Gods, Empire of the Ants or The Magic Sword.
Not that I think that anyone on the new show even would bother listening to any criticism or suggestions and at the risk of following-up a certain poster here with a certain anti-Mike bias: the reboot should really take the time to work on the writing.
I’m not going to sing the accurate song about how the riffing is going a mile a minute. It isn’t completely true as there are some moments where the silence in the theater is rather overlong and not a build-up to a well-placed riff. Just quiet. Too quiet. Weird quiet, for them. Perhaps they ran out of breath trying to keep up with the script, such as it is?
Oh and if you’re gonna have Gypsy in the theater, at least give her a real great corker of a joke to justify her appearance.
But the real point is that the host segments have a feel of “well, we’ve got to fill two minutes because it is expected of us” rather than “hey, this is a funny idea, let’s see if it has legs let alone a point”. For the most part it seems as if this new show is just doing it by rote and if there’s a joke in there, well, all the better! Yay!
But when you don’t have the entire writing staff stuck in the tundras of Minnesota all in one place forced to come up with their best material and get feedback right then and there from your fellow writing staff members, there’s going to be a dropoff.
That was a big recipe for the actual show’s success, but as long as there’s a great Rotten Tomatoes rating, why take suggestions, right?
Am I the only one who finds the supposed cynicism of the Mike era to be vastly overstated? No question, the characters got more impatient with the movies as the series went on. Whether the comedic result was less charming or less cloying is a matter of opinion. But to me it never lost the fundamental sweetness that made it MST3K. Up to the very end the characters would regularly call each other “honey,” seek solace on each other’s shoulders, react to “adult” moments in the movies with childish naivety, and remained fairly plucky, dopey and innocent overall. To hear EricJ tell it, you’d think the show turned into Honest Trailers when it changed hosts/Mads/Crows.
Everyone’s tastes are different, but let’s not rewrite history to support an argument that the show devolved into an unmitigated snarkfest. It just isn’t so. A lot of Mike’s most charming and lovable moments come from the latest seasons, like when he is gently jealous of Joel’s achievement of managing a Hot Fish Shop, or shares the bots’ excitement about ending up in a single bedroom, half bath apartment in his finale. There remained too much underlying humility in the characters during the Sci-Fi Era for the claim that it became purely mean-spirited to hold any water.
aah, the Joel Knows Best days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWRIdxMiyCk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RMA8Vn2Gbk
So gentle and supportive and fubsy-wubsy …
No, you’re not alone. I have already commented once before that I can’t think of anything more lame than bashing Mike because he’s not Joel (or the other way around, although that doesn’t happen that often). It’s the exact same show, through all 12 seasons (counting “Season 0”). It’s predicated on the idea of skewering “cheesy movies/the worst that we can find”; cynicism is going to be part of the package no matter what. The cast’s trick is to make their own cynicism commensurate with the cynicism of the film makers. NB, the only times I’ve seen/heard of real outrage directed at MST3K were: a YouTube non-MSTie commentator furious at their treatment of “Bride of the Monster”; my then-wife bursting into tears at the ridicule directed at the short “Alphabet Antics”; and the Japanese taking great offense at the way they handled the Gamera and Godzilla movies–i.e., all Joel moments. Somebody once commented on this site that Mike’s reaction is actually actually quite normal: for God’s sake, he’s been kidnapped, shot into space and forced to watch ****ty movies by a couple of lunatics. Who wouldn’t be a bit cranky? Also, it’s more than just Joel & Mike: the whole dynamic between them and the ‘bots is different. I loved the observation a while back that Joel was the ‘bots’ dad and Mike is their brother (and Jonah “an affable neighbor”): they pick on him and tease him like any bratty younger sibs would; I love the basically-normal-but-not-overly-bright persona he has on the SOL: usually, Crow and Servo are a step ahead of him. But just as Joel’s sweet, wide-eyed innocent goofiness makes his own zingers that much more pungent, the seemingly dim slacker Mike suddenly honing in on an unsuspecting director or actor with the accuracy and power of a laser beam makes the experience that much funnier for us. There’s a lot to choose from in MST3K; we all have our personal favorite lineups and episodes–and least-favorites, too. For me, the good Joel episodes and good Mike episodes are equally good–they are good MST3K episodes no matter who is in the cast. (Ditto for Jonah, too.)
All the Mike and Joel episodes are rewatchable.
I will never sit through Season 11 again. They aren’t fun, they are grating.
…Someone who learns to make lemonade when life gives you lemons?
Although, as some have mentioned, Jonah seems to make whole Country Time pitchers out of them, but with a little too much artificial sweetening.
They didn’t seem to have patience for anything…Hence the “They don’t really like movies” observation, since most of the riffs seem to be dark, bored, and hostile at seeing their time wasted. We don’t really know WHY Pearl is sending them the movies, after all, so why do they have to sit through them?…Why are we rooting for them, if they’re just being subjected to a mild annoyance of their time, with no danger to their smug, superior sanity?…Why is it funny watching them complain that it hasn’t ended yet?…Why are we watching??
Between Kevin’s cathartic anger issues, Mike’s general air of smug/hip superiority, and Bill, the little-brother in the gang who tagged along overdoing anything he saw the cool older kids do, any scene that dared run fifteen seconds longer than it should have was “Okay, Movie, you can end the scene any freakin’ TIME now!” (Movie, you see, was a living, sentient being, that they could hurl with abuse and dream about inflicting any manner of assault and battery on in a dark alley, like a Renfest Punching Bag, for “its” crime of demanding their attention. Unless the director had a name, like Coleman Francis, and then they could dream about beating him up in a dark alley.)
That’s likely where we got the sweet, humble and lovable “C’mon!” jokes where they wondered where was all the cool stuff the title promised–C’mon, it’s been ten minutes already, shoot somebody, take your clothes off, something! Which is, of course, charming and puckish if you ever have to listen to the real thing three rows behind you in a Saturday night cineplex.
Jonah&tB complained that nothing was Avalanching yet halfway into their movie–and Beast of Hollow Mountain, guilty as charged–but think the “Yyyep,
Avalanche, any minute now!” riffs were more a decade-culture product of the uneducated 70’s-lore generation that never actually saw Irwin Allen disaster movies, and never learned that the disaster always had to happen at the midway point, after the subplots. When M&tB do it, however, it just sounds like drunken football fratboys.
(slaps glove!) How DARE you insult the honor of Honest Trailers, sir! Their sarcasm of Zack Snyder movies are TWICE the heckler Mike will ever be! ;)
(Although, yeah, even Mike would consider the “Funny names” shtick at the end as way too junior high, and the tweet-in “Trailer voice” gags as way too cult-kissing. And that’s saying a lot.)
Well said. Some people, even into adulthood, can’t recognize that, as you say, “Everyone’s tastes are different.” For me, one of the best things about this show is that it often changes: hosts/voices, SOLs, formats, types of movies, types of riffs. It never stagnates, even if I feel that s. 11 didn’t live up to the previous 10.
Zontar : Thing From Venus
I second the idea that Kinga and Max should look “busier”. Dr. F. and Frank always seemed to be in the middle of something when it was time for the invention exchange. Seeing Kinga in a cluttered lab with her hands full would make her seem less like a TV show host.
I’ll second “Yor: The Hunter From The Future” and add “The Last Dinosaur”. Though Toho had a hand in that last one so it may be nigh impossible to get the rights.
For someone who appoints himself as some sort of expert and is the daily demagogue of this show, you sure weren’t paying attention. The premise is clearly spelled out in the theme song. We root for them because they’re being held against their will. The ever-present danger, as was shown several times and *explicitly* mentioned at least twice, is that life support is turned off outside of the theater.
In short, you’re cutting your own ‘argument’ (if one can even say your blatherings rise to that term) off at the knees.
I honestly can’t tell if this statement represents overwhelming jealousy, or just a continuing psychosis. Either way, it’s very sad.
Delete your account.
Gare
I may have mentioned this on another thread, but, “The Manster? Please?”
It could even come with its own ear-worm: “Well, I’ve got a Manster in my panster, sends some joy down my LEGGGSSSS …!” :::Bo Diddly guitar riff:: “Makes me walk like a hairy ape and I NEVER begggg …! ::more Bo Diddly guitar riffs::
And it kind of goes on from there.
Join us, won’t we?
Well, heck, that could be a lot of fun.
Does the Manster have a man-bun?
Man-boobs?
Does he carry a murse? … oh, wait a sec… um… man-purse?
Does he man-splain? Does he, heaven help us, man-spread?
All I know is, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a rubberized coconut head growing out of a guy’s collarbone as is featured in … The Manster!
I’ve been watching MST3K reruns with great joy on COMETTV on Sunday nights. Their regular promos during the broadcasts for upcoming shows reveal a veritable smorgasbord of B-movie cheese. Does Netflix MST3K have a chance to tap in on this cornucopia for Season 12? Is all that already part of a catalogue that some of you have already mentioned? BTW, they show straight, non-MSTiefied versions of some classics: “The Incredible Melting Man”, “Outlaw”, etc.
Oh, speaking of, how about first Gor movie for season 12?
He has been posting like this since the days of usenet… it got to the point where so many people had him kill-filed, that he was pretty much posting for an audience of himself. That was nearly 20 years ago; isn’t that fascinating?
Ah, the days of the functional killfile…
This post really hit the nail on the head. I’m of the opinion that the comedic result in the Sci-Fi era was less charming, but it’s for reasons that don’t affect others. Some can enjoy Seasons 8-10 and not be affected by the snark. And yes, the snark rate went up, but for me, it overwhelmed the sweet moments. I will watch episodes from that era occasionally, and some I enjoy much more than others. But I can not watch a bunch of them in a consecutive run like I can Seasons 1-7. The reason for this is I have anger management issues. I can not watch what i perceive to be angry comedy, or it will royally set me off. That combined with many changes that I really don’t like make for a usually unpleasent experience for me.
But that’s just me. I know everyone’s tastes are vastly different, and they don’t get out of it what I do in the same way. And that’s good. I wish I could enjoy the Sci-Fi era more.
I do not get any sense of angry comedy from Mike’s tenure at Comedy Central, Seasons 5.5-7. Season 6 is the bleakest stretch of episodes they ever did, but I absoluetely love them. The way Season 6 takes something so bleak and turns it into a thing of beauty, well, for me, that’s just what the doctor ordered. It soothes my anger issues, it corrects them. As opposed to the Sci-Fi-Fi era, where too often jokes about a person’s appearance, country-bashing, or just plain boredom with doing the show tended to happen. I know they are just jokes, but I can’t help it, they set me off. So I tend to stay away from that era for the most part. I would never knock anyone for enjoying that era. I would be confused, but I would never knock them. To each their own.
Season 11, while far from perfect, succeeds for me because it’s comfortable. I usually only get two or three real belly laughs from any given episode of the series. So the not trying to be hilarious, rather making interesting and fun comments is very relaxing for me. The Land That Time Forgot, for me, is as relaxed as a Season 2 episode. And that makes me very happy. It’s really all I wanted out of Season 11.
I want to hear more about this story? What in Alphabet Antics caused tears?
I’m pretty sure that he hasn’t watched an episode of MST3k and is the brother or ex of one of the main people who founded this site trying to destroy it.
Yeah, I’ve never actually seen The Manster… but I remember seeing pictures of it in one of those horror/science fiction film magazines I used to collect as a wee lad. I thought the photo of the guy with the eyeball growing on his shoulder was pretty awesome, so the film must be, too.
Alas, I am now older, wiser–and far more jaded. :/
Well, she saw “Alphabet Antics” as a very sweet, if old-fashioned, little short for kids that didn’t deserved to be mocked at all. Upon further reflection, I saw her point, and this incident became a kind of object lesson for me in evaluating MST3K: the level of vitriol directed at the film or short has to be commensurate with its badness; things go better when they go more gently on films that have a modicum of honest effort or good intentions in them.
On that note, I would argue that most of the material shown in the SciFi episodes is demonstrably more cynical and/or incompetent that most of the stuff from Seasons 1-7. As bad as “Manos” is, it doesn’t make me mean-mad (to quote TV’s Frank) like “Hobgoblins” or “Overdrawn … ” do; “The Killer Shrews” is just goofily bad, not obviously and cynically exploitative like “Horror at Party Beach”; “Neptune Men” completely lacks the charm of the Gamera movies; and so on. For this reason, I have never been bothered by the slight change in tonality in Seasons 8-10 (although I greatly prefer Trace’s Crow to Bill’s): it strikes me as a sign of greater desperation on the part of the captives in the SOL and they give the movies exactly what they deserve.
i say add these to the mix:
The Crippled Masters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYYbvzz4RsU
Invincible Shaolin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgov6mqB9wo
they have Kung Fu Gorillas in this.
The Joel-era MST was so cruel …
How about “From Hell It Came” with the killer tree and the natives who are white people in native make-up. Also “The Cyclops”.
I think that Gypsy singing backup on “Idiot Control Now” is one of the cutest things ever.
Now crush your spirit by imagining that scene with the new voice.