Joel and Trace were interviewed by “The AV Club” and Joel was interviewed by City Pages.
Joel and Mary Jo got interviewed for a piece in the University of Minnesota student newspaper.
CBS Minnesota does a nice long story and a two-part video interview with the entire cast!
UPDATE: The local Fox affiliate has a short text piece and a pretty good video piece. And there is a short little piece in the Strib suggesting you buy Christmas gifts for your MSTie pals at the meet-and-greet after the show, which is in the restaurant next door.
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AVC: How has your audience changed over time?
TB: I don’t know if they really have changed. They’re all walks of life. You might stereotype them as the guy in the basement building the Millennium Falcon … No, wait, that’s me.
And it me too. I just rencently put two models on string to hang off my office ceiling….the L.E.M. from the the Apollo flights as seen in MOON ZERO TWO and a V2 as seen in KING DINOSAUR [and others]. AHHHHHH I “am” a MST3K geek!. Wait that’s not so bad…I kinda like it, it fact I like it very much!
A V2? You could have had a V8!
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I’m super excited that they’ll be taping “War of the Insects” and “Rattlers” for more DVD releases! Can’t wait!
AV CLUB interview was great.
@4 Agreed. Is this the first official confirmation that all CT DVDs from now on will be live only?
In 2008 our one big vacation was to fly to Minneapolis to see CT on their first live tour since they weren’t coming anywhere near Maryland that year. Saw them at the Old State Theater, same place as the MST3K live performance at the first Conventio-Con in 1994. The 2008 trip there were 3 of us instead of 2, our son who was 11 years of age then really enjoyed it too. Very relaxing fun time. We’ve been to Minneapolis 3 times ever and all 3 of those trips were MST3K/CT related.
As for model building, I built an X-wing and a Darth Vader TIE fighter when I was a teenager after the first Star Wars movie came out. Most of my other models were flying model rockets or WWII war-birds scale models at the time and I know I had a plastic LEM as well, humans going to the moon was a wonderful backdrop to the period. I still build models to this day as my main hobby, mostly fantasy miniatures.
I just bought my tickets to the Green Bay show! I’m so excited. I think I’m going to wet my… yes, confirmed, it has happened. Better go change.
Sampo> I think there is a weekend discussion topic in here somewhere.
Joel’s comments that the fans are only interested in the riffing and not really about the host segments bothers me a lot. I guess I’ll turn in my fan club card. I love the host segments. Like anything else there are good ones and bad ones but they were important to to connecting with the performers and there was great commedy there. Take Willy the Waffle for example, or Timmy the Dark Spector of Crow, or the Star Trek Mirror Mirror parody.
And I did enjoy the host segments of the studio Cinematic Titanic DVD’s. Now I’m not saying they should be doing those live. In fact I’m not sure that would play all that well live. I could be wrong but that is my impression. Also I fully support the live DVD’s of Cinematic Titanic. I love going to an Aerosmith concert and I love going to see Cinematic Titanic. Live always adds an element that the studio will never have. But the main point here is BOTH live and studio/host segment or no host segment have their place and it truly bothers me the way host segments are casually dismissed in the AV Club interview.
Cheepskate Crow #5> No it’s been said before that live DVD’s are going to all there is going forward. It was said quite a while ago actually. At least a year but I remember the article being linked right here on the site at the time.
@Dan in WI #8:
I must have missed it. I agree with you that the host segments were very important to the show and had many of my favorite MST memories. The absence of them and the robots makes me not nearly as interested in CT or Rifftrax as I was in MST. What might be an interesting discussion thread and a question I put out to anyone is: Do you see yourself watching any CTs/Rifftraxes in 20 years like how (I’m guessing) most of us here still watch MSTs?
#9 “Do you see yourself watching any CTs/Rifftraxes in 20 years like how (I’m guessing) most of us here still watch MSTs?”
Yes, actually. I enjoy the MST host segments, and I like some of the ones CT has done (I love “Which Thing Won’t Kill You?” from Legacy of Blood), but the riffing is awesome, and that’s enough for me. [shrug]
Well I have seen Alien Factor twice before unriffed and twice riffed and it holds up well. [I just rewatch the Alien Factor clip in the interview and even though I knew ever riff it was still funny]I think CT will last quite a long time as a watchable product because the titles appeal to a wide fan base. The rifftrax releases with the old sci fi movies will hold too. The rifftrax for the modern stuff may not fare so well over time. The more popular genres like Twilight and Lord of the rings and Harry Potter should age well. I suspect the other titles won’t. But only time will tell for certain.
On a side note I really wish that we can have some of the cast doing their stand up acts/music that they perform before the show put on the live dvd releases. Joel is the only one I have seen do stand up and that was way before MST3K. It would be a nice little something speccial for us who have yet to see a live show in person [tear drop]. Heck I’d settle for footage of Trace doing a sound check. “One, one, one two, check one, check two, check check 0ne two one two check, check”.
NEW YORK SEPTEMBER, HARTFORD CT. FEB. SCHENECTADY NY. FEB. COULD YOU SQUEEZE IN A BOSTON VISIT???????
Trace and Joel’s attitude with regards to esoteric references is kind of a bummer. That’s one of the (many) reasons why Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic will never ever be nearly as funny as MST3K was. It’s almost like they’re treating it like a sitcom with a studio audience. It’s kinda ironic, because nowadays the best comedies on TV don’t have studio audiences or laugh tracks. They were ahead of the time back in the MST3K days, and now they’re behind the times.
I love the host segments on MST3K and some are classics,but the ones on CT are so so at best.A few are cute.As far as Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic being behind the times,they don’t need to duplicate what they did with MST3K.Been there,done that.
Joel and Mary Jo got interviewed for a piece in the University of Minnesota student newspaper.
Um while I always love hearing what the cast of CT have to say I find it odd how you can interview someone and print basically one reply to one question, about as long as a conversation in a elevator ride, and then call it an interview.
I am all for good press for the show but I don’t think I have really seen an top notch interview yet. For me, I am a built in fan for them. I don’t need the same old same old. I could less about questions like – what was the worst movie you did on MST3K? Been there – done that.
I wish that they would get questions like: Tell me the first time you fell in love. What crazy things did you do as a kid? What did you do on your first real job. What totally pisses you off. Tell me about your worst airline/travel misadventure. What are your thoughts about the Isreal/Arab situation?
These peolple of whom which I admire greatly, are in my opinion the finest comedians today but I know so little about who they are and what caused them to be as funny as they are. Frank on a recent webcast spoke alot his early life and I gained even greater respect for him after upon hearing that interview.
Wow, I haven’t built a model in years. Too many sticky Calvin & Hobbes moments. There’s still the pieces of a PBY-5 Catalina in a big box in my closet, though. Someday…
Interesting. I’d never thought of it quite that way, but the interviewer hit on what’s arguably the key difference between Cinematic Titanic (Joel often refers to “discovering chessy old movies and sharing them) versus RiffTrax (“Some movies have it coming” Boy, they sure do.) MST3K would probably be somewhere in between. “Interpreting” is especially thought-provoking when you consider that the Brains often went out of their way to purposely misunderstand a movie for comedic value.
Regarding esoteric references, think of it this way: You’re one of the Titans, on stage, performing before a few thousand people. They’re loving you, laughing uproariously, you can barely stick to your script riding on the performance high. And then you make a reference like “Isn’t that how Aeschylus died?” or “It’s Jimmy Carl Black!” or one of the countless out-of-left-field references that you know maybe one in a thousand viewers might catch. But nobody in the audience gets it. Silence. You’re in the dark – the audience can’t really see you – you can’t tug your collar Johnny Carson-style and squeeze a giggle out of the situation. Under the circumstances, wouldn’t you err on the side of a tried-and-true fart joke?
Anyway, I for one, do not mourn the passing of the time tube, the nanotated disc, nor the silhouetted scaffolding. Maximizing the funny is paramount. They should really stop using that lousy promotional image. It’s looks like an ad for a local submarine sammich deli.
I’m glad they’re finally taping War of the Insects. I saw them do that one live and it totally killed.
I’m not going to miss the time tube conceit, either. It really seemed like their hearts weren’t in it, and they just thought they needed a back-story. Which is confirmed by the interview, I guess. Anyway, I like the live discs a whole lot better. (Seeing them live is much better still.)
Really, Rifftrax has dropped esoteric references almost completely, and MST dropped most of them late in the series – count the number of pre-1980 references in a season 8-10 episode, and compare to a season 3-4 episode. Now CT will be doing fewer of them, too.
RIP “The Right People will Get It” 1988-1996.
I object, Mike. Rifftrax has lots of esoteric references, maybe you just don’t get them. :silly:
Granted, they’re not as frequent as in the “Golden Age” of MST, but far more than in Cinematic Titanic. (Of course, it helps that RT has done over 100 feature-length riffs compared to the dozen or so movies CT has done.) One could also argue that those Golden Age episodes haven’t aged all that well because of it – for every obscure but intellectual reference that one is more likely to pick up on with age, there’s a couple painfully dated jokes at the expense of contemporary celebrities. (Faith Popcorn?) However, I will admit that RiffTrax is much more guilty of this (e.g. their inexplicable fascination with Kevin Federline and Schnappi) than MST ever was.
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