During the heyday of MST3K, most TV critics stayed above the “Joel vs. Mike” fray. One rare exception to that was The Washington Post’s Tom Shales, who made no attempt to hide his admiration for Joel, and his disdain for any MST3K product that did not feature him.
It’s clear that’s still true today, judging from his piece today about Cinematic Titanic.
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Shales on Cinematic Titanic44 Replies to “Shales on Cinematic Titanic”Commenting at Satellite News
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It’s nice to see MST3K getting mention, but frankly the weird level of attention that CT has gotten over RiffTrax is just weird to me. The first CT I purchased and was pretty disappointed, the point that I never bought another. I am welcome to suggestions for one better than the first one just to give it another chance. As it is, I can’t say Cinematic Titanic is very much the descendant of MST3K to me in any meaningful way.
I also didn’t like CT much at the beginning, but they ARE getting better with every episode. SCCTM was very funny, and I’m looking forward to Frankenstein – for once the trailer actually looks good. The only thing that’s sort of disappointing to me is that it seems very stilted and formal; I’m sure they’re better live, but sometimes on the DVD’s I wish they would laugh at each other. I still prefer RiffTrax to CT – they always seem like they’re having much more fun and it translates well – just my opinion.
You can definitely tell which “side” Shales is on, since he never mentioned Jim or Mike by name.
Wow, I didn’t know Joel went into therapy after leaving the show. Once again says “I was cheated out of five good years.” Shales simply refers to Mallon as “a former partner” and says Joel left (Shales): “…because he didn’t like what interlopers (another likely Mallon reference) were doing to his show.” Overall a pretty negative and bitter tasting article.
Also, possibly shedding new light on how Jim forced Joel’s hand in deciding to leave in order to keep the peace, Shales specifically says that ‘the CT crew are the folks who were in his camp/on his side.’
The fact checker for the article missed the ball — the next movie to be riffed is “Frankenstein” not “Blood of the Vampires”, there were 5 CT releases in 2008 not 7, CT is not released by Shout! Factory, etc.
…Or Shales is just assuming. I’m guessing some of the RT people (or others not involved in either project) consider themselves on “Joel’s side” even if they didn’t join up with RT.
Maybe it’s just me, but I just don’t care about drumming up melodrama from the “Joel v. Mike” days. Joel is hilarious. Mike is hilarious. CT is great, even if it’s clear how much Mike helped shape MST3k. Rifftrax is great, even if they need to stop Riffing on good films and avoid some cliches they’ve relied on.
What’s the deal with Shales acting like the Mike years don’t exist? As I’ve stated before, while I love Joel, I find that the Mike shows are much better written(a lot less of the “oops-missed my line” type comments). Plus, with the exception of my missing Frank and Dr. F, I’ve always preferred the Sci-Fi Channel episodes(and I started watching in 1990!). I love both CT and RT, although I think with “Legacy of Blood” Joel and CT really hit their stride. Also, as someone who never cared for Josh on MST, I’ve come to love him on CT. His sardonic delivery is hysterical(Lazy Title-a division of Shrug Corp.). All that said, both “shows” are great, let’s leave the Joel v Mike crap in the past already.
The Sci-fi episodes (my goodness- Time Chasers- Overdrawn-Boggy Creek-Final Sacrifice, et al) were what I cut my teeth on- then I went back and picked up fan and Rhino copies of earlier episodes- the first Joel episode I saw was Pod People- the contrast between the two is priceless- and I think their collective legacy is delicious. Joel gets props for being the creator, Mike for being the head writer.
Joel would say (like a high dog out of the 70’s) – “oh wow” while Mike would split my sides with comments like Future War’s “oh, that was easy” when the “tool” punched out the cheesy dinosaur. As a fan of a fan’s show, I appreciate the differences between the two hosts and savor the fact the entire cast turned over from the KTMA days until the final riff in Diabolik.
I look forward to more CT episodes, and hope the therapy of riffing helps Joel.
Saw all three Cinematic Titanic shows in Chicago, and they are simply brilliant on stage! If you caught them all three nights, you saw them evolve into a real group. It was incredibly gratifying for this long-time fan.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Cinematic Titanic FEELS like the original MST3K. (The Joel Years.) And that (for some of us) is much more fun than Riff Trax.
On the one side, there’s CT riffing on cheesy older movies like the original show. On the other side, there’s RT riffing on current movies that the original show could never have afforded.
And I’m in the middle, enjoying an embarassment of humorous riches. That other stuff is really none of my business.
Good but some definite factual issues.
Wasn’t Tom Shales one of the first big media writers to support MST3K? Maybe he feels so close to the early days of MST3K that he can’t abide the existence of anyone but Joel?
I watch and enjoy both Joel and Mike as MST3K hosts. I can’t imagine how people can like one and not the other. It must be a metal illness that needs to be in the DSM IV?
Nobody’s going to point out Shales totally slamming MST3K: The Movie? That seemed really unnecessary. And honestly, I can’t believe people still defend This Island Earth as being anything more than simply watchable, but cheesy.
As time passes, the less I like MST3K: The Movie. There are dozens of episodes I’d rewatch first. There was some good riffing but you could say the same about almost any weak episode. It wasn’t a movie but it wasn’t the TV show either. To me, it’s a lost opportunity, something that should have been great. Kinda like Let it Be or almost every superhero movie. Still, it was the first time I saw the show with big crowd and that was very cool.
what a maroon.
“for crying out loud, can’t we all just get along?!”
That is one evil piece of writing.
Oh, come on. Nobody cares about “Joel v.s. Mike” nowadays. It’s all about “RT v.s. CT” these days! :grin:
Like trickymutha, my first Joel episode was Pod People. Will never forget my first invention exchange viewing, I laughed so hard at the “Van Halen” guitar blowing up and Joel’s “Whattaya think, sirs?” It’s also the first time I got to experience the hilarity of Frank Connif. MST3K: the Movie will always hold a special place for me since that was my first MST experience, right before I started on the Sci Fi episodes *before* I got into the Joel eps via Rhino and fan copies. As said before, the contrast between Joel and Mike’s styles is part of what makes the show fun. And as much I still like the movie, Universal’s meddling watered down the riff quality and it would have been so much better with the bunker scene and especially the real ending. Tom pretending…I think…to conspire with Dr. F while Mike and Crow prep Gypsy had me rolling. Shame those weren’t on the new DVD (did you even try to have them included Mr. Mallon?) And agreed Shales is buffoonish for praising This Island Earth. As said many times before, not a terrible movie but still plenty ripe for riffing (I love Mike’s line in the 20th DVD segment commenting on the indignant reporters asking them, “Uh, so why’d you guys decide to make fun of a good movie?” Mike: “Have you guys seen this movie lately?” haha). And I don’t see how the movie can be blamed for idiot-schmuck-Doug-whatsisface kicking it off CC and vapid dingbat Bonnie Hunt cancelling it 3 years later.
Doug Herzog. There we go, blech. Been awhile since I read his last name. On a positive note, I was only able to remember his name up by thinking of the cult classic Sega Genesis shooter/strategy game Herzog Zwei. If only Herzog’s Way was one of intelligent programning. Also, as more proof of him being an enemy of shows that have actual effort and brains behind them, when he was at Fox (’99 or early 00’s I think), Chris Carter mentioned in an interview how the first time he met Herzog, he somehow made it clear to Carter during their conversation that he was NOT a fan of the X-Files. He’s now back dredging as the president of MTV, another network he helped ruin (or make even worse, whichever. It and the once excellent 97-99 version of MTV2 are now complete turds) in one of his previous jobs. Who keeps hiring this idiot?
Interesting. Unless I’m mistaken, the “interlopers” comment could not be directed at Jim Mallon, because he was there from the beginning, and thus could not be an interloper. The only person I’m aware of who would fit that description would be someone who was brought in later, say, to “do some typing,” and secured a great deal of power. Maybe my ears and eyes have been deceiving me, but there have been a large number of comments by Joel in recent interviews that could be considered shots.
I have no interest in stirring up drama (I’m a Joel fan anyway), but this pattern is starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth. Hopefully, this is just that Tom Shales is being a jerk (which he kinda is, Mystie or no).
There was an interview this year on the web where Joel referred to Mike as “A really talented and funny guy” so I don’t follow. Any and all perceived shots from Joel that I’ve seen have been when he candidly talks about his rift with Jim back in the day. He did criticize rifftrax a bit in an Oklahoma based blog interview (it’s linked somewhere on Deep Ape) where he says he doesn’t agree with the concept since, in his words/opinion “It’s just audio.” But he admits he’s listened to at least some RT and thinks they’re “very funny,” but since he’s “a very visual person” as the interviewer puts it, he feels RT’s audio only format takes away some of the “participation with the audience” that MST3K had. Unfortunately because of this, in the interview he also affirms that he feels CT and RT should be separate entities and specifically says he has no plans to riff with Mike, mainly because of the aforementioned reasons and he feels however great some fans think a Joel/Mike riff would be, it’d end up not being anywhere near as funny/awesome as they’d envision.
by the way….Happy New Year, everybody
I loved and watched MST3K till the day it ended, but it was never the same without its brilliant creator. My fondest memories are always of the era before Joel Hodgson left the show.
Hodgson should never have left the show. No matter what he should have stayed with and nurtured his “baby”, his creation, even if he didn’t want to do the movie. He should have never surrendered creative control or the rights to his own creation, the funniest, best comedy show that’s ever been on TV.
Nice review by Tom Shales. Glad to see CT is getting good recongnition. Now if only there was a time machine where I could go back and talk Joel (or he could talk himself) out of leaving the show solely in the hands of his partner.
I think I remember that SCI-FI canceled MST because it wanted to venture into more original sci-fi programing. What a joke! Their own movies are such crap that they may well be future CT fodder. Oh and they also just did a MORK and MINDY marathon (real hardcore sci-fi there)and lets not forget ECW wrestling. We only got the SCI-FI channel added to our cable during the final season of MST3K and I rarely even watch it anymore. LIFETIME is more sci-fi than SCI-FI!
Man, considering the inaccuracy in that piece, I’d be weary of just about everything Shales said in it including his quotes. And even though he seems to lean towards earlier MST and says it got meaner later on, he also started the article out by praising Mike hosted the Brain That Wouldn’t Die. He seems to be making some assumptions but at the same time, giving pops to Joel and CT is good for all. Like all the stuff in Entertainment Weekly and local newspapers lately. They bring up one riffing product and mention the others.
I like Joel ALOT better.
Why do these articles need to bring up the “Joel vs Mike” bulls–t here?
I want everyone doing this to ask themselves two questions — would the show exist at all without Joel? and would the show have been as funny without Mike as head writer? — and if you think the show would have been better off without either of the guys, you are insane.
For the record, I think Mike is a lot better than Joel as host, but I love Joel and think he was great on the show. Why can’t people like both?
Jason asked: “Why do these articles need to bring up the ‘Joel vs Mike’ bulls–t here?”
Because that’s hu-man nature. Many individuals feel insecure and without value unless they belong to an exclusive group that is good and right and smart. This requires an excluded group that is evil and wrong and incompetent. THERE CAN BE NO GRAY AREAS AND ANYONE WHO SUGGESTS OTHERWISE IS PART OF THE EVIL AND WRONG GROUP AND WISHES TO DIE A HU-MAN. (This, by the way, is everything you need to know about American politics.)
I prefer Mike over Joel for MST3K, and yet, while I’m an avid fan of CT, I avoid RT like plague.
Years later I still can hardly stand to watch Joel fumble through skits in MST3K (sometimes actually stopping cold, struggling to recall his lines), but you don’t see any of that nonsense in CT, where they can do as many takes as needed.
Mike was energetic and professional in MST3K, but his Rifftrax work seems bitter and nasty. Not ALL movies “ask for it.” There’s a qualitative difference between “Battlefield Earth” and “The Little Shop Of Horrors”–especially given the circumstances under which each film was made–that Mike is too busy saying “huh huh huh that really sucks and these people are all fools” to acknowledge. This is…unfortunate.
Mike wasn’t always like that. Take “MST3K: The Movie” and the great “This Island Earth” debate. Nostalgic fanboys will be forever butthurt over the treatment their “classic” got, but in truth most of the jokes in MST3KTM are either incidental (“Eat at Joe’s, Eat at Joe’s”), playing off something already integrated into the script (“Into the weenie-mobile! Weenie-man away!”), or completely and inarguably justified (“Do you notice the peculiar indentation in the foreheads?” “…NNNNOOOO!”). Nobody cracks on the movie’s All-Important Message or anything like that (although they could’ve, easily). For crying out loud, it features giant insects wearing slacks. “Metropolis” it ain’t.
Shales? I don’t care if he’s a Joel fan or a Mike fan. He’s sloppy and unprofessional.
Ever since his appearance on “This Is MST3K”, I’ve always thought Tom Shales was a blowhard, and this review of “Cinematic Titanic” only reaffirms my initial impression.
First of all, as previously pointed out by other msties here, some of his facts are wrong. One episode he mentions under Joel’s moniker, “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die”, is in actuallity Mike’s opening episode. As far as I can tell, CT never did “Earth vs. The Spider”, and CT did choose the Frankenstein movie over the Vampire movie as its next release.
Way to go on the fact-checking, Tom! :roll:
If you ask me, Shales is a fan in the same vein as Martha Stewart…yes, they know how the show works, but their lack of knowledge within the show itself shines through whenever they try to discuss its virtues. Just another elitist who thinks they know everything about everything.
What struck me was that he claimed there were two camps: The people who took Joel’s side, left with him, and formed Cinematic Titanic…and the “interlopers” who stuck around and ran the show into the ground.
So the first camp would include Joel, Josh (who apparently took Joel’s side so vehemently that he left the show four years before Joel did, just to demonstrate his loyalty), Frank, who, um…left a season and a half later…Trace, who, um…left two and a half seasons later…and Mary Jo, who stuck around until the very last episode.
And the second camp would include Kevin, Bill, and Mike…none of whom are actually affiliated with MST3K anymore (MST3K being now pretty much just Jim.)
Honestly, even if you do buy into his claims of a major schism (which I don’t buy–I’m sure there are some creative and personal differences, like you’d get with any group of a dozen or so talented and visionary people, but come on, these guys are Midwesterners. We’re too nice to schism. :) )…I’d say there are clearly three camps, not two. Joel, Mike, and Jim, each of whom have taken the basic concept in their own direction. Lumping Mike in with Jim gives people a distorted image of the conflicts and personalities involved.
But again, I think that he’s also wildly overstating the conflicts to fit in with his worldview. I think they’re probably all pretty cool with each other, even if they might grumble a bit every so often.
“CT did choose the Frankenstein movie over the Vampire movie as its next release”
Since Shales was talking to Joel while they were in Chicago, I suspect they were talking about the next performance; not the next release (the schedule listed Vampire before Freaks).
But yeah, he could’ve done more fact-checking.
Tom Shales will always have a place in my heart for 2 reasons: He was, I believe the first, or one of the first to champion MST nationally. And, he is the reason I found MST. I heard him on NPR, talking about his fave TV shows or something, way back in 92 or so. If I hadn’t caught that review it would have taken me a lot longer to find the show. So, Thanks Tom! Other than that, he is kind of a knob at times.
Yes, Shales does get his facts wrong and yes, it’s clear he’s let his biased antagonistic view of the original series run away with him, but at least he brought us this good Joel quote:
Because that’s hu-man nature. Many individuals feel insecure and without value unless they belong to an exclusive group that is good and right and smart. This requires an excluded group that is evil and wrong and incompetent. THERE CAN BE NO GRAY AREAS AND ANYONE WHO SUGGESTS OTHERWISE IS PART OF THE EVIL AND WRONG GROUP AND WISHES TO DIE A HU-MAN. (This, by the way, is everything you need to know about American politics.)
This is also basically everything you need to know about any fan-group on the internet. It seems any time I look into the fandom of something I like, someone is trying to create some gigantic schism out of basically nothing. It’s frankly sickening, and while it doesn’t amke me ashamed to like what I like, it does make me ashamed to be associated with some of these people even by proxy.
I gotta second a lot of what Happenstance said in post #30. There is a huge contrast between Mike in RT and his time on the show. Especially in his Comedy Central years and even in the sci-fi eps when things got a little sharper (in a good way since that had to do with the writing continuing to evolve and improve even at that late stage, but also with Bill’s much feistier and indignant version of Crow), Mike always seemed like such a warm and friendly guy (just love how reassuring and enthusiastic he is to the ‘bots when singing “To Earth” in Diabolik) who I’d love to meet and have a discussion with on any one of variety of topics. But maybe that was just Mike the character. Now, he seems really cranky and super condescending so I honestly can say I would be much more nervous to introduce myself to him than I was when I met Joel, Frank, Josh, Mary Jo and Trace back in October at CT Live in Minneapolis who were all incredibly welcoming and engaging to speak with. Based on a few stories I’ve read, if I met Mike I’d be too worried I’d just bore or piss him off easily due to one of his many chronic headaches, ya know?
Joel good Mike good shut up…
I haven’t had a chance to read the other posts yet, but I just read the Shales article and, despite his early and fervent support of MST3K for which we owe him much respect, he seems to have flaked out a bit here, as evidenced by the many simple factual errors. Furthermore, it does not seem that he’s been paying attention, in a social historical stylistic sense.
(Oh and I don’t think CT is very good)
I like Joel. I like Mike. I like MST3K. I like Rifftrax. I like CT. I like Tom Shales.
Much of the good critical reception MST3K received is thanks to Tom Shales. The subset of people here who don’t know that, and only care about Mike and the Sci-Fi episodes, need to realize that those episodes wouldn’t have existed had the show not been as critically well-received as it was, and Shales had a lot to do with that.
Some perspective, folks.
A critic is a person whose opinion is supposed to have weight with the public by being critical with the venue he is critiquing. Shales is a TV critic who is not typically fair with venues he personally doesn’t like.
Hell, all critics fall into their own biased clap trap after doing it too long. Shales is one, along with Ebert (who thinks “Pillow Book” is good).
#37 – Captain Cab
Really? Personally, I feel like Mike (the person, not the character) has been friendly and stayed in contact with MST3K fans more than Joel over the past several years. Back when I read about Joel’s thoughts on being famous and his treatment of Lisa Jenkins, I wasn’t sure I’d want to meet him in person. However, perhaps he’s gotten more relaxed since he decided to start Cinematic Titanic.
#40 – Big Stupid
It’s nice that Mr. Shales used his TV critic influence to help advertise MST3K, but that doesn’t change the fact that he could have made this article more informative and less dividing.
He clearly wants the reader to feel sorry for Joel and dislike his “former partner and the interlopers” who did stuff to “his baby”. Slamming the feature film version seemed unnecessary. He acts like the reason the movie failed was not only because it lacked Joel, but because the interlopers made the mistake of going after a “good” film. Seriously? I’m amused by the idea that Universal had to make the movie because of the fan write-in campaign though. Too bad fan demand couldn’t make Universal advertise it or put it in more theaters. Plus that bit about the show getting canceled because it was “running out of steam.”
I think it’s more than time for Joel to let this issue drop about whatever transgression he feels Mike and Kevin have committed against him. That means no more passive/agressive comments in interviews and no more water carrying by his Amen Corner like Tom Shales.
This whole “loyalty to Joel” scenario would be more plausible if there had been a wholesale cast change immediately after Mitchell, which of course there wasn’t.
I can’t help that if anyone in the CT and RT camp had enjoyed substantial post-MST success in other ventures that a)they wouldn’t have attempted to relaunch the show under a different name and b) there wouldn’t be this endless back and forth sniping about a personality conflict/business decision that occurred nearly 20 years ago.