Mary Jo (isn’t that an adorable photo of her?) is taking part in something called the “10,000 Laughs Comedy Festival” in the Twin Cities Oct. 19-21. Find out where you can catch her here.
Mike and RiffTrax writer Conor Lastowka have been doing a podcast called “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back,” which they describe as a “podcast book club” which involves rifffing Ernest Cline’s book “Ready Player One” which, as the podcast’s website says, “they’re pretty sure they’re going to hate.”
It’s on itunes, or wherever you get your podcasts, and at 372pages.com.
J Elvis is doing several days at the Acme Comedy Company in Minneapolis. Details here.
Anything else goin’ on?
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Well, the Mads are touring… They’re in Arizona next week and then Pennsylvania the week after and THEY BETTER GET BACK TO NY/NJ SOON
Mary Jo is cute as a button.
Because, after all, Some Books Have It Coming.
(Apparently the Spielberg movie just wasn’t coming fast enough for Conor to do the 80’s jokes and Mike to do the nerd jokes.)
Eric J.:
Have you listened to the podcast?
I can’t imagine what your grudge is against Mike.
Joel has given Mike praise on how he was as the host of MST3K.
Both Kevin and Bill have stated on their respective Twitters that Mike is considerate, well read, and thoughtful.
Mike stated on his Twitter that despite his conservative leanings, he does not support Trump.
That leaves me with three possible motives for your resentment.
1) You agree with the opinion that Tom Shales had of Mike: he’s too telegenic.
2) You are a bitter, unhappy troll.
3) You have a crush on Bridget and are jealous she’s married to Mike.
If my guesses are incorrect, please post here what exactly is (are) are your grievance(s) against Mike.
My guess is that he has an actual crush on Mike and is fighting it. That’s the only time I’ve seen such hatred in real life. The more he rails against Mike, the more I think, “Yep. Serious man-crush.”
Anyway, I will echo the sentiment that Mary Jo looks great/cute as a button. Would that I could wear short hair as beautifully!
Has Mary Jo moved back to Minnesota?
None of them ever come to California…. [pouting]
(You asked for it, chum…) :)
Look at their own words: “We’re pretty sure we’re going to hate it.”
Not the usual practice that started at the beginning of MST3K, ie. “We watched this movie together in the screening room, and there were so many silly moments, the guys were breaking up, and we knew we had to do this for an episode”, but the new reason RiffTrax takes on fodder: “We found something that needed punishing.”
They didn’t know for SURE whether it needed to be rolled to the public guillotine in a tumbrel cart and pelted with cabbages by the citizens for crimes against the people, but, by overblown reputation, it had a cult fandom, so kill, kill, kill!
Well, an Annoying Book Club, that’s nice to see he’s so “well read”; will he go after other authors that Annoy us, and we’ll see episodes devoted to Nicholas Sparks, Michael Crichton and Anne Rice?…Or will we see overblown-fandom books like Twilight that have cult fandoms RT can “make cry”, because the fans who read it like pathetic geeky things like 80’s computer games? Oh, I’m pretty sure we won’t see Fifty Shades of Grey next, will we?–Or maybe, heaven forbid, Harry Potter & the Cursed Child? Nahhh…
That’s what Mike’s done to the fans, and that’s what Mike’s done to the fandom–Taken (someone else’s) silly low-tech comic inspiration, and turned it into his own personal Cult Of Hatred, raising a loyal army of devoted minions to get back at everything that bothers him…Mostly other celebrities, comics, and trends that annoy him. And remember folks, Shia LaBoeuf is the devil.
“But Mike was head writer!”…That’s odd, I keep hearing he wasn’t around when the show was first put together, and I’d wager most of his more loyal “Stop saying he’s mean, he’s my hero!” fans weren’t either. You can go back at your leisure and read the discussions we’ve had in the last week or two from fans who had literally never seen the show before Sci-Fi, literally thought that was the show’s style of humor, and wondered why the original creator of the series, and his later handpicked host, were, quote, “Too nice” to the movies and not killing them in mob-style executions: “Why are Joel and Jonah so ‘nice’ to Manos? For what the movie puts us through, he should be screaming obscenities at it like Kevin, or joking about how he’d like to string Hal Warren up by his thumbs and rape his wife and children in front of his eyes!”
Simply put, Mike is a bully–no surprise there, playing the aging Biff Tannen smug-Aryan high-school jock bully from your anniversary class reunion has only been the comic persona of his act for the last twenty-five years–and, not unlike the political candidate he doesn’t support, he attracts bullies, those who only dream of being one, and hope he will fight their battles for them. He doesn’t quite connect with other people’s actual comedy that came before him and doesn’t see the humor about being anything else, and his majority of fans don’t see the comedy AS being about anything else.
Which would be bad enough. Except that Mike doesn’t even care if it’s about movies anymore…Because the franchise and cult he wants to create isn’t about movies anymore. It’s about HIM.
Eric: It just isn’t that absolute. The people at Rifftrax, I believe, were genuinely tickled and/or gob-smacked by some of the stuff they found. They sound fascinated by Ice Cream Bunny, Psychotronic, Fun in Balloonland and other weird stuff.
However, your main complaint seems to be about the fans who enable him. So, they support a show that they like and that you don’t. Mike is no longer attached to Joel’s ongoing brand. So you have a neat solution here. Stop watching Rifftrax. Watch new Mistie or one of the other riffing groups that has arisen.
Even if everything you said was correct, you still have the answer in your hands. (And I get you hate that “Mike’s” style was attached to half of MST3K’s run, but it was always there from season 2, even if it wasn’t as dominant. And again, it’s now completely in the past.)
I mean, even if Mike is a bully-comic, he certainly wouldn’t be the first: It would certainly put him alongside the greats of Mean-Spirited Predatorily Narcissistic A-Hole Bully Comics, in the company of Peter Sellers, David Letterman, Dave Foley, Jim Carrey, and others…But those other comics (except maybe Sellers) at least knew they were in the business of comedy, an ancient tradition handed down by other professionals before them. Carrey might hero-worship the great Blake Edwards years of 60’s Sellers, Letterman might talk about the days of Jack Paar, even lovable bastard John Cleese has done classic-comic tributes on TCM–Every comic working with some effort in the business knows that he at some point didn’t realize he was “apprenticed” by some other great who put some work into it.
You don’t see that as much with standup in the 90’s and 00’s, where they now pretty much use comedy as a safety net that rescues them from having to wait minimum-wage tables at T.J. Bearwich’s in Minneapolis, and craft most of their material around that basic principle.
Yes, and we can be thankful that the new popularity of Weird Public-Domain Stuff (hey, didn’t somebody have that idea earlier?) got Rifftrax’s main marketing off the nerd-bashing Avatar/Transformers/Twilight “Stuff That Has It Coming” angle they thought they’d be selling. Now that RT is the House That Life Day and the Ice Cream Bunny Built, they’re not showing that three-hour cartoon before every movie anymore, where you invite all your friends over to watch Anakin Skywalker jokes. (Real ones, by comedy professionals!)
Y’knowwww, if it wasn’t, and that WAS just that easy a solution, I’d be doing that. Seeing as I’m doing much of that already. But it isn’t that simple a solution either, to say https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYW5rmQgGXE .
(Heck, even RT doesn’t seem to want us to psychologically separate the two, given the sheer amount of fan callback episodes and cult lines they revolve their movie choices around, as if nobody ever left a cable network.)
Many of the Fans That Enable Him have, as we’ve seen here, confessed that they damn well just don’t know any better–That includes the middle generation of fans that tell the new fans what they “should” watch, the fans who interchangeably bring up RT refs in WDT threads (so, guess they do count, then?), and the new RiffTrax writers that thought that Mike brought Riffing down himself from Mt. Sinai on the seventh day, and follow his teachings faithfully. What the show WOULD have become in fans’ minds another five-year generation ahead, if Joel and Jonah hadn’t come back, isn’t pretty.
And like they say, the fool who doesn’t know he doesn’t know, avoid him, but the fool who knows he doesn’t know, teach him. Unless he quotes more Final Sacrifice cult catchphrases, and then you can also slap him upside the head. :)
The most recent RiffTrax release in my collection (the summer shorts beach party) has the three hour animated opening, complete with jokes, professional jokes, by professional comedy professionals.
Having said that, along with saying that almost everything EricJ says is a dumb waste of keystrokes, I do feel that the 372 Podcast feels a little mean spirited. Ernest Cline wrote for the new season of MST3K, so I’d hazard a guess he’s familiar with Mike. It would probably suck to find out some you’re (I assume) a fan of hosts a podcast dedicated to trouncing your big work.
But I’m sure Cline can dry his tears with fat Steven Spielberg checks.
Also, source on Kevin making a joke about raping Hal Warren’s wife and children? Because I’m pretty sure you’re just flat-out lying (but remember, it’s Mike who’s mean!)
Eric J.:
Wow. You are an angry person.
First of all, I’m a lady, not a “ chum.” I was here as Lavendare, until DISQUS messed up.
I don’t know where you get that notion that Mike is a bully. To compare him to the racist, misogynistic, lying, spiteful Trump is infuriating.
Have you ever met Mike? Have you ever communicated with him or anyone who knows him personally?
Do you have any corroboration to your inflammatory statements?
It seems to me you are projecting your own attitude onto Mike.
As for me, I’m hardly a MST3K newbie. I started watching the show during Season 5, and I was on the Prodigy MST3K board from 1994 to 1997.
If I were Sampo or Erhardt, I would block you from posting here.
If I knew Mike, I would advise him to sue you for defamation.
You answered my question. You are a bitter, unhappy troll.
You remind me of that creep Sean Hannity.
Do something to better yourself: read books, meditate, do volunteer work, and/or take antidepressants.
You would be doing yourself (and us) a favor.
Has anyone/everyone else noticed that as the ravings from No One’s Favorite Troll have increased on this site — often running to multiple long ramblings per thread — overall participation on Satellite News has gone way down? It’s just not fun any more, knowing that one will be called stupid, gullible, idiotic no matter what happy MST3K stuff one says.
Sampo or Erhardt, please block the troublemaker or make the Ignore button actually work. For the sake of your site.
Yeti:
Although Eric J. should be blocked, for now don’t let that troublemaker troll ruin your mood.
There’s a Mary Jo and Bridget short available at rifftrax.com.
In fact, its title may explain one of the reasons behind Eric J’s rants.
“Boredom at Work.”
Enjoy.
Thank you — good advice. More MJ&B? That works for me! I recently bought their cover of Angel’s Revenge that came out a few months ago and enjoyed it tremendously. Since I already had the Mike&thebots version I wasn’t sure that I would. One version isn’t better than the other; they’re both great and sort of compliment each other.
I think we’ve figured out Eric J.’s real identity – he’s Ernest Cline.
The 372 Pages podcast was Conor’s idea, after he saw the tweet going around a few months ago of the pop-culture list from Chapter Six of Ready Player One. Conor takes the lead in the podcast, and does most of the research, and is the one who presented the idea they might hate the book based on the reviews. He asked Mike to join him because he thought it would be fun. That’s it. That’s the hideous, horrible truth. The fact that Mike and Conor are both professional writers and published authors who have written novels makes them as qualified as anyone to critique another author’s work. I found it interesting that in the first episode, the two discuss Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Novels, and how few the two of them had read, and what other “great” works of literature they hadn’t read or stopped reading due to boredom. In other words, these are not the snobs you’re looking for.
I was listening to Mike’s other podcast a few weeks ago, where he mentioned totally unironically and without guile that he had just been listening to the Miami Connection soundtrack, and he started singing “Friends for Eternity”. In some other interview, I recall him saying that he could and has watched Birdemic many times just for the sheer fun of it, because yes, he does find enjoyment in watching bad movies. Bill Corbett said much the same in an interview I listened to yesterday: he and Mike share a love of cheesy bad movies, especially the ones from the 80s and 90s.
You and one or two other middle-aged male self-proclaimed movie experts online (unless they’re your sock puppets) that I’ve seen keep pushing this narrative that somehow Mike has destroyed the native purity of movie riffing out of sheer hatred, and now you’ve gone so far to claim his ultimate motive is the creation of a Cult of Personality where Michael J. Nelson is worshiped as a Nazi, excuse me, Aryan Dictator of How Ve Must Vatch und Rrriff ze Movie, Jah! and that he is nothing more than a smirking, self-satisfied bully.
Projection, much? I think that if you had actually read the interviews where he talked about his life before MST3K, you might think differently – oh, who am I kidding? Evidence is meaningless to you. Mike Nelson isn’t a bully, he WAS the bullied growing up. He was the clumsy, awkward nerd who looked like the football star but preferred to play piano and read Tolkien and ended up alone a lot of the time. Like so many comedians, he went into comedy to deal with the frustration. I understand that you don’t like his style of comedy; he’s a satirist, whereas Joel is an absurdist. That’s a personal preference and we all have them and your preference is as valid as anyone’s. Where you cross the line are your attacks on Mike’s personal character; that’s what people here can’t stand. It’s not enough for you to say you don’t like Mike Nelson, you MUST make sure that EVERYONE knows what a horrible person Mike Nelson is, how he kicks puppies and drowns kittens and is personally responsible for the fact that you can’t go back to the one perfect time in your life when you sat in that Sci-Fi Film Festival as a college kid and had a good time and you and your buddies did movie riffing as good as Joel could ever do and it’s just not fair the world hasn’t realized what a genius you are yet DAMN YOU MIKE NELSON!!!
You are a parody of yourself and every decent point you make is buried under the weight of hundreds of your useless, repetitive screeds. I for one don’t hate you, I just laugh at you and the fact that you waste so much energy trying to make us hate what you hate so you don’t feel so damn lonely. But, please, do keep posting. We all can use as much laughter as we get these days.
Just for the record, in my first complaint, I did imply that this….SOUNDED like Conor had to be in on the idea, to no small degree. Trot out the Big-80’s refs, and see whose ears perk up.
Even so, the Second-Generation RiffTrax mentality is there, even if not necessarily from Mike, Kevin and Bil’s First generation–Find Something to Hate, not Find Something Goofy.
Give credit for a good argument, but in the end, just couldn’t resist that lil’ Millennial temptation for an “Old people are wrong, eat supper at 4:30, and aren’t dying out fast enough for progress” dig to discredit the opposing sentiments that things that came before you could be better, could we? (Leaving aside the conspiracy theories that One Bad Person must be doing it all deliberately, since clearly no good person could share his opinion.)
And not just ANY middle-aged old people, mind you, but “middle-aged movie experts”, because of the similarly Millennial idea that any movie fan informed of what he speaks is probably a “snob”, sipping chablis with Woody Allen, who hates to see regular people have regular fun, and wants to make the world watch Swedish grim-reapers playing chess for their own good. (And we wonder why college kids have never seen Rear Window.) But fortunately, they’re “self-proclaimed” experts, because they’re probably wrong. Let’s not even touch that they’re probably male.
Too bad People Who Hate Things You Like offend you so.
In non EricJ news, Shout has posted the extras for Vol. 39:
https://www.shoutfactory.com/product/mst3k-volume-xxxix?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI0LqNkt_71gIVTFmGCh1w8QQ_EAAYASAAEgL-evD_BwE
Chuck Love And The Anatomy Of A Theme
Beyond Transparency: New Featurette About The Amazing Transparent Man
Showdown In Eden Prairie: Their Final Experiment
The Last Dance: A Documentary Special That Chronicles The Final Days Shooting The Last Episode Of The Original Run Of MST3K, Diabolik.
Behind The Scream: Daniel Griffith On Ballyhoo
Theatrical Trailers
4 Exclusive Mini-Posters By Artist Steve Vance
I’m 47 years old.
My parents were both born before the Great Depression, and I grew up around older relatives who were born in the 19th century or the first decade of the 20th, which certainly influenced the media, both printed and audio/visual, I was exposed to and consumed as a child, which skewed far older than that of my contemporaries.
You went with your trusty reliable “millennials have no appreciation of what’s actually good because they’re snotty little whiners” argument against me, only to have it backfire and flame out spectacularly because I’m not a millennial.
Due to my stubborn refusal to believe that any person is irredeemable (call it “the triumph of hope over experience”), I feel compelled to weigh in here.
I couldn’t agree more. EricJ, there may be those here who might tend to agree with elements of your arguments, but it is really hard to have a dialogue, pro or con, when the opinions are expressed with bitter sarcasm or downright horrific statements (“…string Hal Warren up by his thumbs and rape his wife and children in front of his eyes” really was unconscionable, in my opinion).
I think I probably speak for the vast majority of the folks here: its not that anyone “hates things we like” that offends anyone, its overworked and often offensive statements of a position.
I, for one, would really love to have on this site a reasonable and objective discussion about what constitutes the good, the bad, and the ugly with regards to riffing–but its just not possible here. And that makes me sad.
I got it. Eric J is the athropomorphization of Mike’s migraine.