Rick Prelinger’s movie archive online

Rick Prelinger, curator of the Prelinger Archives, from which BBI got many of the short films they used, has announced that he is making a concerted effort to get all of the films he provided to MST3K onto his site at http://www.moviearchive.org. Some of the films made into MST shorts are already available, and Rick is currently working on putting the rest of them up.

Not all of the shorts from MST3K came from Rick (one that didn’t was “Mr. B. Natural,” sadly), but all the shorts that were from his collection should be available within the next month or so, he says. We should also note that Rick has a vast collection on his site already, including many of the films mentioned in the great book MENTAL HYGIENE. If you find these films as fascinating as we do, Rick’s site is a treasure trove.

By the way, Rick also notes that his group is working on converting the entire online collection to QuickTime (MPEG-1) so that they will easily play on Macs and on PCs running QT for Windows. Our thanks to Rick for his hard work!