Slashdot Mirror
Joel and Original Cast of MST3K Riding the Cinematic Titanic
AugstWest writes "Unfortunately it's in separate projects, but just after Jim Mallon (the man who owns all things MST3K) announced that he would be bringing back Tom Servo, Crow and Gypsy in animated Flash shorts on the web along with Paul Chaplin (a writer from the original MST3K), Joel Hodgson, the series creator, has announced that he will be launching a new venture called Cinematic Titanic. It will feature horrible movies riffed by the original cast of MST3K, including Josh Weinstein (the original Tom Servo), Trace Beaulieu (the original Crow), Frank Conniff (TV's Frank), Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forrester) and, of course, Joel himself. They've already got the rights to 12 movies, and will be releasing one a month starting in December for DVD purchase or download."
The obligatory clarification links (from Wikipedia) -- some of us have never heard of MST3K:
Mystery Science Theater 3000 , often abbreviated MST3K , is an American cult television comedy series created by Joel Hodgson and produced by Best Brains, Inc. that ran from 1988 to 1999.
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
MST3k stands for Mystery Science Theater 3000. It was an American comedy that ran from 1988 to 1999.
Just in case anyone, like me, didn't know.
Summation 2
Unfortunately it's in separate projects
Let's see now... Joel and the original cast, or some random schmuck who owns the rights to Joel's creation? Tough call.
I never "hated" Mike like some did, because he just filled a role. But I think we can almost all agree that Joel made the show (literally and figuratively), a fact supported by its demise once he left.
We can only hope that they re-review "Manos, the Hands of Fate"....
Screw you. There are as many good Mike episodes as Joel. I will agree that on average Joel was better, but Mike was not bad enough to warrant that description.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
I have some idea of what the Mistery Science Theater movies look like, and my long-time desire is to acquire the DVD set(s). However, it would have much greater value for me, if the DVDs contained both the original version sans satellite crew, and the version with the wisecracks. That way I could first ascertain myself of the crappiness of the original movie, and then enjoy the ripping with the crew.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Actually, Mike Nelson has been doing this for some time already with Murphy and Corbett (the later Servo and Crow) at Rifftrax. Looks like we've got a Joel/original-bots vs. Mike/new-bots slapfest a-brewin'.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
A few years ago I remember the cast of MST3K were collaborating with comic-book/fantasy-art deity Richard Corben to make a cheesy movie (fellow Corben fans knowing Corben himself is no stranger to making cheesy home movies). What ever became of that? That certainly got my nerd-antennae buzzing with anticipation but after what, 4? 5? years, I have a feeling it's been canned.
I think this is great and will definitely be checking these out. I am a huge mst3k fan and am really pleased that many of the people that were involved with the show are putting out new material. For those who don't know, Mike Nelson and friends also have a project called RiffTrax where they do more popular and high profile movies like The Phantom Menace, Daredevil, and Cocktail. Also, I don't care if I'm starting a flame war: I prefer Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy as Tom Servo :)
that the "final" crew of MST3K(onstage anyway) is involved in yet another project(well, projects): The Film Crew and Riff Trax, both lampooning movies. RiffTrax is interesting in that you buy mp3s of the riff online and play them over the dvds of the films. The Film Crews is closer to MST3K in that it comes in 1 package and even has some filler sketches in it....
Monstar L
He's selling feature-length commentaries as audio files to be played alongside the movies (and even a few scattered TV shows) at http://www.rifftrax.com/. Not always brilliant, but there are certainly some chuckles scattered in there, and at about $3/movie the price is right. Now if we could just get them all back together again, dammit...
Selling DVDs? Wrong vehicle, boys.
I used to watch MST3K, but it was only because it was ON FOR HOURS and you felt safe dropping in and out of the viewing session. (It was a basically a crappy movie, so you weren't missing anything.)
I didn't go see the MST3K movie (there was one, right?) for the same reason. The show's fun for free at my leisure, but not at $6 and the feeling that I'd be compelled to watch it for 2 hours.
So...if you can get MST3K back on TV where it can serve as the background for whatever I'm doing with my kids or my computer, I'll tune in. Otherwise...buy it? Way too much commitment.
It won't be worth it to stop and compare. One of the reasons the movies they rip look so bad is that they're mauled down to fit in the running time of the show + skits
Its to bad they can't just cooperate and vary the cast from film to film.
Man, just think of all the babes, the hot oil, the mango juice!
The summary is a bit confusing given that it lumps the two announcements together... There seems to be a bit of confusion about who's doing what and how...
Story 1: (announced earlier) The cast from the end of the series are doing some animated web shorts, using the MST3K characters
Story 2: (new) The cast from the beginning of the series are doing some live performances and DVDs and such of movie riffing - with no details yet on the exact format...
Bow-ties are cool.
Bow-ties are cool.
Anyone started a betting pool as to when Twentieth Century Fox is going to sue for an injunction against Cinematic Titanic for trademark violation for use of the name Titanic?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Step 2: Press Play.
Step 3: Do things while movie plays.
Bow-ties are cool.
I'm more of a "Puma Man" guy myself. Nothing like flying through the air like a majestic puma...wait..
I was wanting to check out what they did for Battlefield Earth but, to do so legally, one would have to buy the rifftraks AND a copy of Battlefield Earth. I'd be happy to do the former but not the latter.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
You haven't seen a DVD in a while, have you?
It's more like this:
1. Put DVD in player
2. Wait for stupid menu to come up
3. Play the DVD
4. Wait for stupid previews to go away
5. See DVD distributor's logo again
6. See silly FBI warning
7. After 5 minutes of farting around with pressing buttons and fast forwarding, you finally have what you're looking for
(And, you forgot steps 0,
If I want to watch something on TV, it's many times faster (no, I don't even use digital cable - way too slow when you're just trying to flip channels).
DVD's just suck if you're an "instant gratification" guy like I am. I've got my kids hooked on old Transformers cartoons, er, "delivered digitally" without DVDs and I don't think I'm ever going back.
MST3K ~ Samson vs. the Vampire Women
[We see an ominous castle in a deserted forest.]
[The camera zooms in on a dessicated woman's corpse in a casket.]
Crow: Let the Cher jokes... begin.
Servo: Hey, it looks like Cher! Heh heh heh...
[Vampire priestess Tandra calls on the goddess Selene, changing from her withered form to a hottie.]
Servo: Another successful José Eber makeover.
Crow [as Tandra]: I'm pretty, so I have value now.
[As Diana plays the "Moonlight" Sonata, four bats hover outside her window.]
Servo: Hey, the woodland creatures love her music!
Crow: I don't get the physics of a hovering bat.
Servo: The Vampire Precision Flight Team in formation!
Crow [as Bat]: I don't know how long I can keep this up!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Damn. When I saw dear-god-please-no... I thought this comment would be the one I was looking for.
You know. The one that said, "WTF? TFA's headline isn't even in english. But it seems to conclude with something about an orgy."
As a fan of the original series, I excited.
The interesting thing is to note the difference in the types of movies being riffed by the Mike-lead MST3k alumni and the Joel-lead MST3k alumni. Mike's Rifftrax stuff generally (with a few exceptions) is making fun of modern blockbusters starring and directed by people we have actually heard of. While based on the description of Joel's first movie as "making 'Manos the Hands of Fate' look like 'Santa Claus Conquers the Martians' in a car wreck with 'Eegah!', it seems that Joel will be tackling the really obscure B-movies of the type they did on the original show.
Personally, one of the things I loved about the original series was not just the jokes, but the absolutely bizarre films that they got their hands on. I mean there are too many hilarious WTF moments in the films of say, Coleman Francis, that you simply will not find in modern films made by "professionals".
So, the fact that we'll be getting another batch of unheard of films to watch (with help) makes this announcement great news in my books...
(That said, Mike's group, The Film Crew, did do a set of obscure B-movies... but for some reason haven't announced any past the initial batch of four that they did.)
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
That costs:
Money
Time (to purchase/rent DVD and set-up for playback)
MST3K is perfect when you're in high school and spending your Satur^H^H^H^H^H weekday nights playing around on BBSes for hours and want to pretend that you're hanging out with a slightly cooler geek crew instead of your parents. Somehow you lose that social feel of it when you put it on DVD, probably because it's harder to feign disbelief that it's a live event.
Either that, or I'm just older. I just really can't sit through an entire MST3K DVD any more. I watch some of the Shorts I bought on VHS occasionally, that's it.
Wanna see what all the MST3K fuss is about? Old episodes (just about all of them, except for those that are commercially available) can be found at the Digital Archive Project. Old episodes of the show encouraged viewers to "keep circulating the tapes", and the DAP guys are doing just that. For legal purposes they pull down any episodes whenever Rhino decides to package and sell them, but otherwise, just about everything is there.
Most episodes were encoded years ago in MPEG4 format, but there's an impressive (and growing) number available in higher quality DVD format.
I agree. It was always nice when it was on at 12 on comedy central, and you could just pop the show on and chill :)
from Pod People: boy> wow trumpy you can do magic!! Tom Servo as trumpy, an alien> it's called Evil, kid
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
MST3k was officially dead/zombie-fied to me when they starting suing small live acts based on 'format similarity'. The folks in charge obviously have no sense of humor.
I'm just a guy who doesn't like to wait. Most of the social regressions on this site have free time coming out the ying-yang, but when you've got a busy job, young kids, busy wife and friends constantly complaining that "we never hang out anymore", you learn to watch movies 5-10 minutes at a time or not at all.
DVDs and digital cable just aren't built for the modern family.
The movie was gut-bustingly hilarious. I hope you get to see it sometime. You'll be glad.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Do you have a recommendation for one that doesn't? Seriously. (I've got a program on my computers that lets me skip all the menu/preview/advert/warning BS on DVDs, but I'd really like a piece of hardware that does the same because I don't feel like hooking my computers up to the TV/stereo.)
I miss Joel, although I prefer the later bots.
Every thanksgiving, we re-enact Turkey day from the days of yore on the Comedy Channel. Remember, way back in the days when Penn Gillette was th voice of Comedy Central? 24Hr MST3K Marathon.
I just want to take this opportunity to say, Thanks for coming back Joel!
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Servo went through a few iterations in the show's pre-cable era... First he didn't talk, then he talked in this kinda Kermit-the-Frog or low key Pee-Wee Herman voice, and then he switched to the deep voice he used until the end of the first season on cable... It was at that point that he started calling himself "Tom" Servo, and talking about how his new "Mighty Voice" would get him all the babes...
All the early versions of Servo were voiced by Josh - the "Mighty Voice" was just him speaking a bit more naturally... It was a big switch, though, much bigger than the change when Kevin took over - it established Servo as being roughly the character we know today... "Mighty Voice" just refers to Servo after that change - I think Kevin used the phrase, too, when he first took over for Servo...
Bow-ties are cool.
My guess is that you're not the target audience. And considering the number of people who have gone on to make a career of it my guess is that they have enough of an audience to worry about it.
And that's not to be rude but let's face facts, MST3K (for all it's brilliance and majesty) simply isn't a serious contender for a two hour slot on any of the larger stations today. It's an extremely sad statement but it's all too true.
I will agree with whomever that Sci-Fi and Comedy Central did their best to kill the series by playing it for 8-10 hours a day but if the viewers were there they could have continued to do it. There simply isn't enough of an audience that can't ingest this much MST3K and still be happy about it when it comes on the next day.
The worst of it all is considering the kinds of shows that have lived and thrived on these same two stations... I don't demand high entertainment 24-7 but Jesus, it's getting really bad out there. I can't even remember the last time I had an original Comedy Central show on and I can't recall the last time I had Sci-Fi on at all.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I never went for the Joel vs Mike debate, instead breaking it down into times before and after TV's Frank and later, Clayton Forrester's departure. To me, Mary Jo just wasn't as good as Frank and Trace, although there were a few good Pearl episodes. The episode when Crow's voice changed, there was a good back and forth with Mike though. (Yes I know Mary Jo had been with them for a while, but in the Evil role, just not the same.)
If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome.
You beat me to it! I hope the mods will reward you justly!
They've always had something going on since the show ended... I'm not sure if anyone remembers timmybighands.com (you'll have to go to archive.org now if you don't) which had fun essays and comics by most of the staff.
(My favorite line up on the show was Mike, Kevin as Servo, Trace as Crow, and definitely WITH Frank... for me the show wasn't as fun without Frank.)
I, for one, saw MST3K: The Movie opening weekend, and own at least half of the DVDs (not sure how many there are now). I can easily pop one in and spend a few hours laughing, even if I've seen it many times before.
I preferred Joel to Mike and I liked the really obscure stuff, but I know that the franchise owners really wanted to push the format into the mainstream, which they did pretty well. It's kind of like Linux 2.2 vs. 2.6. Version 2.2 was the last Linux that you could really hack on without sorting through piles of code, it feels more homegrown. I think it's the same here, Joel made every show look like it came out of a garage, when they switched to Mike, production budgets went up and it lost some of its "youtubeness".
When the show was still running on Comedy Central, my best friend and I wrote into the show to amuse our hopelessly dorky selves. It wasn't until years later did we realize that we were writing into an episode that aired 4 years earlier. I guess we should have begun our letter: "Dear MST3K Episode From Several Years Ago".
...is no more black & white movies from the 40s and 50s. They are so lacking(IMO) that they are almost too easy to rip on. The more bizarreish sci fi films from the 1970s to the 1990s are much more fun to watch. I like bad movies in general, but black & white dramas are typically a snooze-fest even with the MST treatement.
My favorite episodes are from the era of bad early 1980s sci-fi flicks, usually by Italian producers(plenty of movies to rip!). One of my favorite all-time bad movies was Laserblast, seeing the DVD before I saw the MST3K version. Even got lucky and found "Warrior of the Lost World" on DVD and saw all the bits that got cut for time/content on the MST version. Megaweapon forever.
"Push the button, Frank"
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
What's the difference between it playing (aired from a network) on your TV while you're out and about doing stuff and it playing (from your DVD player) on your TV while you're out and about doing stuff?
This strikes me as the dumbest complaint ever. Is your concern that it takes too long to put the disk in the drive?
Comment of the year
No offense, but it sounds like the problem lies with your lifestyle/tastes, not with their chosen distribution methods. People buy DVDs all the time, so I don't think that the DVD business model is all that broken.
People make time for what is important. Your kids are more important than watching a movie... I can agree with that. But just because you don't have time doesn't mean that DVDs are the "wrong vehicle." Also, you did catch the part about downloads, right?
I can't remember where I heard this, if it was an interview or an article, but Joel said it best when he said "When we write a joke, we never ask who's going to get this. We always say, the right people will get this."
That being said, being from Minnesota I caught a lot of Minnesota-themed jokes. I always wondered if anyone else got them. Or even cared. I know when I didn't get a joke because of some obscure reference, I just let it slide and waited for the next one.
"Well..here I am..." - Jubal Early
Let me see if I have this straight:
Yes, they're probably all funny, but when does the Department of Redundancy Department get involved? Can't we all just get along?
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
This totally made my day. MST3K (Joel/Mike eras both included) was my favorite show ever. Bad acting, brilliant riffing, obscure pop culture references, and the bots were such cute little guys. I bought the "Killers From Space" DVD from Mike and Kevin's crew and have to say it was absolutely hilarious. It stands up well when compared to many MST3K episodes. I can't wait to see what Joel/Trace/Josh/Frank come up with. SWEEEEEET!
SYS64738
If only there were a (AHEM-DAPCENTRAL) way of downloading these MST3k movies online (CAFF-DAPCENTRAL)...then maybe you wouldn't have to wait!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Jim Mallon's Best Brains Incorporated (who originally made the show anyway) owns the rights to MST3K. Plus they would need to rebuild many props. They'd need to have a serious backing and project time to get it back to where it was to air it as the old "J&TB" format.
And that's assuming they can get the rights for MST3K again. And this sounds much better than what Mallon is currently doing with MST3K.com.
Pancakes. Oh I blew it.