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17 Years Later, A New Season Of MST3K Premiers On Netflix
Launched in 1988, Mystery Science Theater 3000 ran for ten seasons on Comedy Central and The Sci-Fi Channel, with its last episode airing in August of 1999. But now Slashdot reader #5844 ewhac writes:
17 years later, Season 11 of MST3K debuted Friday on Netflix. A full season has been produced, including a stretch-goal Christmas special, funded by the highest-earning Kickstarter Film & Video campaign to date ($5.76 million) -- thousands of contributors are listed in the show's end credits, spread across all fourteen episodes.
The show remains true to its low-budget roots, relying almost exclusively on models and practical effects, including a very inventive new door sequence. The backstory for the new season is very swiftly established in the opening to Experiment 1101, as Jonah Heston (played by co-producer Jonah Ray) is abducted by the evil mad scientist Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day) and her sidekick Max a/k/a TV's son of TV's Frank (Patton Oswalt). Together with Gypsy (Rebecca Hanson), Tom Servo (Baron Vaughn), and Crow (Hampton Yount), Jonah quips his way through a barrage of bad movies, including Reptilicus, Starcrash, The Loves of Hercules, and The Christmas That Almost Wasn't.
In 2008 MST3K's original creator Joel Hodgson answered questions from Slashdot's readers, and said he was fascinated by the popularity of Creative Commons licenses. "For most of the public domain titles that we've used, it's a matter of the garbage not being taken out. Basically, they forgot to apply for a copyright so it in fact lapsed into the public domain."
The show remains true to its low-budget roots, relying almost exclusively on models and practical effects, including a very inventive new door sequence. The backstory for the new season is very swiftly established in the opening to Experiment 1101, as Jonah Heston (played by co-producer Jonah Ray) is abducted by the evil mad scientist Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day) and her sidekick Max a/k/a TV's son of TV's Frank (Patton Oswalt). Together with Gypsy (Rebecca Hanson), Tom Servo (Baron Vaughn), and Crow (Hampton Yount), Jonah quips his way through a barrage of bad movies, including Reptilicus, Starcrash, The Loves of Hercules, and The Christmas That Almost Wasn't.
In 2008 MST3K's original creator Joel Hodgson answered questions from Slashdot's readers, and said he was fascinated by the popularity of Creative Commons licenses. "For most of the public domain titles that we've used, it's a matter of the garbage not being taken out. Basically, they forgot to apply for a copyright so it in fact lapsed into the public domain."
It stinks!
"Nothing new can ever be as good as anything old"
I've watched the first three episodes so far, and the movie sequences are all pure Mystery Science Theater. Not legendary episodes (although holy crap, Cry Wilderness is bananas), but solid throughout.
But the skits feel off. It's not the cast, they're fine off the bat and are finding a rhythm more and more. It's more that the show has more money now than it did before, and a larger crew to go with it. It takes away a lot of the DIY feel from the early episodes, but it doesn't really bring anything new to compensate. The skits feel really flat too, in the physical sense. Compare the "family" visit in 1102 with almost any skit set in Castle Forrester.
Settling in, maybe? Here's hoping. It still feels like Mystery Science Theater 3000, and I'm happy about that.
Netflix is for Old People!
Seriously, this region crap has got to end.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Yes, but it's more subtle than that.
90% of everything is bad. 10% is good. Over time, that 10% is remembered, re-watched, re-lisened to, etc. While the bad 90% is forgotten.
So when you look back at the old, you're only remembering the good, it's all been well screened for quality. When you look at what's new, you see it all so it's 90% bad.
It's not exactly Shakespeare at the Globe, now, is it? You should really just relax.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Yeah, I never got it either. Sometimes the bad movies behind it were somewhat interesting, and I'd have rather watched the bad movie without a bunch of crap in front of it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This and "roasts" are two things an American friend of mine tried to explain to me when he realised we don't have either - and then our Comedy Central tried to get the UK all het up about Justin Beibers "roast" and it all failed miserably over here.
The Americans just have some unique sense of humour, one that is hard to decipher some of the time :)
It's not for everyone. I remember first seeing MST3K when our cable (in the Netherlands) offered the SciFi Channel for 6 months as a sort of trial, and I was watching with a friend when an episode came on. First thought was "What the hell...", half an hour later we were fans. When I was in the States for work for a few months, I faithfully recorded every episode that aired during that time.
My brothers didn't get it at all though, and with the many people I've tried to introduce to the show it's been hit-and-miss: people who I thought might enjoy it hated it, and others unexepectedly loved it. Same for Rifftrax, of which my wife (thankfully) became a big fan as well.
By the way, I don't get "roasts" either.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
As of last night, there were NO torrents for the Netflix version. That seems to me to be a bad sign. Or the current seeders don't care.
Sig for hire.
It's hard to say. MST3K suffered from a great schism after Joel left, with many saying that Mike was the true bearer of the MST3K flame. I am an originalist and feel that Joel is the true founder, so I would say that the MST3K legacy belongs to him.
I hate to get off-topic on this story but you realize that most of your "big chunk" goes toward the military, veterans, retirees and people too sick to work?
You want to tell which of them they're just being lazy?
Politicians.
I'm American, so I think it's just a matter of tastes. In the golden age of Dean Martin roasts, I was too young. There was a sweet spot where I understood what SNL was satirizing and loved it. Now I'm middle aged and out of touch with the popular culture in many ways. I *know* I'm watching satire on SNL, but I don't know what they're satirizing so it isn't funny. Likewise, a roast isn't going to be funny if you don't know the people being roasted. Of course it's also possible for these things to be poorly executed or out of touch with the culture as you say. I think a lot of SNL is poorly executed these days... but people have probably been saying that since the show first aired.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
They both are.
Mike was head writer even before he took over as host. Joel picked him as his successor.
Both sides have made clear their goodwill to the other. Some of the mads have done rifftrax. They all got together for rifftrax live recently to promote the new season.
The real villain of the story is Jim Mallon.
Felicia Day was terrible in her role. Patton Oswalt started out sounding as bad as if he was just doing a table read and finally got into the role by the end of the first episode. I haven't watched past the first episode yet. Mary Jo Pehl was great in the original series, and truly underappreciated.
They already went through an entire cast change through the original series. And it mostly went pretty well. They were close to doing it again, but their "big" name actors were worse than the rest of the new cast.
Little of both. The new host feels more like a Joel, mostly because Mike Nelson was head writer even before hosting. Mike is not involved in this project. I was more a Mike fan on the old series, but Jonah is really good. The riffs are much better than the filler bits, but that was always true in the Joel era for me.
Rifftrax is a focus directly on commentary and has a whole new style (but familiar voices) and it's great that there are two entries in the genre, but this new show is firmly MST3K. Give both a shot if you haven't.
It's not exactly Shakespeare at the Globe, now, is it? You should really just relax.
Well played sir! well played indeed.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Wheaton and Oswalt, thanks but no thanks.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
My personal feeling is that Joel too frequently let his pride get in the way of what was best for the comedy. He was in a straightman role but hated being the straightman because it often meant the jokes were at his expense. This led to him stepping on jokes by having to get in the final word after the actual punchline.
Mike realized his job was to be the robot's buttmonkey and was fine playing the buttmonkey.
You completely misunderstood my post. MST3K was in the 10% that is good which by definition is why we're still talking about it. Had it been in the 90% bad it would be forgotten which is why most of the old stuff we remember is good. (unless we try to recall the bad stuff).
This new MST3K may or may not be good, but it *seems* like new stuff is worse in general because it hasn't been culled of the bad part.
When we were teenagers we made fun of the bad movies on television just like MST3K does, but we were doing it a couple of decades before the original series was broadcast. One thing we did back then that MST3K never did was watch foreign language films with subtitles and do our own, funny translations.
When MST3K came along in the 80s, it reminded me of the old times and it was hilarious.
I'm watching the new series on Netflix right now and it's just as funny as ever. I could (and will) watch it over and over to catch jokes I missed the first time.
That was one of the things that made the show work, it was basically the anti Star Trek. The heroes weren't heroes and the tropes were turned upside down. There werre some parts that didn't work well, but some parts were brilliant (the hall of records with the time prophet's instructions to Stanley).
I never was a huge fan of it, myself. When the episodes were good, it was pretty awesome. But most of them just seemed kind of boring.
Nonetheless, a lot of my friends were into it. And in kind of a meta sense, it's a lot more fun to watch this kind of show together with other people.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Lots of people from the original are involved. It's just that they're mostly involved as writers, rather than in-front-of-the-camera personalities (barring a few amusing cameos).
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
True. It's totally an American thing. Thanks why the show never got cancelled because the American audience loves it so much!