Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax

[RumblyTumbly]

Regarding MST3K's unfortunate impact on the greater Internet reviewer trend, I have often said that most of these people (usually but not exclusively connected to Channel Awesome) know how to play the notes but have no idea how to play the music. Part of the problem is that very few of them seem to understand why MST3K worked. Even when heaping disdain on the movie, the MST3K crew very rarely left the impression that they felt they were above the movie. I don't know if this was a result of their innate Midwestern-ness or just the quality of their writing. Also, looking back, very few of their jokes were dogpiling on how bad the movie was. Unless the movie was constantly finding new ways to fail, that approach would get really old really fast. Most of these The Blank with the Blank posers are smug motherfuckers who find minute ways to say something sucks for twenty minutes before directing you to their Patreon page.

That is an interesting point.

One of the reasons I got so attached to MST3K in my youth is that I was amazed there was basically a show about the thing I would do. "Wait, there is a show dedicated to making fun of B movies, dubbing in our own silly lines, and having a good laugh? Awesome!". I mean the show basically acted out what I was doing at sleepover parties with friends, and that's what made it fun. It was a party game, but the crew at MST3K did it way better than any of us 10 year olds could.

For me, the point of MST3K was never to establish superiority over the garbage films they watched, but rather finding a way to enjoy them. I credit this show for teaching me how to find good in something that seems so terrible and make the best out of a bad situation. I mean that fits in with the whole premise of the show, right? A bunch of mad scientists are forcing this poor guy to watch terrible films, and he finds a way to make the best of it and have a good time.

And maybe a decade ago, some of the video reviewer/YouTube critic types had that same feel to them. I mean initially I thought (probably by mistake) that the whole point to Nostalgia Critic was that it was funny how seriously he was taking this bad movie, but overtime it became clear that a lot of these reviewers really think they are hot shit and above what they are reviewing...which is not a good look.

 

[Someone in a Tree]

Thinking about it.
Cheap seats at the stop near me are $40 with an extra $20 for parking so I'm not as enthusiastic as I might otherwise be. Who's on the card? I saw something about Joel on it. Joel/Jonah as a pair did some decent riffing on that anniversary show before Season 11. iirc S11 the bots were puppeted and voiced separately so I'm not sure how well that would transfer to live compared to Trace and Kevin.

I was lucky enough to see one of the This Island Earth shows they did at the first Conventio-Con as the movie's beta test, so I already got "MST live" in a pretty tough-to-top way.

It was recently announced that Baron Vaughn and Hampton Yount will not be going on the tour. Vaughn couldn't do it last year and Tom was operated and voiced by Tim Ryder, a writer and performer on the show. Crow will be operated and voiced by Grant Baciocco, who is Crow's principal puppeteer on the show. This is being advertised as a 30th anniversary tour and Joel will be riffing alongside Jonah. I'll be seeing it in a few weeks. I saw their live show of Argoman last year and it was pretty damn funny. I know that I'm probably too apologetic about some of the recent season's shortcomings, but I still find it to be superior to any of the other riffing projects that have happened since the original run.

 

[XYZpdq]

I'm probably too apologetic about some of the recent season's shortcomings, but I still find it to be superior to any of the other riffing projects that have happened since the original run.

Nah season 11's not that bad. I fastforward through most of the host segments but I did that for years with SciFi's run, too. Finally finished season 11. It is what it is.

I would have preferred more Cinematic Titanic releases, but they weren't doing that so whatever. CT touring everywhere but near me wasn't as good as Season 11.

 

[Stab You in the Back]

Rifftrax release of Ready Player One is out. Its the perfect combination of hilarious riff and stunningly bad movie.

 

[Someone in a Tree]

The British Board of Film Certification recently released the ratings for the next season of MST3K, revealing five of the six movies being featured. Am I good to post them here for discussion? The information is publicly available on the BBFC's website and on the front page of Satellite News, so I don't think it really merits spoiler tags. One of the choices will probably be seen as controversial, so I don't know how much it will help discussion if everyone is having to hide their responses.

 

[Lackadaisy]

The British Board of Film Certification recently released the ratings for the next season of MST3K, revealing five of the six movies being featured. Am I good to post them here for discussion? The information is publicly available on the BBFC's website and on the front page of Satellite News, so I don't think it really merits spoiler tags. One of the choices will probably be seen as controversial, so I don't know how much it will help discussion if everyone is having to hide their responses.

Go for it. I'm interested.

 

[Someone in a Tree]

Mac and Me
Atlantic Rim
Lords of the Deep
The Day Time Ended
Ator

Atlantic Rim is causing a lot of discussion because people automatically assume that all Asylum movies are tongue in cheek due to the Sharknado movies. Judging by the clips I've seen, it appears to be an earnestly made Pacific Rim ripoff, making it not much different than the Roger Corman movies showcased during the original run that are revered as fan favorites. Mac and Me has been one of the most requested titles and fits comfortably in the shitty kids movie genre where the show has found great success in the past (Pod People, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Cry Wilderness). Ator is the first movie in the series that brought us Cave Dwellers, a beloved season three episode.

 

[Orkeosaurus]

Regarding MST3K's unfortunate impact on the greater Internet reviewer trend, I have often said that most of these people (usually but not exclusively connected to Channel Awesome) know how to play the notes but have no idea how to play the music. Part of the problem is that very few of them seem to understand why MST3K worked. Even when heaping disdain on the movie, the MST3K crew very rarely left the impression that they felt they were above the movie. I don't know if this was a result of their innate Midwestern-ness or just the quality of their writing. Also, looking back, very few of their jokes were dogpiling on how bad the movie was. Unless the movie was constantly finding new ways to fail, that approach would get really old really fast. Most of these The Blank with the Blank posers are smug motherfuckers who find minute ways to say something sucks for twenty minutes before directing you to their Patreon page.

And the odd thing that perhaps works to RLM's credit is that despite being a midwestern filmmaking crew that riffs on movies, they've intimated that they (at least Mike and Jay) weren't really MST3K fans. Presumably because while it's a great show it's kind of a friend simulator and they already had friends to riff on movies with.

That's kind of the problem with nu-mst3k. They constantly tried to shoehorn jokes in just to keep some kind of mst3k rhythm going.

 

[XYZpdq]

Mac and Me
Atlantic Rim
Lords of the Deep
The Day Time Ended
Ator

Atlantic Rim is causing a lot of discussion because people automatically assume that all Asylum movies are tongue in cheek due to the Sharknado movies. Judging by the clips I've seen, it appears to be an earnestly made Pacific Rim ripoff, making it not much different than the Roger Corman movies showcased during the original run that are revered as fan favorites. Mac and Me has been one of the most requested titles and fits comfortably in the shitty kids movie genre where the show has found great success in the past (Pod People, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Cry Wilderness). Ator is the first movie in the series that brought us Cave Dwellers, a beloved season three episode.

I'm mostly okay with those. Mac and Me is kind of a big name movie for MST standards. I haven't watched Atlantic Rim but I've heard similarly faint praise of it.

 

[JustStopDude]

I think this is because I am not native english speaker, but I cannot follow the new season of MST3k. None of the characters sound different to me so it comes off like one person talking very fast. And there is no build up it seems to set up jokes.

I never had this problem with the old show. And I don't with Rifftrax. The actors all have different voices and personalities. But the new show, again, it sounds like one person trying to act like 3 characters, but he is not changing his tone, pacing or anything. It is like bored teenage droning a play reading in a literature class.

 

[XYZpdq]

None of the characters sound different to me so it comes off like one person talking very fast

yeah this is my biggest issue

 

[Commander X]

Speaking of Rifftrax, Nelson and writer Connor Lastowka have been continuing their podcast "372 Pages We'll Never Get Back" after breaking down Ready Player One and then Cline's less critically lauded follow up Armada (pointing out that despite being the same book somehow Armada was considered the "bad" Ernest Cline novel) now they've started taking on the notorious The Eye of Argon, "a typo-riddled fantasy novella written five decades ago by a sixteen year old who never published anything again".

http://372pages.com/episode-20-hope-you-like-adjectives

Argon is differentiated from any other sword-and-sorcery wannabe story published in some locally published fiction magazine during the 1970s and so on because holy crap the, uh, heavy use of adjectives. Author Theis wanted you to get every little detail of items like, a "shamens" sacrificial tool.

Incidentally, I became aware of Argon years ago after seeing this, a "MSTing" that had been posted to lots of places (back in the 1990s, even when MST3K was still on Comedy Central, fan "MSTings" were pretty popular, with several mostly now defunct sites devoted to archiving them but straight up MST3K style text fan-MSTing sort of petered towards towards the mid/later Aughts)

http://www.bmsc.washington.edu/people/merritt/books/Eye_of_Argon.html

 

[Someone in a Tree]

I saw the live show a few days ago. The movie was The Brain and it was probably the hardest I have ever laughed at MST3K. The movie was steadily ridiculous the whole way through, basically something that was always meant to be featured on the show. Unlike last year's tour in which they basically tried to present it as a live episode of the show, it was a lot looser this time around, structuring the host segments like a ComedySportz style contest between Joel and Jonah. Also, Jonah has an incredibly sharp sense of timing and rapport with the bots onstage that often feels lost on the recent season. Hopefully that's an improvement we'll see with the next season in a few weeks. I wish I would have the opportunity to see their take on Deathstalker II since that is also a movie that seems to exist for no other reason than to make fun of it with some friends.

 

[Commander X]

So Mike Nelson's book review podcast 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back has returned, again. After tackling Ernest Cline's RPO and Armada and getting things started again with the brief but notorious Eye of Argon the new book Nelson and Connor Lastowka are going to be dissecting has been announced in all of it's ghostwritten glory.

 

[GentlemanFaggot]

So Mike Nelson's book review podcast 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back has returned, again. After tackling Ernest Cline's RPO and Armada and getting things started again with the brief but notorious Eye of Argon the new book Nelson and Connor Lastowka are going to be dissecting has been announced in all of it's ghostwritten glory.

I love the quotation on the cover of the book. You can tell it was carefully excised from a negative review.

 

[UnKillFill]

Eh, I saw rifftrax take on the room in theater (mostly just because I wanted to see a movie as obviously bad as the room in theater.) I had already thought that it was a funny as fuck movie (obviously for all the wrong reasons), but broken up by a couple of retards making stupid/obvious comments every few seconds, if anything, it totally decreased my laughter for a movie I had previously laughed at. Likewise, at best, MST3K has always been the same thing, just with movies I didn't even think were funny in the first place- so the stupid/obvious comments are even more distracting from the (terrible) movie, and I don't even care most of the time.

 

[Devilish Jack o Lantern]

Oh boy , more shit I won’t see just because I don’t really find the cast that funny.

 

[8777BB5]

Oh boy , more shit I won’t see just because I don’t really find the cast that funny.

Why is my Sophomore Math Teacher cosplaying as a future janitor?

 

[Starscreams Cape]

Any thoughts on Season 12? I thought Mac and Me was pretty good, Atlantic Rim was also solid. The others had their moments.

For some reason I still find Jonah likable. I also find it amazing that they have not gone "orange man bad" with their riffs. I was pretty sure this year they would. They made a couple of SJW riffs here and there, but nothing worse than Frank Conniff used to write back in the day. For a show taken over by millenials it's not nearly as bad as it should be, but man do I miss Mike Nelson and his warm chuckling at times.

Felicia Day is still pretty bad. Patton Oswalt can be funny, but unfortunately when he isn't he is face-punch-worthy. And most of the time here he isn't.

The musical numbers aren't that funny. Please stop them immediately.

The riffs are still on overdrive, they really need to let the movies breath occasionally. Maybe they were and are still worried about Netflix thinking it would be too "slow" if they did. It might also be the 10 second attention span almost everyone has these days.

 

[Dr. Samuel Hayden]

I never was a fan of the skits in any of MST3K, sometimes I'd chuckle or enjoy a joke or two but they never were a selling point for me so I skip these ones, too. These ones though, holy hell, the cheesy acting done before is now way too much with Kinga Forrester and Max, I cringe instead of smirking like I would with previous characters. All other changes made to the show I either like or tolerate, but these two really don't do it for me. Yikes.

I'm surprised how much I really like Jonah. First impressions I had were terrible, but he grew on me, I think he does a swell job. Crow's good, too, but something about the new Tom Servo doesn't click with me.

The actual riffing of the movies is really well done, in my opinion. I have to agree that they pretty much talk over each other to get a joke in and it can make it too jarring to seem like each character is giving a rehearsed line instead of the joke coming naturally, it just makes it more obvious.

I haven't watched the latest season just yet but I'm optimistic!