#mst3k revival

[gladismajor]

further conclusions from the mst3k revival:

gpc's voice, while jarring, very much suits her

hampton yount (crow) and jonah ray were both clearly msties before joining the show

baron vaughn (tom) took an... interesting approach to tom, but it's not so bad that it's a disservice to kevin murphy. vaughn's tom is much more of a mean gay™ than murphy's and it's honestly really funny

it's so strange seeing tom and crow have arms that work. and seeing gpc all strung up in the ceiling like that. not in a bad way it's just strange

he's a drummer, he's a rapper, he's got a lovely singing voice, what can't he do? jonah's lovable, though not quite the blorbo material that joel and mike are

felicia day is serving so hard as kinga forrester go off girl. i do wonder exactly how she came about and how old she is, considering she's supposedly clayton's daughter and clayton died at some point between seasons 7 and 8, but that's also 500-ish years we're talking about there. whatever i'll figure out that whole timeline at some point

i really like all the little wooden models!! they're so cute!!

the theme song fucks!! the original should have had the trumpet parts and the bari sax and the epic drum fill that the new one has

oh so this is where the "the mads cut off oxygen in the sol during movie sign" thing came from

oh my god the hosts are the wiggles. joel is red, mike is blue, jonah is yellow and emily is purple

ONE OF CROW'S PUPPETEERS IS THE SANDERS SIDES PUPPETS GUY?????

jonah referring to kinga as "sir" gives me deep and indescribable gender envy

also really cool that baron vaughn was on dropout go off king

i hate the unrequited kinga/max subplot so much

jonah does the exact same little hops during movie sign that joel does omg jonah ray was 100% a hardcore mstie

there are. a lot more suicide jokes/references than in the original. were the writers okay?? i mean it's pretty in character, especially for crow, but like. y'all good??

there's so many songs!! i love it!!

[fleetn-crab85]

A fresh batch of MST3K Textposts that make me wish the series was revived again

[tobiasdrake]

What are your thoughts on the Nostalgia Critic?

Complicated.

I was a big fan of the NC in my twenties. I discovered him later than a lot of other people did but that's kind of normal for me, and it meant I had a lot of videos to go back and laugh at. By the time I got onboard, the anniversary movie "To Boldly Flee" had already officially ended the NC's run, before he failed out of his attempts to move on and be a filmmaker, and wound up coming back.

At the time, I really liked the format of "Wacky skits and personal plotlines mixed with video essay". Writing a story with characters and storylines and also riffing on existing media at the same time. It was basically a modern MST3K, which I'd never really been able to find accessibly.

But the thing that really grabbed me was Channel Awesome itself. The community of creators who would cross over into each other's videos and do collaborative projects and mix up their storylines together and stuff.

And I loved the movies. I watched all of them like dozens of times. It was so cool seeing these creators that I had parasocial relationships with going on adventures and fighting villains and stuff.

...but then things fell apart for Channel Awesome, and we started learning more and more about how shitty everything was behind the scenes for those creators. And how the channel was never really invested in those creators to begin with, and only cared about propping up the Nostalgia Critic.

It soured me on the whole thing, and made me stop and really think about the series. How a lot of those other creators that the channel was exploiting are doing what Doug does better than he does.

I'm not going to say Doug is untalented. He has a Jim Carrey-esque comedic talent, which is to say that he has a remarkable aptitude for flailing his limbs and making sounds erupt from his throat.

Doug's bread and butter is wildly over-the-top reactions, frantic body movement, and the kind of shrieking that will absolutely murder your throat. Which sounds simple but is surprisingly hard to do yourself and, with good comedic timing, can be very funny. He got big for a reason.

But. At the end of the day, all he's bringing to these movies is CinemaSins- or Zero Punctuation-level critique mixed with physical comedy, while other creators in his space were offering thoughtful, serious analysis.

And I like CS and ZP, don't get me wrong. They can be very funny when you remember that this is not a proper review but basically a comedy roast. I've always found criticism of those videos to be akin to sitting down to an hour-length special that's literally just stand-up comedians talking shit about Tom Cruise and going, "Wow, they are being very mean to Tom Cruise. Do they have to be so mean to him?"

But it's a very different sort of thing from, say, listening to F.D. Signifier explain the complete history of the legendary Drake and Kendrick rap beef for three hours.

Comedy isn't easy. But it's easier than the kinds of thoughtful critique that other creators who walked away like Lindsay Ellis or Dan Olson were doing.

And at the same time they were walking away, the Nostalgia Critic's revival was... underwhelming.

While the other collaborators were leaving, the NC was becoming an island reliant on his own stable of paid actors and divorced from the collaborations that made him big to begin with. And the passion just... wasn't there anymore.

It was pretty clear that he'd fallen back on doing NC because his attempt at branching out, his new series Demo Reel, never took off with audiences. The NC revival was Doug passionlessly returning to what made him successful and paid his bills. And it never felt the same after that.

After Change the Channel, it all fell into place. I wasn't enjoying Doug's passionless new videos because he was just going through the motions. I couldn't go back and watch the old stuff I used to love knowing how miserable the other collaborators were behind the scenes and how much Channel Awesome as mistreating them to prop up Doug. My parasocial relationship with him fractured after finding out how he treated the other creators.

(It's worth noting that his paid employees who he pays to support him came out in support of him during all that. The NC isn't some guy's internet show that he films in his bedroom, it's a company. Doug himself is an employee. He doesn't even own the legal rights to the Nostalgia Critic; He signed it over to an executive to manage him.

Tamara and Malcolm are not his buddies; They're his hired staff, so take their opinions while on his payroll with a grain of salt. This is a professional operation, which makes how unprofessional it all is appalling rather than endearing.)

And there were other creators out there, including the ones he'd mistreated, making the same kind of stuff he was making but better. So I made a choice to leave and never looked back.

[mabelsguidetolife]

the net good of the mst3k revival:

they renamed her to GPC

that’s it. I don’t have anything else.

[vincent-marie]

"Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow (December 2023)"

A version of Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow that I did last fall after watching MST3K: DOCTOR MORDRID. Revived my interest in the Jeffrey Combs Scarecrow from the animated series.

Maskless Crane is heavily influenced by Alucard from HELLSING & Linda Sejic's character Dr. Vlad Stein.

Whereas I was trying to make the Red Sky-era Scarecrow my own. I don't know HOW the animators for that series were able to draw that fragmented-looking design so easily.

Might later repurpose this Jonathan Crane design for my own Victor Frankenstein.

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[crescent-coral-base]

Look, I've got PLENTY of pre-strike vintage programming on functional physical media that I can pull off the shelf to watch.

Just on the shelves in my bedroom alone, I have the old Addams Family sitcom, Airwolf, the Avengers (Steed & Mrs Peel), Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Baa Baa Black Sheep/Black Sheep Squadron, Barbary Coast, Barney Miller, Batman '66, Batman: TAS, original Battlestar Galactica, Bionic Woman, Birds of Prey, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Coupling, Danger Mouse, Get Smart, The Greatest American Hero, the first season of Hogan's Heroes, the Invaders, Jonny Quest, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Lois & Clark (first season), the Lone Gunmen, the Man From UNCLE, Mission:Impossible (TOS and '88 revival), the Monkees, the New Avengers, Night Court, Night Gallery, The Outer Limits, the Paper Chase, (R2/PAL DVD of the Quatermass Collection, Red Dwarf, Remington Steele, four of the first five seasons of Saturday Night Live, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, the Six Million Dollar Man, Space: 1999, UFO, WKRP, the first season of Wonder Woman, Ultraman, Ultraseven, Ultraman '80, Max Headroom (misfiled), Gatchaman complete series, an R2/PAL DVD box set of Battle of the Planets, Gatchaman II, Gatchaman F, Star Blazers, Space Battleship Yamato 2199 and 2202. Also on that shelf are the three Flash Gordon serials, the 1939 Buck Rogers serial, the two 1940's Batman serial, the Kirk Alyn Superman serials, the Captain Marvel serial, and the 50's Adventures of Superman TV series.

On the living room shelf, I have the Wild, Wild West TV series, Babylon-5, Crusade, Robotech, every extant episode of Classic Doctor Who plus recons, Doctor Who (2005- present), original Tomorrow People, the Adventures of Brisco County, Jr, Jack of All Trades, Ash vs the Evil Dead (Season One), and my spousal unit's collection of Emergency! I also have R2/PAL DVD's of Blackpool, Life on Mars, and Absolute Power with Stephen Fry.

My Star Trek TOS, TAS, and feature film collections are stored in a cabinet under one of my televisions, along with my incomplete TNG, DS9, and ENT collections.

My MST3K, Dark Shadows, Columbo, MASH, Gilligan's Island, Twilight Zone, Simpsons, and Futurama collections are currently boxed away because I've run out of shelf space.

And that's BEFORE we get to the shelves full of books and boxes of comics.

And THEN there's the movie part of the video collection, which I won't even go into here.

It's safe to say that when it comes to outlasting the strike, I am good.

[gaykarstaagforever]

I keep trying to give new MST3k a chance.

I do. They worked hard on this. We all wanted it to be good. Jonah has serious Joel energy, and I appreciate the revival of the invention exchange.

But

I have liked Felicia Day in things exactly twice. And this ain't one of them. Her smarmy Buffy-esque whatever does not work with this.

Patton Oswalt is RIGHT THERE. Take his brakes off and let him do this.

If we want to keep a woman Dr. Forrester, fine. I loved Pearl. And I can think of like 10 actresses / comedians who would be better for this than Felicia Day.

Also the commentary jokes are bad but not funny bad.

And I don't know why or what they did to my girl Gypsy in this. I guess they didn't want her name to be a slur? Okay. But the voice...

That was her whole thing. And they just didn't care.

At least Shout! Factory is dumping these for free in YouTube now.

[mst3kgifs]

Uh... nevermind. Do you write short stories, maybe?

[all-seeing-ifer]

Happy birthday, Mark Hamill!

It’s Mark Hamill’s 66th birthday today so I felt that like sharing some of my favourite moments from his glorious career:

"But I was going over to the Tosche station to pick up some power converters!!!!" actually iconic thanks for the memes dude

"I am a Jedi, like my father before me" also iconic

That scene in Return of the Jedi where Luke just saunters into Jabba's palace like "im gonna ask the biggest crime lord in the galaxy if he can let my pal go nbd"

All of his Joker LaughsTM but especially the one from the end of Mask of the Phantasm

Literally every line read in Return of the Joker tbh

His delivery of "You shall learn respect. And suffering shall be your teacher" is the most intimidating thing in the world

The Dramatic StareTM

That one time when he retweeted a news article saying that he'd died

That one time when he got Daisy Ridley to carry him on her back Yoda-style

The scene in the World's Finest two parter when one of the mobsters doesn't recognise the Joker and the Joker tells him that he needs to get out more

His cameo in MST3k as the scam artist owner of a non-existent circus

Him yelling angrily about pistachios in Milo Murphy's Law

I can't think of any more but feel free to add your own :)

[randomthunk]

Thinking about how many things with the MST3K revival they got right, with one of them being that they didn’t bury the one host who hasn’t made a reappearance, Mike.

They could have ignored him if they wanted to, they really could’ve; Lord knows we have plenty of examples of modern franchises that have decided the past is not worth honoring. But instead of ignoring the host responsible for half the original run, they really made sure his presence was present.

He’s on the arm patch, for one. Movies and songs from his era are referenced and remixed. In the Time Bubble Tour, the bots sigh wistfully for all three of Joel, Mike, and Jonah (before cheering up because Emily is there!).

When Erhardt goes to fetch an original classic host, the odds of Joel or Mike are basically 50/50, he’s not picky. When Kinga is with Pearl, she goes “I know, I know, my hosts are nice but they’re not Mike”. In the s13 finale, when Jonah, Emily, and Joel are needing to play up-tempo music to get the ship going and Emily suggests the theme song, it’s Joel who goes “I only know the lyrics to Mike’s”, and they sing his first opener.

It’s very, very lovely, and makes MST3K feel like a long-lived show that both embraces its present and celebrates its past. Even if not everyone from the original run can be involved now, you as a fan don’t feel scorned for liking and missing something from before, and it’s nice to see it on screen.

[jokerman9540]

Recently found out that fucking Joel G Hodgson has a voice cameo in BATDR, but I don’t know who he voices. Does anybody know/have any ideas?

[krjpalmer]

After watching my way through all the episodes of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 revival, I settled down to hear if more of them would be made. Some of the people commenting on Satellite News seemed to show an undercurrent of pessimism towards that possibility, though. As the summer went by and the people making the series put on a travelling live show but didn't have any news of more episodes on Netflix or anywhere else, I at least got to wondering myself. The American Thanksgiving and the traditional "Turkey Day" marathon of the show at last felt like a final chance...

[aokozaki]

A big fancy revival, that they then cancelled after two seasons like they cancel everything after two seasons. Which, whatever, they do that a lot, and MST3K was at least able to continue after that by pivoting to crowdfunding...

Except Netflix was like "oh the special effects for the door opening sequence each episode? yeah you're not allowed to use that in your version" - so the crowdfunded season had to use its limited budget on remaking that entire sequence.

It's not just that Netflix cancelled it (after a second season that was intentionally shorter, with the gimmick being it was short enough to binge in one sitting), but also how spitefully they did it. Bastards.

Ooooohhh remembered what Netflix did to Mystery Science Theater 3000 and I'm angry again.

[hard-as-cheese-blog]

[mistershow]

I made this video and I’m not sorry

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Oh my god, this bit - I cried!