Mystery Science Theater 3000: C/D, S/D.

i guess it depends, as ever, on whether you know the obscure refs or not...

"Get Courtney Love!"

I think it was Rosenbaum who pointed out the "Flemish painting" line in The Movie as an example of a dumb miller-esque line used as filler.

yes: final paragraph of http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1996/04/no-joke/

OK I was trying not to be cynical during the development, but the first episode was just an exhausting onslaught of riffs. It really needed to breath better. Certain riffs would have been better if they weren't sandwiched between 5-6 others in a relentless burst. The delivery was a little too try-hard as well. It's not like they didn't let you breathe but there were way too many portions I found overwhelming.

I like the verse in Monster rap when they rhyme Luxembourg with itself x 5, it makes me laugh

The Time Travelers turned out to be a decent (if dated) movie. I liked how it used magic tricks instead of special effects. The riffs didn't work for me in the competently made sections. Its skits were the best yet.

That's one of my least favorite things Rosenbaum ever wrote. (Though I do agree The Movie is no great shakes.)

Also just reminds me of the Master Ninja riff. "Let Dennis Miller do Dennis Miller, Demi!"

Har Mar Superstar is a bit much.

Avalanche: soporific Corman-produced 70s disaster movie. The tendency to cram riffs into every free space is apparent here. Lots of figure skating without dialogue, so they make up silly move names that I didn't find funny. During the ending there's a long silence, and they fill it with... letters to tripadvisor? who writes letters to a website? There's also a skit with another terrible song. Best jokes come from the genre-awareness, that the movie tries to get away with its filler and bad characters because of the title. Love the riffs where they personify and root for the avalanche.

Avalanche and At The Earth's Core are the two that I am most looking forward to watching, as I vaguely remember both movies as Saturday afternoon filler on TV as a kid.

IIRC some footage from Avalanche is also used to dress up 1979's awful Meteor with the sense that the meteors are indeed wreaking disaster around the globe. (Not sure where they got the Hong Kong tidal wave stuff in the same sequence.) So really, you see that flick and you're really covering your Saturday afternoon TV filler bases.

avalanche was fun imo! the tripadvisor riffs made me lol, and i liked the iceskating riffs too. idk that this show holds up to too much deep scrutiny? even the old seasons would buckle under too much in-depth analysis

Beast of Holllow Mountain is enjoyable for the shared audience & riffer agitation of WHEN IS THE MONSTER GOING TO SHOW UP. It is a really weird awkward not good movie but the riffing is fun & has a more relaxed pace imo

i think they are getting better at the more continuous riffs vs rapid-fire one offs

this show is like super important and formed a lot of what comedy is to us idiot losers born in the 70s and 80s.

i get that

idk. i feel like exegesis is to comedy as nutrition is to big macs. it starts to feel more like science & less like the fun thing it was intended.

but that's always been my beef with comedy conversations on ilx so i should probably get over it by now & just let nerds be nerds <3

Land that time forgot is shaping up to be the perfect lazily entertaining mst episode

Finally got to watch Reptilicus. Agreed that the riffs seemed to be coming too fast and the timing was off - wish they had edited their material a bit and let it breathe more. I still enjoyed it a lot, largely because it's a great movie for riffing. There was a stretch starting with "how about reportercus shutupicus?" where I laughed at every riff for like two minutes

^^ Started watching Ep. 1 last night and ended up stopping it early because I had a headache and needed to lie down. But there were many time where riffs had me laughing so hard I was crying during the stretch you mention and even after. Especially good were, "Father! You remembered my birthday! But what did you do to my pony?!" and "A fire in the aquarium? This'll sort itself out."

The Beast of Hollow Mountain: genre mismatch of oater and monster movie, with a script worse than you'd suspect. The monster part takes a while to start up, but when it does, oh boy. They finally start building on riffs over time. (Are the episodes listed in the order they made them? It feels like it.)

So far I'd rate the episodes
1. Reptilicus
2. The Beast of Hollow Mountain
3. The Time Travelers
4. Cry Wilderness
5. Avalanche

reportercus shutupticus cracked me up so much

I watched Cry Wilderness last night and it was amazing. The pace and sharpness of the jokes had me in near-hysterics the entire time. (And the host segment with the Servo clones felt really Mike-era to me.)

Oh, and when the kid was hitchhiking up the mountain and the truck pulled up, I said to my wife, "Oh, please, let there be a 'Rowsdower' joke." I was only off by one scene!

Agreed that the initial eps are too frenetic and intense, with the riffs arriving before your brain can process what it's seen. They seem to start to relax and inhabit the moment better beginning with Star Crash or so. This makes some sense because I think they recorded every show in one massive push, which must have been gruelling. Haven't finished the season yet (on Land that Time Forgot) but I think they stuck the landing.

The characters need some more time to settle in – Servo's not quite there yet; I miss the dumber, kind-hearted Gypsy, I can see why they felt compelled to do something about her but right now she has no real personality, I assume that'll come. In the theater each of them sounds like the other so much I can't tell them apart, which wasn't true in the Joel/Mike shows where Joel and Mike have very distinct personalities from the bots.

Some skits are really weak and others are stunners (the monster rap), which is just like the original show. When you went back to the set you never really knew which you'd get. I have to say that the skits with the Mads are so far generally not that great, but we'll see how it goes. (Interesting that they relocated the 'conversations with people outside the ship' to the Mads rather than on the satellite.)

I wonder how people who weren't MST fans before are liking the show, I really hope they are, so they get some more time to see where they can go. Now we can see that rebooting the show with a new cast was the right call, I don't think people would really take to a reunion/nostalgia act.

Huge article on MST history, some great stuff in here: https://www.wired.com/2014/04/mst3k-oral-history/

plan on finally catching up w this this weekend.

lol @ "Rowsdower" i just watched that episode. "He looks like a clown without makeup"

Starcrash is great

I'm dying

Starcrash is one of my favorite movies. it is peak late 70s post-Star Wars cheap Italian rip-off. they were smart about it and got James Bond's John Barry to do the soundtrack. it is way more colorful than any other post glam rock sci fi even Flash Gordon. do they riff the international cut? there is an original cut of the film that features some extended performances that were cut because they were too hammy.

i caught some of the first episode last night. i like it! it feels very much like watching a new MST3K. i admit the voice for Tom Servo threw me off at first during the theater scenes but he ended up making me laugh anyways. this crew shows promise! i can't wait to watch Starcrash. i'll probably skip ahead...

i laughed so hard so many times

also i'm in love w nina cassini now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKsRlEsIcpg

also i'm in love w nina cassini now

― Yoni Loves Chocha (VegemiteGrrl)

would you say you're... obsessed with her?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTqQgjR57qc

lol yes

what's gypsy's deal

how come she's only ever in each thing like once

and what's the basket thing she's always either picking up or dropping off

is it secret

oh nevermind according to the Wikipedia, she's too busy/smart to care. also she's a notary, that's cool

ending riff to Loves of Hercules had me in tears, omg

Cry Wilderness was very funny too. 2-for-2 so far! Are the skits shorter than they used to be? it seems like they come and go more quickly

yeah they are much more compact

Wizards of the Lost Kingdom is bananas

Starcrash is besting me. I have no idea what is happening in that movie. Watched the first half a second time, still no idea.

Its riff frequency is a lot better though. They even held back when David Hasselhoff was shouting "Stella!"

Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II - less pants, not *as* bananas, 100% more David Carradine

The Land That Time Forgot: based on a Burroughs story, it starts off well, then gets sidetracked by its makeup and hand puppets -- pretty good hand puppets, mind, but not good enough to come across as full-sized dinosaurs. Lots of riffs on bland, Shatner-looking leading man Doug McClure, star of long-running but forgotten TV oater "The Virginian". Many references to Simpsons character Troy McClure, and this season loves its Simpsons references. Also Game of Thrones, which gets three different riffs in this episode alone.

The Loves of Hercules: my favorite so far. One of those bad movies I love that combines pleasurably incompetent parts with painfully boring parts. It's great how they forgot how to shoot a movie during the Hydra fight. The simple plot means I don't need to expend brain energy to follow both the movie and the riffs. And the riffs definitely help getting through those boring parts. I laughed a lot.

'The Land That Time Forgot' felt like an odd inclusion to me - it's a classic! I must have seen that once a year since I was a kid. It's like putting 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth', or 'Jason and the Argonauts' on there.

Lmk when y'all finish this off

Honestly I haven't had time to go back beyond that preview showing of the first one. (Vacation and work and etc. will do that to you.) But the fact I'm in no rush miiiight say something about how I'm regarding the rest of this.

It's also like 20 hours worth of TV

First one didn't grab me... Was too overwhelming with the eager preloaded riffs jammed in there.

However I was in Antigua this past weekend howling on the beach while watching Aliens From L.A. on my ipad! That was nice.

Have got up to Land That Time Forgot, show feels like it has hit its stride now. Reboot has turned out much better than I was expecting tbh, nothing amazing but watchable, like average episodes from late seasons MST3K. And my god Starcrash is an amazingly bad movie.

I've been enjoying it immensely, but making my way through it slowly rather than bingeing. I'm up to Land That Time Forgot as well, but I fell asleep watching it last night.

Yeah, "like average episodes from late seasons MST3K" sums up my response so far, but we're only partway through Time Travelers because finding time for these is tough. Still, that's a considerably higher level of quality than I feared at the outset. The biggest problems have already been nailed down here - a kind of rapid 'bunching' of riffs that feels a bit like teenage riffers afraid of silence and just blurting out anything that the words spoken onscreen vaguely reminds me of. I believe those who suggest that this gets smoothed out a bit as things go on. Some of the riffs are really good, so at least it's not just a cavalcade of groaners and awkward references.

Still wish the voices of the characters were a little more distinct (both sonically and personality-wise) and especially that the puppeteering was a little less subtle. Sometimes you can't even see a mouth move, which makes it that much harder to link up Voice X with Servo vs. Jonah. It's like the inverse of stage actors learning they have to dial it down for the movies. This too I imagine they could get better at as we go.

Gotta say though that just getting things like "Cry Wilderness" screened in front of me is kinda worth it. What in the everloving hell, such an odd execution of what would appear to be a kids' movie, until it's not, plus you get that Return to Oz vibe where the adults insisting that the kid is mentally ill and making it all up seem to be the most believable sources, so that at the end when they change their tune you assume that behind the next dissolve you'll see the kid in a rubber room imagining that too. Obviously with the Internet at large, awareness of Bad Movies is considerably broader, but something MST did, and can still do, is unearth real oddities and sort of grant them canonical status as bad movies that people know. Manos and the Coleman Francis trilogy are probably the best-known cases of this but basically every ep they did either elevated something from totally unknown, or cemented the status of things that had already been appearing in "the hundred worst movies ever!" books. Feels like the new season(s) can totally carry on that role whatever their other qualities.

I kind of wish there were a few more obscurities like Cry Wilderness in there. Back in February, I came across a list of the movies that were going to be used for this season, and at the time Cry Wilderness was the only film with less than 100 votes on IMDB (44 votes with a rating of 5.4. It has now 528 with a rating of 2.2), whereas quite a few of the other film had closer to a thousand. And some films like Repitilicus and especially Starcrash were already quite well known among bad movie buffs.

We watched "Avalanche" the other night and I admit I laughed until I cried over "This is the third time I've found you under a log this week, it's getting weird."

Yeah, I've seen at least half of Starcrash before, and had certainly heard of Reptilicus and Avalanche. But, y'know, it's not like the original show 'discovered' every one of its flicks, as I was suggesting with reference to the "worst movies ever books." Certainly it's going to be harder in 2017 to surprise anybody, whereas in 1992 even a "bad movie buff" would really have to be devoting a lot of hobby time to tracking stuff down (conventions, movie guides, pen pal contact with cult collectors maybe). So even the major studio releases that take up a huge part of the MST episode list and lent it so much of its 50s texture - all those Universal and Warner B-pictures, or even the Corman fare which saw wide drive-in release in its original run - wouldn't all be things a buff had seen, necessarily.