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

^random reflections

I love that the direction and editing in The Final Sacrifice are highly competent, and yet the movie is still terrible.

We couldn't get into Overdrawn at the Memory Bank but it was getting pretty late; should we try again?

Gotta at least make it to "My nuts?"

Skydivers is hilarious & bizarre, I love it. It's like a rejected workplace information film + crossed with the most boring soap opera you've ever seen.
Petey the Plane is one of my favorite riffs

"Where is it -- your coffee?"

I mean I know they filmed it near places of human habitation but it might as well have been Mars.

it's SO weird

Must watch.

Gotta at least make it to "My nuts?"

This whole minute or so of the movie generally leaves me convulsing with laughter, between that and:

Raul Julia: "Mom? What are you doing here?"
Servo: "Why aren't you Puerto Rican?"

Also the big overhead shot of the building interior with NIRVANA on the floor, accompanied by Crow's "Come, as you are, to my mall, to my atrium . . ." may be my favorite riff ever.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/20cb0d65bdf5fe53bdc4134020174993/tumblr_mjtjsuJv8K1qmrf3bo1_500.png

isn't the baddie's "office" just out in the open on like the stair landing? like they just moved the sunglasses hut kiosk out of the way

My go-to for all-time favorite riff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6FG8lha7-w&feature=youtu.be&t=1h22m21s

D'oh, it embedded ... anyway it's at 1:22:21, the Sheena Easton crib.

+ the entirety of the Rita Martinez vs. Iggy Pop bout that begins at 1:10:14 -- one of their longest sustained runs of total hilarity.

xxp that's in Time Chasers, yeah. His desk is literally on a landing at the top of a staircase.

"Is his office in a branch library?"

fav line ever, from 'time chasers':

"we're running out of ALT!"

Actually, this whole section of Devil Doll beginning around :11:30 to :18:10 is constant guffaws from me. Culminating in "He told me he was an expert in modern dance . . ." and "Well, back to the concession stand, hope you get some pants, bye!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rLsECjWvr4c#t=691

Some day I'm going to make a concerted effort to plow through all of the season 8-10 episodes, since so many MSTies rank them so highly these days. (A layman would presume Space Mutiny is the series' best episode ever.) Having grown up with the show in real-time, I can't quite get over how much "jump the shark" accompanied those eps when they were first airing. I have liked some of them after the fact -- Merlin, Touch of Satan, Giant Spider Invasion -- and yet I still resist any attempt to elevate them to the level of seasons 3-6.

Space mutiny is indeed so so great

never realized the consensus on black-and-white being extra boring

I thought it was just me. And all I meant was that the B&W ones (movies, not MST3K episodes) tend to be more dull-bad rather than silly-bad overall.

I think 8-10 is massively underrated due to people hating change.

that said, season 5 has both Eegah! and The Wild Wild World of Batwoman so it might de facto be my favorite

On one thing I think we should all be able to agree: the host segments, such as they were, were dire during the last few years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RHVoFpncgA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2f0nfrgaK4

The B&W movies are mostly time-fillers of people walking through the outdoors or people standing around in a room and constantly drinking.

The Killer Shrews being the case in point.

That's Monster-A-Go-Go to a T.

I might have to watch that tonight. Been too long.

Killer Shrews!!!! They must have gotten hammered on that production.

The B&W movies are mostly time-fillers of people walking through the outdoors or people standing around in a room and constantly drinking.

Haha, just before that Devil Doll clip I posted above, there's like a minute of a half of William Sylvester and a secretary, in tight two-shot, standing in an office talking. No cuts, no over-the-shoulders, no shot/reverse shot, just a locked down camera. (Also, Sylvester has his back to the other character.) To which Crow finally responds, "Exotic locations!"

yet I still resist any attempt to elevate them to the level of seasons 3-6.

No need to even resist, there is just something about Joel, Dr. Forrester, and TV's Frank that fits the whole concept of MST3K so much more naturally than Mike and the villains in the later seasons. It's even there in the theme song. Listen to the song in the Joel seasons, and the very last note, where he sings "Three thousand", he has a vocal inflection that is both kind of a micro-tribute to Elvis and a mockery of awesome rock n roll singers. The later seasons' themes are great, but played a bit too seriously and soullessly. I'm sure many fans that followed the transition noticed this.

It went part and parcel with the shift from something that felt homemade (the original themes sound to my ear pretty much like Joel goofing around on a four-track) to something that probably was still largely "homemade" in the same way, but didn't feel it anymore. Also the skits weren't funny and the finely-balanced late-80s/early-90s camp (which has a LOT of "let's riff on those silly 1950s!" - it was that era!) of Forrester and Frank was lost to something much more "obvious" and "wacky" that just reminds me of freshmen Trying Too Hard. And the slightly slicker quality of the themes goes along with that for me.

Watched the Gamera playset host segment yesterday and just about fell out of my chair - how much deadpan humor and silliness Servo packs in to that voice-over!

Also, I probably revere their riffs on those industrial shorts more than the average MSTie, and that's another part of the format they more or less dropped after their move to Sci-Fi.

I hope you count Mr B Natural as industrial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Hh4M4vipAo

The skits aren't not-funny across the board in the later era but I do usually skip the segments in the episodes with the new villains to get back to the movie riffing.

I was really talking about all of the shorts and serials.

did this get syndicated on something mpls station after it went to comedy central? because i swear to god i caught it on TV late at night a few times when i was younger and definitely did not have cable

I've never cared about the skits in any of the show's incarnations. Happy just to skip right ahead to the movies most of the time.

xp they used to run what I think was called the MST3K Hour on Kare 11 on Saturday nights.

I always skip the skits now too. They're not unfunny, I suppose, but when I watch them, I get like Milhouse waiting for the fireworks factory.

If I feel antsy at all I'll skip them. Long enough episodes as they are, so unless I'm really hanging out I usually pass them up.

I don't hate the skits, but I look at it this way: the length of an MST3K episode is the length of a movie, so watching one is substituting for me watching an actual film. Since the riffs on the films are all I really care about, this (admittedly trifling) time saved makes me feel less guilty about not having spent that ninety-whatever minutes watching one of the thousand or so (probably) not-awful movies that I still want to see.

Most movies are secretly awful and should be given the MST treatment.

It's that kind of mentality that's fueled Rifftrax. And that's not necessarily a good thing.

Even many "good" movies deserve the treatment.

xp syndication, on FOX in the NYC area they used to play hour long chunks of movies (split up into two parts) late night Sundays. this had to have been around the mid 90s or so