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

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

My all-time favorite host segment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atM9ZQK7OSo

Just that perfect moment where everything falls out of sync and Joel hits them to set it right again -- brought back SO many elementary school memories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-18A4qcKSiA

watched this last night, diiiiied during Servo's segment of the medley, don't mind the lousy camcorder YouTube

This may be my favorite, followed by Crow's extremely profane video deposition for Mike's "blowing up a planet" trial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56NRz0u2ieU

As spotted and shared out by the Facebook account

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/1380812_10151724404762153_1971638886_n.jpg

Awesome

! that is so great

I do understand

http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/always-meet-your-heroes-how-mystery-science-theater-3000-has-influenced-basically-my-whole-life

that is pretty great! and those sentiments are 100% otm.

btw I forgot to ask, did anyone else make it out to the Rifftrax Night of the Living Dead? It was a lot of fun -- I've seen that movie at home on my own tv SO many times, and I realized I've NEVER seen it on a big screen. My biggest takeaway from Mike & Kevin & Bill is that the first half of Night of the Living Dead is pretty much 'guy hammering pieces of wood'

?!

Fuck Rifftrax.

:(

Didn't see it so I can't speak to it but...I mean, Night of the Living Dead is a cool movie!

But maybe the spirit of these things changed at some point away from "bad" movies as such, in favor of free-riffing whatever can be riffed? Wouldn't be my thing but that would make more sense.

I think their spirit of having some level of respect and even love for movies changed over to them (meaning the Rifftrax crew, not the Cinematic Titanic one) having respect only for their erudition and wit.

I got my tickets for the final ever Cinematic Titanic performance

so sad... Rifftrax has gotten really stale the past couple of years and now no more CT...

"MST3K was like a code, a secret language of cultural references I desperately wanted to unravel, and to this day when I recognize a long-obscured joke I feel a little thrill of satisfaction. (Like just this week, when I was driving a rental car and listening to the radio for the first time since I last drove a rental car, probably, and the song "Brandy (You're A Fine Girl)" came on, and I recognized the words and realized OH, THAT'S WHAT THIS IS.)"

Cracking the cultural code of MST3K takes a little longer for some folks, haha. Guess there weren't a lot of Looking Glass fan forums to stumble onto on Prodigy in the day? Seriously, though, I and many of us can relate to her.