Help Bring Back MST3K, Thanks to Kickstarter!

Well, if it worked for Veronica Mars and Reading Rainbow...

Earlier today, Joel Hodgson announced that he's now got all the t's crossed and such and can start a Kickstarter campaign to revive the first great cable TV show that didn't include sports highlights or Pat Buchanan complaining, Mystery Science Theater 3000!!!

In his Kickstarter page, he explains why now is the time to revive this classic show. The obvious reason is we miss the show, and so does Joel. That's why we had Cinematic Titanic and Incognito Cinema Warriors XP, and have Rifftrax (now with selected MST3K episodes). The legal tangles have been straightened out, and the project lives.

The plan is to raise at least two million dollars for three episodes, but if five and a half million dollars are raised, we'll have 12 episodes, or the same length of the first season.
There's lots of rewards, of course, named after classic phrases from the show, like "We've Got Movie Sign", "Poster-a-Go-Go", "Mr. Blu-Natural", and "The Big McLargeHuge". Specifically, people can get a free download of the first episode or the whole season, shirts, coffee cups, a producer's credit (for those in the one percent, and not necessarily in income) and even seeing the show in a theater,

So, if you think you can take over the world through bad movies, despite the fact Sharknado didn't make humanity burn itself down (and neither did Jem and the Holograms aka Two and Out), just give cash to the return of MST3K. You can always claim you're responsible.
The real hope is that a cable outlet or Netflix/Amazon Prime picks up the show. A lot has changed in 15 years, and it just might happen.

For more info, head to https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mst3k/bringbackmst3k

UPDATE: Joel Hodgson had an "Ask Me Anything" event on Reddit, and revealed some interesting things:

The new episodes will likely center on movies made in the 1970's and 80's but later releases are possible

They've already chosen a new host, who will be revealed soon

The new show will be "quaint", compared to, say, Guardians of the Galaxy

His choice for a "Desert Isle Flick" would be A Hard's Day Night

The show will be filmed in Los Angeles, although the talent and staff will be from several places around the country.

The new targets, er, movies will be excellent prints. Too bad the script and acting won't be.

He compares the show to Doctor Who, in that it has a chance to reboot and reinvent itself. That's why the new episodes will include (we're not sure how) Dr. Forrester's offspring. Maybe cloned or something, but that's what he'll be. The old MST continuity will be part of the new show, just like Doctor Who, actually,. Oh, and Joel's favorite Doctor is Tom Baker.

It's also possible the old crew, from Joel to Trace and Mike, could make cameos in the new episodes. Again, nothing is certain.

He also compares the show to going to a haunted house on the edge of town with your funny friends. It works best if you don't know what's in there."

The next DVD set is coming December first.

Mystery Rifftrax Theater 3000

Eat your heart out, Clayton Forrester.
You had dreams of taking over the world after driving all of mankind insane through showing horrible movies.
It was a plan doomed to fail, since mankind keeps making these crimes against cinema. Hello, Jem and the Holograms.
Still, you would never have guessed there would be something called Rifftrax, which went you one better when it came to mocking movies, or even this:

Mike Nelson, the Pope of Rifftrax, made the announcement Monday afternoon:



It plans to offer a new movie every Monday with new introductions by Mike, and call it MST3K Mondays.
What's interesting is that the first two selections, "Pumaman" and "Final Sacrifice" are from the Sci-Fi Channel days, However, Jeff Whitton, press guy for Rifftrax, says it'll also be showing Joel Hodgson episodes, with the first one on November 9th.

Also, fans can download MST3K episodes. Vimeo already offers that option for 80 episodes for a modest fee, but the two shows Rifftrax is offering are not in Vimeo. Amazon, Hulu and Shout Factory, meanwhile, also have MST3K shows but they are only streaming video. So, it should be interesting which episodes Rifftrax can get. It would be incredible if they get episodes not even on DVD, like "It Conquered the World."
Update: word from the Rifftrax comments board  confirm the offer is being done with the help of Shout Factory. They have ten titles confirmed, and more may be coming.

The point is, of course, is to introduce a new generation to the beauty that is insulting movies you wish weren't made. Again, hello, Hotel Transylvania 2 and Pan.
They might get confused by the silhouettes, but not for long.

Rifftrax's new MST3K page can be found here. Of course, fans can still get other mocked b-movies, and mp3 riffs elsewhere on the website.

Joel's Serving Real Turkeys Online Again This Year

Last year, Joel Hodgson, the man who invented the show that justified cable TV, served up a very special Thanksgiving meal online: five classic episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It ended with the bots, Tom Servo and Crow, about to share the Thanksgiving meal. People wept.



It was done to commemorate the 25th anniversary of MST3K, the show that created extreme movie criticism which is recognized as one of America's best industries. Just ask Rikk Wolf, Josh Way, Mary Jo Pehl, J. Elvis Weinstein, Bill Corbett, TV's Frank and Trace Beaulieu.

Actually, the 25th anniversary is still going on, since the show premiered nationally on the Comedy Channel around Thanksgiving of 1989. Shout Factory's newest MST3K set features classic Turkey Day bumpers, the story of how it started, and great movies (to riff, natch) including The Painted Hills, Jungle Goddess, Squirm and The Screaming Skull (with the Gumby short that really upset the bots).

This year, on November 27th, Joel will be serving up turkeys again, This time, according to the Nerdist, people are encouraged to choose the menu. You can tweet Joel at @JoelGHodgson to make your suggestions. I suggested It Conquered The World, one of the movies that haven't made a DVD set yet. However, you could suggest either of the two Godzilla movies the show has riffed (Godzilla vs. Megalon and Godzilla vs, The Sea Monster), or maybe any of the Hercules movies. It's the price those characters should pay for attempting a comeback this year (one more successfully than the other).
The article says special guests may drop by, maybe some of the crew from Cinematic Titanic or an aging Mr,. B Natural. Knew your father he (?) did.
One person who should show up is Michael J. Nelson, the Modern Warrior Against Bad Movies. It would also be the first meeting between the two since Comic-Con five years ago. I still have the special pass from that panel.

Anyway, the show will be found at www.MST3KTurkeyDay.com. Expect this site to be more popular than football, parades, your aunt's famous rye bread dressing, and camping out overnight for Black Friday sales.

Of course, Rifftrax will have its own Thanksgiving event, Fun In Balloonland. This has been talked about previously in this site, but it's just as cheesy as you've heard. You can pre-order it before it arrives in three weeks.

So prepare for Thanksgiving the way your parents, or at least your strange uncle, did 25 years ago, and enjoy the kind of turkey you can't use for leftovers for the next month.

JOIN US!

This Movie MST3K, The Whole Story On Blu-Ray

As many Rifftrax fans await the encore of the live riffing of Starship Troopers next week in theaters, and Night of the Living Dead just before Halloween, many of them have picked up the new blu-ray release of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the Movie. It's not only a new and improved version of the 1996 movie, but it also includes extras that reveal why the movie didn't do as well as it should have...and studio meddling is a main reason why.

I remember seeing it at a theater in Eureka in 1996  just after watching the show on Comedy Central. The crowd was small, but it was a good movie...and strangely short. I got a copy by taping it off Starz during one of its "free preview" weekends.

The premise, of course, is evil mad scientist Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) ready to show the movie to poor lab rat Mike Nelson and his two bots Tom Servo (Kevin Murphy) and Crow (Beaulieu), figuring the movie's so bad they'll be driven insane. For some reason, Clayton went overboard on the "crazy". Maybe he was missing TV's Frank, who left Deep 13 just before this experiment started.  Safe to say, the "victims" shake it off easily.

The new edition includes a "featurette" that's a combination of the trailer and interviews with the cast. There's

even a couple of scenes that never made it in the final version.  Then, Ballyhoo presents the real story of the very hard road the production had to travel just to get to the screen, or 26 of them (according to Box Office Mojo). It features interviews with Mike, Trace and Kevin, along with producer/director Jim Mallon, aka Gypsy. We find out some new facts about pre-production, such as another studio was interested and it almost became a musical.
Making the show for the movies is quite different than making it for Comedy Central. For one thing, Universal tried to control the choice of the film (like only using its titles), and what kind of jokes they could tell. That's why the weird alien was called Leona Helmsley instead of Bootsy Collins. They also kept insisting on cutting the film under 90 minutes, even asking for a scene they later decided they didn't need. That's why the movie is 74 minutes, much shorter than a typical MST episode without ads (not to mention This Island Earth, which lost 13 minutes being MSTied).

There's also focus groups, whose odd opinions also affected production. The pain they inflicted was recreated in the host segments from The Incredible Melting Man, where "Earth vs. Soup" got the real Hollywood treatment.

A third featurette looks at the making of This Island Earth, and how Universal had hoped it would give them a bit more prestige after the release of Forbidden Planet and The War of the Worlds. We also learn people connected with that movie are not happy with what the MST crew did to it.

Then there are the deleted scenes. I had seen them on video footage of the 1996 ConventioCon, but the ones in the blu-ray version are much better. Ballyhoo said Universal didn't have the original masters of those scenes, but what they found are still in good shape. The storm shelter scene is classic, and those suits at Universal should have risked a 91-minute comedy and kept it. There was also a different ending that actually would have been better, especially when you see Crow finding a chainsaw in Servo's room. The extended scenes have slightly different riffs compared to the original.

MST3K The Movie may not have been bigger and better than the typical Comedy Central episode, but it was a bridge to its second life on the Sci-Fi Channel. It might have had better luck it if was made like a regular episode with a bigger budget, and Universal just butted out and took whatever was given to them.
It's also more fondly remembered than Barb Wire, the movie that Gramercy decided to support because it had Pamela Anderson and her...eh...barbs. That movie made nearly three point eight million dollars in 1300 screens. Compare than to a million dollars in only 26 screens for MST3K. It also came in handy as a go-to movie for Cinemax and Starz for a while.

Shout Factory made a lot of MSTies happy with a fantastic blu-ray release that gives the movie the respect it deserves.  Copies are likely to be seen during stops of the Cinematic Titanic farewell tour.

Maybe someday, the Rifftrax crew will take on This Island Earth, the complete version. Then again, riffing on Barb Wire may be an even better idea. To keep Mike, Kevin and Bill Corbett from being distracted by Pam's...er...barbs, the Gorilla Grams can always block the screen again.