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If you're doing shorts do not forget The Truck Farmer or Uncle Jim's Dairy Farm.
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Dec 8, 2014 18:27
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I first discovered MST3K through none other than This Island Earth. It's as good a start as any, I think.
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Dec 8, 2014 18:30
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I'm still trying to get my brother into MST3K, but of the episodes I've shown him, he says "Warrior of the Lost World" was his favorite.
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Dec 8, 2014 21:51
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I think that the best MST3k to show someone is "Time Chasers" it almost has a good plot, but is still one of the most horrible movies out there.
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Dec 8, 2014 21:53
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Badcounterpoint posted:I think that the best MST3k to show someone is "Time Chasers" it almost has a good plot, but is still one of the most horrible movies out there.
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Dec 8, 2014 22:03
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Santa Claus would be my pick right now to introduce someone to MST3k. Amusing film, good riffs, and it's in season.
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Dec 8, 2014 22:35
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Cromulent posted:Yeah, to me, Timechasers and Soultaker are two of the "best" movies. The plots are decent, just horribly executed. Both of those episodes also have particularly good riffing. They're also two of the more modern movies, since I know a lot of people are just instantly turned off to anything in black and white. Most of the color Sci-Fi Channel era episodes are probably good. Like, in addition to those two you've got stuff like Space Mutiny, Future War, Pumaman, Diabolik...
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Dec 8, 2014 22:49
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I always hold off on showing Space Mutiny or Diabolik until the inductee is somewhat seasoned. Though they are easily my favorite episodes (maybe I just like John Phillip Law  ) I figure if you risk showing them the best episodes right off the bat and they are still shaky on the premise, they're lost. When you're teaching someone to like booze, start them with something cheap but good, not the best.
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Dec 8, 2014 23:06
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To me, "Space Mutiny" is probably the perfect MST3K episode to get someone into the series. It's got a laughably bad film that is also in color and relatively "modern" (in that 1980s sort of way), and the riffing is just perfect. There's not much else I can say, aside from "show it to all your friends immediately". 
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Dec 9, 2014 00:50
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Sydney Bottocks posted:To me, "Space Mutiny" is probably the perfect MST3K episode to get someone into the series. It's got a laughably bad film that is also in color and relatively "modern" (in that 1980s sort of way), and the riffing is just perfect. There's not much else I can say, aside from "show it to all your friends immediately". Yeah, space mutiny is pretty amazingly awful... but it might be overwhelming.
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Dec 9, 2014 02:36
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The Time Dissolver posted:Santa Claus would be my pick right now to introduce someone to MST3k. Amusing film, good riffs, and it's in season. What's happening!? 
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Dec 9, 2014 04:36
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I always liked Pod People as an intro.
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Dec 9, 2014 04:39
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egon_beeblebrox posted:"Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" is a good one. It got a few of my friends into the show. "Parts: The Clonus Horror," too, since it's so obviously what THE ISLAND is based on, and a lot of people have seen THE ISLAND. And a lot of eagle-eyed people (probably a few MSTies) were kind enough to point that out to the director of parts, which led to legal action. http://www.agonybooth.com/agonizer/All_About_The_Island_and_Clonus.aspx
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Dec 9, 2014 06:43
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Maxwell Lord posted:I always liked Pod People as an intro. When I started watching the show (gah, over 20 years ago, nooo!) the first full episodes I saw were [Really Old] Teenagers from Outer Space, [There's no] Pod [There's No] People, and Time of the Apes -- any of those would be silly yet engaging intros to the show. I have to admit that I found Comedy Central's initial, relentless random clips of the show (usually shown during bumpers and adverts) were off-putting, but I was home with the flu one day and just let Teenagers from Outer Space play out in a 'what the hell, I'm too ill to change the channel' sort of way, and was hooked. CC had a way of advertising shows to make them as unappealing as possible -- Absolutely Fabulous was another one.
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Dec 9, 2014 09:08
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Yea, Comedy Central was weird with MST3K. Even though it was a flagship show, they knew the more popular it got, the more likely you end up with a awkward 2-hour show blocking off primetime tv. CC needed and loved MST3K, but they hated it at the same time. insert_funny posted:And a lot of eagle-eyed people (probably a few MSTies) were kind enough to point that out to the director of parts, which led to legal action. As I seem to remember, the Clonus people reached out to Best Brains for assistance in legal matters. They ultimately won the day (out of court, undisclosed) and as a thank-you, MST3k got the rights to use Clonus for a good long while. Or something like that.
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Dec 9, 2014 15:44
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insert_funny posted:And a lot of eagle-eyed people (probably a few MSTies) were kind enough to point that out to the director of parts, which led to legal action. Leave it to Michael Bay to steal from an extremely lovely movie.
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Dec 9, 2014 15:57
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Overwined posted:Leave it to Michael Bay to steal from an extremely lovely movie. I don't know, in my opinion Clonus is one of the better movies featured on the show. It's still pretty crap, but it's one of those films where if it had been polished better it might have been a really good film. It's certainly thought provoking in my mind.
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Dec 9, 2014 16:03
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-quote is not edit-
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Dec 9, 2014 16:04
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Tedd_Not_Ed posted:I don't know, in my opinion Clonus is one of the better movies featured on the show. It's still pretty crap, but it's one of those films where if it had been polished better it might have been a really good film. It's certainly thought provoking in my mind. Sure!
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Dec 9, 2014 16:44
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For newbies I generally recommend working your way backwards through the seasons, as the films chosen for the Sci-Fi run, especially in mid season 8-10 are actually fairly watchable on their own merit, and very silly. Then you get to go through season 5-7 which are absolutely hysterical.
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Dec 9, 2014 17:17
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Phase IV was one of the best natural horror films, it looks and sounds absolutely gorgeous and the story is engaging enough, but from the cropped, degraded video that was used for MST3k you'd probably be hard pressed to say it was any better than Squirm or The Killer Shrews. (It also had one of the most wicked-rear end endings of any film ever (  for brief tits) that was cut after it obviously tested badly.)
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Dec 9, 2014 17:24
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Yea, Clonus definitely has the elements to be good. They were just ultimately mishandled; casting*, editing, and just general direction was duffed. The film had heart, but wasn't allowed to shine. I could definitely see myself watching Clonus straight-movie on a cold and rainy Saturday afternoon when I was little and enjoying it thoroughly. The movie overall had no clear cinematic goals, but the plot made sense and things happened somewhat logically. And this was true of many of the Season 7 and onward movies. incoming!Though we've talked about it before, it's always fun to revisit the behind-the-scenes stuff. If not for the enjoyment of new members to the thread, then for me to not do work for an hour or so. Best Brains definitely shifted to 'better' quality movies in the later years. They cited a lot of reasons for doing that, namely because the writers simply have to watch the movies like 20-25 times during the writing process. They don't want to hate themselves by the end of it any more than they have to. Though Season 8 had a 'mandate' to be all sci-fi movies (is Jack Frost really a sci-fi?), I also imagine the SciFi execs hinting for them to choose less rough movies, simply for more appeal. In the early years, Frank Conniff was more or less the sole movie chooser. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of awful movies and would many times pick movies just on who directed or produced them. Though we got some great selections from this, we also ended up with really bland choices as well as abominations that can't even be called 'movies'. In the words of a great man, "They aren't even wrong"; or these choices can no more be called a movie than a bucket can be called a sailboat. They were botched on every conceivable level. Later on, the selection process became more democratic. As the writing staff got to choose their movies, they tended to pick movies that were just bad because they were campy (Angels Revenge) or zany(Gumbys Robot Rump) or just simply mind-boggling (ISCWSLaBMUZ). In otherwords, movies they could enjoy watching. They also evolved and changed their writing style a bit, now to make fun of what is happening in the movie itself rather than focusing on the production. Though the higher ups of the movie: director, producer, head writer, continuity editor, and even sometimes the lead actors are very responsible for a bad movie and deserve a roast, there are a lot of earnest people who work hard on movies that end up being bad. And Best Brains didn't want them in the line of fire. (well, a little is OK) They found that you can get rights to movies easier if you don't wholesale piss off the people who own said rights. Ultimately, they picked better movies and they were all the better for it. The episodes are better when the underlying movie makes sense. You don't have to struggle with what the movie is doing, all the while trying to fit the riffing in over top of it. When you're not sorting the movie out, you and your brain are free to laugh on your own at the comically mis-fired stunt, awkward line delivery, or bizarre redubs and ADRs; and the riff is icing on the cake. But when you're trying to simply hear constant droning dialog that sounds as if it was recorded through a broken kazoo, or flat-angle studio interior video that was filmed with a potato, you either rely on the riff or watch it 20 times. I know many of us chose the later, but that selection is not an option for new viewers and can't be taken for granted even with veterans. It is easy to attribute the success of the later seasons on the writing staff finally nailing down their voice for the show coupled with higher production values, but I believe it was actually the movie selection. I bet Season 8-10 writers would have been hard pressed to do as quality of work with some of the Season 4 stuff. Just look at Hamlet, though written by arguably the best writer ever (and probably my favorite Billy Shakes play of all) the movie itself is so poor that the episode is nigh unwatchable. Anyways, *except for the wonderful Peter "Movie Book-end" Graves holttho fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Dec 9, 2014 |
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Dec 9, 2014 17:59
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Deathstalker and Quest of the Delta Knights are good episodes to start people off with. Maybe it's just the people I hang out with, but I've found that people are pretty receptive to goofy, low-budget fantasy movies.
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Dec 9, 2014 19:26
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Tedd_Not_Ed posted:I don't know, in my opinion Clonus is one of the better movies featured on the show. It's still pretty crap, but it's one of those films where if it had been polished better it might have been a really good film. It's certainly thought provoking in my mind. But is it a rare mineral found in the river?
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Dec 9, 2014 19:28
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IIRC, Frank didn't become the sole movie choosing person until after Joel left. I think either Joel picked the movies at first, or they just sort of went by "group consensus" or what have you. Then, after Joel left, I believe they decided to let Frank pick the movies, so we got a slightly odd mix of camp (Angels Revenge is very likely a Frank pick, given his love of 1970's TV references), and horrible B&W movies that just sit on your head and stay there (the Coleman Francis trilogy). I seem to vaguely recall reading somewhere that Mary Jo and/or Paul Chaplin were put in charge of picking movies after Frank left, though I dunno if that was for Season 7 only, or if that was after they moved to
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Dec 9, 2014 19:30
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Ms Boods posted:CC had a way of advertising shows to make them as unappealing as possible -- Absolutely Fabulous was another one. Hell, back in those days CC were able to make Monty Python look like a bad show to watch. I was never a huge AbFab fan, but the commercials CC used to show for it back in the mid-1990s just absolutely turned me off of the show. holttho posted:Yea, Comedy Central was weird with MST3K. Even though it was a flagship show, they knew the more popular it got, the more likely you end up with a awkward 2-hour show blocking off primetime tv. CC needed and loved MST3K, but they hated it at the same time. Also let's not forget that after the first season, CC signed MST3K to a five-season deal, primarily because they needed a proven source of programming for their fledgling network. Once the network started to pick up steam and they started to move away from showing clips of various comedians' stand-up acts as "programming", I'm sure there were more than a few CC execs who began to resent that "Minnesota cow-town puppet show" and how it took up what they perceived to be valuable chunks of broadcasting real estate, but since they were signed to a long-term deal, there wasn't anything they could do about it.
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Dec 9, 2014 19:38
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I wonder if MST3K would make it as a TV program today. Seems like the only stations that wanted it were ones that were just desperate for content.
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Dec 9, 2014 20:48
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holttho posted:Yea, Clonus definitely has the elements to be good. They were just ultimately mishandled; casting*, editing, and just general direction was duffed. The film had heart, but wasn't allowed to shine. I could definitely see myself watching Clonus straight-movie on a cold and rainy Saturday afternoon when I was little and enjoying it thoroughly. The movie overall had no clear cinematic goals, but the plot made sense and things happened somewhat logically. And this was true of many of the Season 7 and onward movies. It's been really fun seeing Rifftrax re-riffing some films MST3K already did with the later formula style, Manos and A Case of Spring Fever for instance.
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Dec 9, 2014 21:07
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I'd say Cave Dwellers is a good one to start people off with too. It's funny you say this; I was just thinking last night that when I want to watch an episode, I'm more likely to watch a late-Joel era or Mike episode over one of the earlier ones. The movies were just so plodding that even the riffing couldn't make them not boring to watch.
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Dec 9, 2014 21:20
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Sydney Bottocks posted:Hell, back in those days CC were able to make Monty Python look like a bad show to watch. I was never a huge AbFab fan, but the commercials CC used to show for it back in the mid-1990s just absolutely turned me off of the show. God yes -- I actually do like AbFab, and avoided it like the plague based on CC's ads; the first time I saw an episode all the way through, I was hooked (and astonished at how utterly different it was compared to its promotion). The voice-overs and bumpers from Penn Jillette on CC's programming didn't help, either. They did try mercilessly to beat MST3K into the ground with supersaturation as well -- the Mystery Science Theatre Hour, anyone? Ninja edit -- the premise I suppose was all right, but it was the same handful of episodes over and over again. Talk about deep hurting...
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Dec 9, 2014 21:21
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Mystery Science Theater Hour was great just for the wrapper of Mike doing his Peter Graves talking about the episode. According to Kevin, one movie that helped change their picking habits was Sidehackers. Apparently they used to chose movies without watching the entire thing which bit them on the rear end with Sidehackers as there's a rape scene late in the movie. After that someone would make sure to screen the movies first to weed out any nasty surprises.
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Dec 9, 2014 21:36
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Ms Boods posted:
According to the The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide the idea behind MST Hour was something they could maybe license out to syndication. There were smaller network affiliates who were asking for some kind of MST3k thing for their net works but couldnt do the entire two hour block thing. After doing a couple episodes the crew found it more expensive and time consuming to make that show than the normal thing. Also the movie rights licenses seemed to start to bite them in the rear end so the show got scrapped.
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Dec 9, 2014 21:43
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Grin and Tonic posted:It's been really fun seeing Rifftrax re-riffing some films MST3K already did with the later formula style, Manos and A Case of Spring Fever for instance. One movie that I'd kill to see re-riffed is "Robot Monster" just because of how weird all the elements in it come together.
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Dec 9, 2014 22:52
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Grin and Tonic posted:It's been really fun seeing Rifftrax re-riffing some films MST3K already did with the later formula style, Manos and A Case of Spring Fever for instance. If Spring Fever doesn't qualify as "later" MST3K, that's a very narrow definition of "later".
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Dec 9, 2014 22:58
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Tedd_Not_Ed posted:I don't know, in my opinion Clonus is one of the better movies featured on the show. It's still pretty crap, but it's one of those films where if it had been polished better it might have been a really good film. It's certainly thought provoking in my mind. Is it me or is the movie "the island" a straight rip-off of clonus?
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Dec 10, 2014 04:40
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Badcounterpoint posted:Is it me or is the movie "the island" a straight rip-off of clonus? It's not just you.
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Dec 10, 2014 04:43
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Good, I watched it the other day on netflix and was waiting for mike and the bots to chime in.
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Dec 10, 2014 04:46
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Badcounterpoint posted:Is it me or is the movie "the island" a straight rip-off of clonus? On the MST3K DVD, there's an interview with Clonus' director and he talks about the lawsuit. He's pretty cool with the MST treatment and considers it an honor to be riffed.
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Dec 10, 2014 04:58
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muscles like this? posted:Mystery Science Theater Hour was great just for the wrapper of Mike doing his Peter Graves talking about the episode.  Jack Perkins.Although the Peter Graves impersonations were always fab. I'm trying to get Mr Boods to watch Stranded in Space because of Crow's Gregory Peck impersonations 
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Dec 10, 2014 06:48
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Catalina Caper might be a good introductory episode, though I seem to recall it's hard to come by on DVD. The film isn't too bad for an early season, and a lot of the host segments are great. I also really like Double 007 and would probably watch it without Mike and the Bots. Again, great host segments: "You're ruining it for me!" "I know."
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Dec 10, 2014 06:57
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