MST3K is kinda back: Update
Mypost from July.
To Summerize, Joel Hodgson and the comedy central cast of MST3K's new project CinematicTitanic just released their first episode - "The Oozing Brain."
The server is down (I am guessing it is because BoingBoing posted a review of it this morning. Since I havent seen it yet, here is the trailer
7 comments:
Are these commentary tracks or videos?
they are DVDs for now - full video downloads later
they seem to be doing older b-movie stuff, where as rifftrax is doing more resent stuff.
Interesting.
I think I prefer Rifftrax to MST3K. When watching MST3K if the commentary wasn't great the movie itself did not provide a distraction. With Rifftrax if the commentary sucks at least I'm watching Star Wars or Harry Potter.
Additionally, newer and more popular movies have a far greater wealth of context and history which one may "riff". If one mocks Boggy Creek 2 then, great, a mockery of a crappy movie. But if one mocks Star Wars or James Bond I think that a far more significant mockery if only because of the value these franchises have within our "culture". It is a far more significant fall when Star Wars is riffed rather than Boggy Creek 2.
That's why I would like for them to riff on Citizen Kane or Casablanca. Those movies need to be taken down a few proverbial pegs.
SO I just watched the trailer.
Fuck those stands.
Fuck those effects.
Fuck those voices.
Fuck that music.
And FUCK that noise.
I'm still interested in Cinematic Titanic, even more so now, in fact, having watched the trailer. What I'm not interested in, however, is spending something like $15 to watch it, and I think it's for reasons similar to what Jay was saying. Buying Rifftrax and Star Wars might cost more in total than a CT episode, but I'll get a movie I want and a commentary track I want, whereas with CT I'm getting a good commentary track and an unwanted movie.
Not that I don't like watching bad movies, I rather enjoy it, I just don't like paying more than a few bucks for the privilege.
As much as I love the CT guys, and as great as it is to see some guys in the theater who never or only rarely got to do so, and as cool (yet startling and odd) as it is that they're using more visual gags in the theater than usual, I'm afraid that it's just not quite the right formula.
The MST3K formula was something like "rather funny + essentially free = good times", and RiffTrax has followed that formula fairly closely with sub-$3 price tags for quality commentary, but CT is politely asking us to pitch in to cover the costs that advertisers used to take on, and I don't mean the cash to pay writers and performers (who, according to the RiffTrax model, ask for around $1 each), I mean superfluous shit like movie rights and sets and Mary Jo Pehl.
But of course I haven't even seen an ep of CT, and it might very well be 5x as funny as RiffTrax and therefore justify the price, but given the number of times I've sat looking at the "check out" screen and decided that I'd rather have food than jokes about a shitty movie, I may never know for sure.
Also, I like Frank's joke with the two chandeliers and the History of Cinematic Titanic.
That was a good joke.
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