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Post by catbasketry on Jan 20, 2013 0:17:25 GMT -5
I remember that firebreathing godzilla. And the slant eye glasses. A local band put up posters with their singer wearing glasses like that recently. I was appalled.
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Post by brandonakaxerxes on Jan 20, 2013 11:34:48 GMT -5
Heh, sort of like Looney Tunes or any classic animation from the older eras did politically incorrect gags, and cartoons that just would not fly today.
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Post by catbasketry on Jan 20, 2013 12:15:11 GMT -5
Yeah, but this was the 1990s, not the 1940s. I recalll in the mid 90s the cartoon network censored certain racial gags in old cartoons. And some show called Toon Heads showed historically important cartoons from WW2 with a warning. They were showing them as part of a set about "cartoons used to drum up war support".
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Post by Mighty Jack on Jan 21, 2013 10:00:50 GMT -5
Personally speaking, there’s nothing on MST so offensive that it has prevented me from watching or enjoying an episode either in parts or as a whole. Several those mentioned, including Su-Maru, I number among my favorites. The few negatives have not negated the many positives in a particular episode.
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Post by catbasketry on Jan 21, 2013 14:37:36 GMT -5
Until i'm not depressed by it, which may take time, i just can't seem to enoy it anymore. It'll happen, it just will take some time. The Gamera films, for example, were favorites of mine.
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Post by jimmydoorlocks on Jan 21, 2013 17:47:47 GMT -5
Yeah I agree with catbasketry, There were some episodes I liked and kept watching but something in me just kept going "this really isn't right..." and then the feeling gets stronger and stronger until I avoid the episodes altogether.
It happens, especially, when they keep harping on a concept or if the racism/whatever is especially egregious. I never cared about/for KTMA and much of season one because of it.
But one of my favorite episodes used to be "The Incredibly Strange Creatures..." but they kept going on about how the dancer looked like a man and she kept having to duct tape and blah blah blah
As I said before, the older I get and the more LGBT friends I know (I myself am gay) riffs like that just start feeling pretty cruel.
Joel once said "the right people will get it", but... unfortunately it appears to apply to hurtful riffs on gender/nationality/sexual orientation also. I've seen almost all of the entire series, several times. It makes me pretty sad that a show that's been there for me when I've gone through so much is starting to bite back. I stick to episodes that I know won't make me feel too badly.
To add, Rifftrax is actually worse on some topics like sexuality and gender (ooh Elton John's gay, what a shocker), and CT is definitely terrible re: Asians. Still. It kind of feels like a minefield.
At this point, it isn't about "political correctness" or whatever one may ascribe to my thoughts on this, but "will it hurt me or my friends if we were to watch this"? I will admit that some of the gay riffs don't bug me ("Yes, our Betty swings both ways!") and I actually laugh. But I can't deal with stuff joking on the transgendered.
Just so my post isn't overly negative, I do enjoy riffs that give a shoutout to the East Coast/NYC (Frank? Bill?), I dig morbid riffs, all the silly references to things you thought everyone else just forgot, terrible puns, making fun of how someone's been a jerkass or insensitive ("Tonight on Insensitive Hospital"), 420 jokes, jokes where someone spots something in the background and immediately picks up on it ("You know..." Sausage!) cracks on the music, the photography, acting, direction, stilted dialogue ("What a stilted, pretentious line."), literary/film/musician and music references, current-for-its-time jokes, jokes on the strange formality and creepiness of the average 50's household and patriarchy, people being super-white, and all the good things about the show that keep me watching.
The Coleman Francis Trilogy... that's my favorite. There seemed to be a really nice synergy between Mike, Kevin, and Trace that I never got from the show when Bill was there (even though he can be funny) that I find pretty laid back and cute.
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Post by brandonakaxerxes on Jan 22, 2013 2:07:54 GMT -5
But one of my favorite episodes used to be "The Incredibly Strange Creatures..." but they kept going on about how the dancer looked like a man and she kept having to duct tape and blah blah blah If I remember right, that dancer was Ray Steckler's wife.... one of the reasons he got pissed at the Brains.
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Post by Monophylos on Jan 22, 2013 13:12:17 GMT -5
For the most part the gay riffs in MST3K don't much bother me; heck, when watching Cave Dwellers I kept count. (I count about thirty gay references of one kind or another in that episode.) I agree that Rifftrax can be a bit meaner about it, e.g. the "Homo-tania" crack in the Plan 9 riff.
The Japan-bashing didn't use to bother me at all--it's a refreshing counter to the enthusiastic manga- and anime-worship that somehow became all the rage among pasty white American youth of a certain age--but not long ago I cued up Invasion of the Neptune Men and I took special note of how many riffs there were that just basically assumed that every aspect of Japanese culture was automatically ridiculous. LOL those kooky Japanese eat squid! and that sort of thing. Not funny, guys.
(Reminds me: my own boyfriend, who is somewhat younger than me, once used "gay" in the colloquial sense as an insult, and I was a bit astonished. But his attitude toward language in general is rather more flexible than mine.)
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Post by catbasketry on Jan 22, 2013 16:31:04 GMT -5
CT is *worse* about asians? God, glad i own just one disc and shoved it aside as deathly unfunny. (gave up around the time of some bit about a vomiting trumpeteer). And wow... Homotania? Eesh. And i was gonna buy a bunch of rifftrax dvds if i got a tax return. Good lord.
I think i will have to retire my MST collection for a few years. I ended up watching Dr Katz recently, found one slightly racial joke. One. A scribbly drawing of an Asian guy with stereotype eyes.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Jan 23, 2013 2:32:36 GMT -5
I’ll give this one a shot:
Stereotypes will always be funny. They are funny because they are stereotypes.
Stereotypes are NOT funny if they are meant to represent all people of a given race/ethnicity/gender. In other words, they’re not funny when they’re taken seriously.
Stereotypes are funny when they are wrong. MST never says that stereotypes are right.
In almost every case I can think of, MST used stereotypes when they were wrong, either when the movie was using them badly, or when the stereotype joke was meant to be wrong.
They never used a stereotype to say “Hey, Japanese people are stupid!” They would use stereotypes to say, “This stereotypical portrayal of Japan is funny!” Or, more subtly, they used a stereotype when using a stereotype was the wrong thing to do. You wanted them to be politically sincere and comedically sarcastic…and they made a joke and foiled your expectations.
We had a long discussion awhile back about Rifftrax and gay jokes. A few people thought RT was making gay jokes that really just said, “Hey, those dudes seem gay and gayness needs ridicule!” But I always took it more along the lines of, “Gay joke incoming in 5…4…3…” or the more meta perspective of “Here is where we insert the obvious innuendo about this situation to point out the lowest common denominator or our baser instincts.” To put it in a not-at-all funny way.
In other words, there are a different ways to be self-conscious about a stereotype. On the one hand, you can be blatantly sarcastic and ironic, like Mr. B Natural is about white people. That’s the more directly political angle.
But you can also play off expectations. That’s the non-political angle, the side that points out the stereotype and singles it out as odd, without making a full PRO or CON statement about it.
But there’s also the furthest moment of comedy: laughing at everything, even that which is most important to you. If you can’t laugh at the sacred, you aren’t really laughing.
What I always liked about MST was that they didn’t care. Everything was a bad movie. Even the thing you cared about the most.
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Post by continosbuckle on Jan 23, 2013 2:48:44 GMT -5
I’ll give this one a shot: Stereotypes will always be funny. They are funny because they are stereotypes. I suppose this sort of response was inevitable. It took a little longer to show up, but, just like the sunrise, it did. So, since you claim to see these things when we can't, can you tell me what the joke was for the final sketch of Gamera vs Guiron, where Joel and the bots were singing a mock-Japanese song to the Gamera music, with all its "Wei wong waki wooki" nonsense, and how that fundamentally differed in tone and direction from the Chinese seance scene in The Wild World of Batwoman, which the Brains took some sort of exception to as racist? Also, can you also explain how Crow's "Yeah, I need that like I need another 3-inch wiener" riff from one of the Season 8 Japanese movies is making fun of people who believe that stereotype, as opposed to merely pandering to people who believe that stereotype? There are a few more, of course, but I'll just start with these.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Jan 23, 2013 2:58:42 GMT -5
Yep. It's funny because it's wrong.
I'm not being snarky. There's nothing more to it. You're laughing at things that other people are going to get mad about. You're not laughing at them because you believe them. But you're laughing at them because thery're terrible things to say.
Again, it's funny BECAUSE it's wrong to laugh at it. But that doesn't mean that you think it's right.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Jan 23, 2013 3:50:14 GMT -5
I've rewritten this post about four times now, trying to approach it from a few different angles. It's a tricky topic. Saying that it's funny to laugh at because it's wrong to laugh at it makes sense, and I'm sure that that's what they were going for, but then it also gets into a kind of "It's okay for us to say this because we know all the reasons why it shouldn't be said" mentality, and that kind of justification seems like one that could go to a lot of places it shouldn't. Like, perhaps, some of the riffs in question.
Ultimately, I think it's a combination of jokes falling flat and cultural shift. I wish that I had a good suggestion for how it could be unheard, but I'm afraid that I can't help you there. I think that the writers got a bit better about this kind of thing as the show went on, thankfully. (Though I admit that I always found Crow's rant at Japan in season 8 to go a bit far.)
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Jan 23, 2013 11:00:51 GMT -5
Ultimately, I think it's a combination of jokes falling flat and cultural shift. I think that's probably right. Besides, they're from the midwest, so, you know: racist. Heh. I made the mistake of mentioning something about this to my wife this morning. Her response was that I'm just a terrible person with an adolescent sense of humor. And she's usually right about such things.
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Post by catbasketry on Jan 23, 2013 13:58:49 GMT -5
I don't recall the "three inch weiner" joke. Was it in Prince of Space? Was it possible it went with them making turkey jokes? Like, a turkey has a 3 inch weiner? Do they? I don't know.
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