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Post by cavedweller on Jan 12, 2019 11:44:00 GMT -5
One of my favorite sites to purchase KTMA and other episodes was MST3UK with free shipping and very inexpensive. Now the site as of last week is gone. I checked many of the competitors and all of them are gone except Cheesy Flix. Is someone clamping down on these sites selling MST3K DVD's? Is it a sign that Shout Factory will be releasing the KTMA episodes? Or maybe these sites are just so very much fly by night. Maybe some members on the discussion board has some inside baseball on the disappearing sites.
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Post by travis on Jan 12, 2019 13:44:11 GMT -5
I'd imagine now that Shout! Factory has released most of the series officially there is less demand for bootlegs. That'd be my guess.
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Post by hike'em'up on Jan 12, 2019 13:53:47 GMT -5
This is scary, I should probably order the last few available eps left that I don't already have.
Thanks for the heads up.
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Post by Udvarnoky on Jan 12, 2019 14:01:30 GMT -5
The MST3K black market has more or less served its purpose. I'd wager most MSTies relied on bootlegs because they were the only way to see most episodes for a very long time. Official releases have made them obsolete resorts except for about a dozen episodes, and in the case of those it's not like streams or downloads are hard to come by.
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Post by hike'em'up on Jan 12, 2019 14:54:40 GMT -5
The MST3K black market has more or less served its purpose. I'd wager most MSTies relied on bootlegs because they were the only way to see most episodes for a very long time. Official releases have made them obsolete resorts except for about a dozen episodes, and in the case of those it's not like streams or downloads are hard to come by. How many are even available as commercial release? Seems to me not even half of all episodes are, at least leaving far more than a dozen episodes remaining.
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Post by Udvarnoky on Jan 12, 2019 15:05:20 GMT -5
It is accurate that only about a dozen of the national episodes have not seen DVD release at this point. The nature of licenses means that availability is always fluctuating, but once Shout! gets through their re-releases (possibly by the end of this year), every episode that was ever on DVD will be in print again with the exception of Soultaker, Final Sacrifice and the Gamera episodes. And even that could change with little notice, as it already has for Final Sacrifice, at least in the VOD realm.
Where are you getting the "not even half" figure from? Note that various VOD portals do not offer the totality of what Shout! has the rights to, so what you'll find on, say, Rifftrax.com or Amazon Video does not represent everything Shout! offers on disc.
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Post by Mod City on Jan 12, 2019 15:12:35 GMT -5
The MST3K black market has more or less served its purpose. I'd wager most MSTies relied on bootlegs because they were the only way to see most episodes for a very long time. Official releases have made them obsolete resorts except for about a dozen episodes, and in the case of those it's not like streams or downloads are hard to come by. This is what I would think. Most of the sellers who dealt in bootlegs disappeared a long time ago. There used to be quite a few. It's too easy these days to get legitimate releases, which is good, as at least some of that money goes to the creators of show (or at least some of them).
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Post by hike'em'up on Jan 12, 2019 16:33:30 GMT -5
It is accurate that only about a dozen of the national episodes have not seen DVD release at this point.... Where are you getting the "not even half" figure from? From my aged brain's lazy guess. Without faithfully tallying them all up I didn't think there would be more than ~90 episodes currently available, commercially, to physically own. Even if I underestimated that grossly, which is obviously possible, my brain doesn't accept that over 150 of them are. Maybe they are, what do I know?
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Post by Udvarnoky on Jan 12, 2019 16:41:02 GMT -5
There are indeed that many available. Travis maintains a handy list of what's not available in the opening post of this thread. Any episode not cited there is commercially available. If you are looking for a particular episode, we can point you in the right direction.
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Post by hike'em'up on Jan 12, 2019 16:47:26 GMT -5
Cool, thanks for the link/directions
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Post by cavedweller on Jan 12, 2019 17:34:29 GMT -5
The MST3K black market has more or less served its purpose. I'd wager most MSTies relied on bootlegs because they were the only way to see most episodes for a very long time. Official releases have made them obsolete resorts except for about a dozen episodes, and in the case of those it's not like streams or downloads are hard to come by. How many are even available as commercial release? Seems to me not even half of all episodes are, at least leaving far more than a dozen episodes remaining. Served its purpose? KTMA will never be released so I would think those 21 episodes would keep the bootleg going for die hards.
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Post by hike'em'up on Jan 12, 2019 18:57:38 GMT -5
Served its purpose? KTMA will never be released so I would think those 21 episodes would keep the bootleg going for die hards. Not only that but those bootleg sites pretty well gave the buyer carte blanche of the entire available catalog, minus those currently available commercially. I never really cared for the random combination of 3-4 episodes per released volume so the freedom to buy whichever and however many individual episodes I wanted (and as previously pointed out, for more reasonable prices than the commercial buys [and I do also own a fair collection of those) at a time was far more convenient. Hard to imagine that expanded and continued commercial availability has put an end to the market for that bit of consumer freedom.
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Post by Mod City on Jan 12, 2019 20:02:47 GMT -5
Not only that but those bootleg sites pretty well gave the buyer carte blanche of the entire available catalog, minus those currently available commercially. I never really cared for the random combination of 3-4 episodes per released volume so the freedom to buy whichever and however many individual episodes I wanted (and as previously pointed out, for more reasonable prices than the commercial buys [and I do also own a fair collection of those) at a time was far more convenient. Hard to imagine that expanded and continued commercial availability has put an end to the market for that bit of consumer freedom. To be fair, those sites aren't selling "consumer freedom." They're selling bootleg MST3K discs, which are someone else's IP. And when they're reduced to dealing in only a handful of episodes, at what point does it continue to be worth it to dabble in that legal gray area? I'm surprised as many sites still exist the way it is already. Many, many have disappeared over the years. It's just another facet of the fandom that's fading away. There used to be dozens and dozens of tape traders - not sellers - online, and that eventually disappeared, as well. We used to have a whole trading section on this board, but it was removed because it really served no purpose anymore. Times change. Best Brains was pretty cool and looked the other way on bootleg sales for a long time. Now that Shout! owns the show outright, they may very well be leaning on sellers to cool it. At this point I'm not sure why they'd bother, but who knows.
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Post by Udvarnoky on Jan 12, 2019 20:11:27 GMT -5
How many are even available as commercial release? Seems to me not even half of all episodes are, at least leaving far more than a dozen episodes remaining. Served its purpose? KTMA will never be released so I would think those 21 episodes would keep the bootleg going for die hards. The fact that only a handful of episodes "need" to be bootlegged any more goes a long way toward answering why there are far fewer DVD sites than there once were, which was your original question. I think the bigger and more obvious reason though is that fan-made discs literally have nothing to offer in the digital age. MSTies who are willing to bootleg are just going to obtain their bootlegs online, making mail-in DVDs an unnecessary middle man. After all, if you are someone willing to obtain episodes illegally, why would you wait for a package or pay one red cent to anybody? The fan DVD scene had more of a purpose back when internet bandwidth was lower and compression codecs less sophisticated. Now fans with high quality sources can just upload their file straight to Youtube or a file-sharing site.
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Post by hike'em'up on Jan 12, 2019 20:16:29 GMT -5
I'll put it this way: if Shout! had offered up every single MST3K title and consumers could buy whichever episodes they wanted, as many as they wanted, and in whatever order they wanted I'd have bought the entire series through them. That's the freedom I was referring to and I would have most definitely preferred that to looking over my shoulder and buying bootleg.
But they offered nothing even remotely close to that, instead choosing a slow drip of random episodes bundled together in sets every few months. I couldn't imagine a more annoying way of going about it for fans of the show or for anybody else, really.
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