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Post by slainmonkey on Jan 3, 2024 0:24:02 GMT -5
I've been watching MST3k since season 1. I personally don't care about the sets, its the comedy. In the original show, the 5 on screen actors wrote the show. Each character had their own personality. Joel/Mike, Tom Servo and Crow had distinct personalities. When the actor changed, the personality of the character changed. In the Netflix episodes, it felt like they wrote a whole bunch of jokes, randomly assigned them to characters and had hired actors read them in one take. Some hit and a lot missed badly. I haven't seen the new eps but I assume that trend continued. IMO MST3k is more a stand up performance than a scripted comedy. You need a flow to the jokes for it to work at its best. The sets isn’t a deal breaker per se, however it does make you feel hyper aware you’re watching a compromised product, and it does make it lose some of the charm of the production. With that said, if the show were firing on all cylinders in other areas, it’s something I would gladly look past. As it is, it just feels like another victim of the show’s diminishing quality….11 outside of a few caveats was a solid return for MST3k, season 12 made a number of unfortunate changes to make the show more “streamable” and had a noticeable decline in the writing quality…..now season 13 has made so many compromises, added so many gimmicks, and is trying so hard to be marketable, that the show has largely lost it’s identity. It left the shows most loyal fans not feeling overly confident in what that planed season 14 had to hold.
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Post by intonyeon on Jan 3, 2024 9:26:54 GMT -5
But notice for all the crowdfunding and rifftrax numbers, it’s always a dedicated but small base of fans. And while that’s great for a crowdfunding campaign and audio commentaries, for a full show it isn’t sustainable. I suppose I see why Joel and the gang thought that going full indie was gonna work, but even there they are at a full mercy of crowdfunding that ended in complete failure this time.
I do find it odd that people say 11 looked good, I always thought it looked even cheaper than the original seasons, perhaps being filmed on videotape helped with that? Who knows.
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Post by slainmonkey on Jan 3, 2024 10:38:00 GMT -5
I do find it odd that people say 11 looked good, I always thought it looked even cheaper than the original seasons, perhaps being filmed on videotape helped with that? Who knows. I think aspects of it looked good, but season 11 was always very statically shot; which even with the limited sets in the original, they tried to film it with a little more life.
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Post by RedTom on Jan 3, 2024 12:24:59 GMT -5
Yeah I really preferred the fully cheap, thrift store stock shelves with the Hungry Hungry Hippos, but that's obviously the MSTie purist in me. Things look so good in standard def.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Jan 3, 2024 19:35:45 GMT -5
While I do agree that I have a preference for the charm of the shoestring budget, I also can't say that I blame them for making things that look shinier. I would too. And it's not like the show itself never innovated or improved its quality of set over the eleven seasons. There's a voice in my head saying "But the new stuff is stylistically different, not just more expensive" but I've known that inner voice long enough to see when it's trying to pretend that it doesn't have a bias.
Unfortunately, we may also be at a time in history when "make it cheaper and with more charm" might be more expensive than making it more expensive depending on the production tools they have available, weird as that sounds.
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Post by kracker on Jan 3, 2024 22:59:52 GMT -5
Well the idea is to kinda have both. Make things on a shoestring budget but spend the money to make things nice where they actually really need it. I thought the Return struck that balance to the point where I felt that if the show had never been cancelled, that is what it would have naturally evolved into. A "lo-fi" or retro movement for TV isn't necessarily that expensive. I've seen instances of it being done before, just not from a big studio. It might be depending on what you're doing, for example, hand-drawn animation is more expensive. But I see more instances, people are afraid to do it, don't want to spend all this money on a project just to make it look old and antiquated. I see this as a time in history where it has yet to be really embraced.
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Post by puppetwhisperer on Jan 4, 2024 0:01:30 GMT -5
Okay okay, exaggerated, yes. I'm simply saying they were remote locationing when it was at its very last limb and not any real threat. Shooting themselves in the foot for basically no reason. Again, a reminder that everyone ended up shooting together anyhow, just in front of a green screen, and at two different locations, which actually could've made the covid threat worse than just one shooting location.
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Post by slainmonkey on Jan 4, 2024 7:03:13 GMT -5
Okay okay, exaggerated, yes. I'm simply saying they were remote locationing when it was at its very last limb and not any real threat. Shooting themselves in the foot for basically no reason. Again, a reminder that everyone ended up shooting together anyhow, just in front of a green screen, and at two different locations, which actually could've made the covid threat worse than just one shooting location. Honestly, I accepted the fact it was all going to be all green screened. During the kickstarter they were suggesting using models in place of sets, which I actually thought would have been a fair compromise, and I feel would have match the shows feel far better. Instead they nixed that in favour of a paper cutout aesthetic which honestly gave everything a rather lifeless quality…which I’m not a fan of. That said, it’s something I could have looked past if the quality of the writing were better.
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