|
Post by Diet Kolos on Jan 14, 2022 11:41:58 GMT -5
I find it odd that you keep bringing up Riffrax. No one is discussing Rifftrax. Its an odd deflection.
But let's see if I can unpack this.
So classic MST can keep boring scenes in because they're the good kind of boring and the writers didn't use the same gimmicks to get through them every episode, so they wrote new material that made each episode tolerable and funny to the best of their ability.
But its ok for new MST to cut these scenes out because they're the wrong kind of boring and no writing team would spend the time and energy to put their best material on screen when they could just take the shortcut of removing it entirely.
And Rifftrax bad, of course. Gotta throw that in, randomly. Plus the pointless ad hominem at the end for good measure.
Yeah. Yeah...ok then. I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Jan 14, 2022 8:53:26 GMT -5
You know what's boring? Endless walking through the woods scenes. Cheap movies have used walking through the woods as a good way to pad out films for decades and decades and it's always boring when presented on film. You know what makes it not boring? Riffing. Go watch Pod People. Watch how many scenes of people walking through the woods there are. I'm sure the Brains thought it was boring too. But you know what they did? They wrote riffs (Chief? McCloud!).
Good writers find ways. Its their job. That's why they're writing for a show that makes bad boring movies funny.
And even if the movie is still boring, like say, Fire Maidens of Outer Space, where there are hundreds of walking scenes, they still write riffs for them and even if it's still boring they can still convey to the audience that they as the writers are bored. And it can still be funny, because it's a shared experience between the writers and the viewers that they are watching a boring movie.
Same with Manos. Manos is 80% filler and 20% unpleasant grease. The grease is what's remembered, but the filler adds to and is a part of the experience. The characters in the episode break down and cry because it's so boring. You the viewer can relate to them. It's funny and cathartic because you're watching what they're watching.
That's the point of the show, to "suffer" through a movie with the on-screen characters. Build camaraderie between the viewer and the show.
Editing down these movies to best-of highlight reels removes that vital viewer-riffer connection and turns the show into a long YouTube reaction video. But heaven forbid anyone gets a little bored.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Jan 14, 2022 8:26:41 GMT -5
Agree, boring can be made funny. Its been done before.
Oh, and have you SEEN that dance number in Mac and Me? The thing we're talking about? Its many things, but it is NOT boring. Its 4ish minutes long and as of writing has 1.2 million views on YouTube. Sure are a lot of people willing to sit through something so boring and mediocre unriffed.
Matt's point was that besides Season 12's ridiculous time constraints, its "hard to write for". Meaning it would've taken effort to come up with 4 minutes of material to say about dancing other than just repeating "pretty nice" ad nauseam.
Go watch it, its pretty damned riffable.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Jan 11, 2022 17:24:13 GMT -5
"You know, we could've made funny comments, but the movie wasn't that good."
--TV's Frank, 323-Castle of Fu Manchu
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Jan 11, 2022 14:47:31 GMT -5
Its almost like these movies are BAD and it requires a decent amount of effort on the writers' part to make these movies watchable and fun.
If you wanted 1 quote to sum up what my main problems are with Netflix MST, there it is. My goodness.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Jan 11, 2022 14:42:45 GMT -5
*shakes head*
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Jan 5, 2022 17:24:24 GMT -5
Did they say why it was cancelled?
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 22, 2021 16:55:54 GMT -5
I took a look at it.
It asked what kind of devices you watch TV/stream on and how often, the browser you use, the streaming services you watch and how often, your upload/download speed, your KS backer number, if you have VHX and if so if you already have any MST episodes on it/how many and how often you use it, plus if you have any thoughts on how to improve VHX.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 22, 2021 15:30:39 GMT -5
They'd prob require an NDA for beta testing, most places do. But its possible they wouldn't.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 21, 2021 16:06:59 GMT -5
I did like the Mads moon set. I just wished they showed more of it/moved the camera around so we could get a good look at the details.
There was a wide shot in one of the episodes shot from way back to show the giant robot thing, and the set was huge with a bunch of detailed areas, but we only ever got to see the one angle on those doors.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 20, 2021 12:00:51 GMT -5
It's interesting about the run times. When I was slogging through the Season 11 episodes that I did watch my reaction to the length of every episode was essentially "Isn't this thing almost done yet?" I swear when I was watching Carnival Magic, aka The Last Revival Episode I Finished, it felt about six hours long, and it wasn't fun. It goes back to what I was saying in my post about revisiting the Netflix era. In that back-half of Season 11, their riffing slows down to a near-normal pace, but the episodes also get really hard to watch. This lead me to a few conclusions: A. The callous and rather ham-fisted cutting up of the movies to not exceed some arbitrary time constraint really impedes the viewer's ability to connect and care about watching the movie. B. The rapid-fire riffing from the beginning of Season 11 carries a lot of water for the watchability of the show in its current format and can even make up for the movies being so heavily cut up. It doesn't matter what's being watched because the riffing is constantly hilarious, or at least drowning out the movie to the point where it doesn't really matter. C. Without the rapid-fire, the viewer's attention can return more towards watching the movie instead of focusing solely on the riffers. However, since the viewer can't easily connect to the movie due to its compromised nature, the viewing experience becomes a rather tedious exercise. You're not watching a movie, you're watching random film clips without a coherent through-plot and waiting for the riffers to say something funny, rather than watching a movie and having the riffers say funny things as you watch in tandem with them. This became a much worse problem in Season 12. They need to strike a balance. Leave enough of the movie to be coherent and followable, and retain a decent pace of riffing. Most of the movies they selected are in the 80-90 minute range for Season 13, so I'm hopeful that even if they do an arbitrary 70 minute cutoff, the movies themselves won't have to be edited down as much as, say, Killer Fish, which was missing 45+ minutes of movie.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 19, 2021 12:01:02 GMT -5
There's a group who have a YouTube channel - BranzantFiLMS - who have done a couple of fan-made Gamera MST3K eps. Gamera vs. Viras, and the aforementioned Gamera vs. Jiger. The timeline of this is somewhere between Seasons 7 and 8, when it wasn't known if the real show would be back and it seemed as if the last ep of S7 would've been it. You know when Trace leaves and everyone goes off to the ends of the universe as balls of energy. The premise is that some guy named Helmut Caruso was the experiment for this timeline when Crow returned to the SOL early. I think they got the idea because Bill's Crow actually mentions some guy named Helmut in the actual first ep of S8 (or one of the S8 eps). They actually use Trace's voice and Kevin's voice in the beginning, using sound clips from the actual show, then have it that their voices change so then they use the guys doing Crow's and Servo's voices from that point on. Neat idea. So, if anyone doesn't want to wait around for S13 to watch a fairly decent ep of Gamera vs. Jiger, you should check it out. It's not hold-your-stomach-split-your-sides hilarious, but both eps got quite a few chuckles from me and it most definitely is in the spirit of the older eps. They are currently working on a third Gamera ep, though with the pandemic it's taking them longer than they originally planned. Pretty cute, I recommend fans of the show to watch. Co-sign. Theirs riffs are great.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 19, 2021 0:58:05 GMT -5
Gee, I think I'm noticing a pattern. I've always thought Season 11 felt very assembly line, cut/paste and boy was I right. No matter how long the movie was, it got cut to a uniform 70 minutes. Even if the episodes themselves were shorter than 90 minutes. How different is this from the original show, though? I don't have a good memory for run-times, but weren't they generally editing movies down to a uniform length? Edit down, yes. Uniform length? No. See here.A fan did a count of all the riffs and time in-theater in the classic series awhile back. For example, theater time in Season 10 ran between 73 and 77 minutes. Season 6 between 73 and 80 minutes. Season 3, 74 to 85 minutes. Etc. They clearly put together episodes to suit the movie. They had 97/92 minutes per episode, chose the best ~75ish minutes of movie first (but clearly didn't mind going longer if need-be or shorter if they had to), then timed out the sketches to fill out the rest of the episode. But editing every single movie to be within 10-15 seconds of a set cut-off minute? No, they didn't do that.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 18, 2021 23:25:08 GMT -5
It makes me wonder about Season 13 and if they're going to use a uniform movie length again. We know they have to use all 84 minutes of Gamera vs Jiger, I'd guess the whole episode would be about 97 mins long. It would be strange if the rest of the movies are still a 65/70 min length and the Gamera movie is randomly ~15+ minutes longer. But it wouldn't surprise me if they stuck to uniform movie lengths, unfortunately. Let's just hope its closer to 70+ minutes.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 18, 2021 21:49:46 GMT -5
So while I was thinking about it, I decided to go back and time the "in-theater" time to get some precise measurements on how much of the movies were getting cut out...
I've only done the first 5 episodes of Season 11 so far, but I've found something...interesting...
Episode-Total Length-Theater Length 1101-90:23-70:03 1102-89:10-70:00 1103-87:33-70:08 1104-92:06-70:12 1105-86:33-70:00
Gee, I think I'm noticing a pattern. I've always thought Season 11 felt very assembly line, cut/paste and boy was I right. No matter how long the movie was, it got cut to a uniform 70 minutes. Even if the episodes themselves were shorter than 90 minutes.
Just...cold, callous, uniform cutting of the movies. How lazy.
I always wondered why the best part of Time Travelers, the ending, was cut off. Now I know why. Now I'm annoyed all over again.
I'm going to skip to 1113 & 1114 to see if its the same all through the season, but I suspect it is.
Edit: Yup! 70:12 & 70:00, respectively.
If I had to estimate, I'd say the standard theater time is 65 minutes in Season 12, but we'll see.
Edit 2: Yes sir! 65 minutes for both 1201 & 1202 so far.
Jiminy Christmas. This basically proves that at this point the show isn't about the movie if every single movie gets cut down to a standard time regardless of the content.
|
|