The Netflix revival.
Dec 18, 2021 0:25:34 GMT -5
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BoB3K, davidbeegah, and 3 more like this
Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 18, 2021 0:25:34 GMT -5
I had the week off, so I decided to revisit Seasons 11 and 12 to see if any of my prior opinions had changed a few years on and to prep for Season 13. Its been a few years since I sat down and watched any of these episodes, and the last time was to revisit Killer Fish to time how chopped down the movie was, not to really watch.
In any case, I wasn't going to watch 20 full episodes, I just didn't have the time, but I wanted to revisit a majority of the episodes. So I watched the first 35-40 minutes of a majority of each season, avoiding the episodes I'd watched more than once or twice previously so I wouldn't recall as much.
I didn't want to make a new thread since this is mostly just my musings in retrospect for the brief Netflix era.
I revisited Cry Wilderness, Starcrash, The Land That Time Forgot, Loves of Hercules, Wizards 1 & 2, Carnival Magic, Christmas That Almost Wasn't, Atlantic Rim, Lords of the Deep & Day Time Ended. So a majority.
Some I watched a bit further than 35-40 mins, but all at least that much.
The main issues I recall with Season 11 are still issues. The pre-riffing/editing issues in the theater. The TOO rapid-fire of the riffs is present in the first half of the season and eases back by the end. The whole thing still seems very assembly line, particularly the host segments which all seem rushed, unrehearsed and half-done.
But! The saving grace is that Season 11 had decent riffing. Not GREAT with any consistency, but fairly decent riffing throughout. There's far too much of it and could've used a good edit to pick out the best bits, but I get they had LOTS of guest writers to include.
There are issues there though. The formatting of riffs is occasionally wonky, they do "bits" a bit too often that go on too long. And Barron's delivery of Servo in Season 11 is absolutely dreadful. And they lean WAY too heavily on forced catchphrases (Paul, Bang, Capsule, Pretty Nice, etc) that echo Crow's fake catchphrase (You know you want me baby!) but miss the point that sketch was trying to make.
But otherwise, the actual content of the riffs is generally fairly good...for the first half of the season or so. There's a reason most of the episodes I rewatched (that I hadn't seen more than once or twice) were in the back half of Season 11. The riff pacing does get better, but also oddly stale and dull, just not as funny. This got worse in Season 12 (though that's easier to pinpoint why, as Season 12's writing sucked, but more on that later).
I THINK I know why this drop off happened, and it has to do with the editing of the movies and the pace of the riffs. One stayed consistent throughout the season and the other decreased.
So as we all know, the films are more edited down than they used to be. In the old show the average theater time was something like 72-76 minutes, sometimes breaking past 80 minutes. Season 11 averaged something like 66-70 minutes. Season 12 was shorter, 65 mins or less.
In the old show we were watching the overwhelming majority of a movie, especially some of those cheap oldies that were only 70ish minutes already. Enough movie was there to follow the plot. They might've cut an extraneous side-plot here and there, but you could generally follow the movie itself with the riffing on top of it. The editors knew how much they could cut down before the movie became totally incoherent. And I think that's the key to how I personally (and I think a decent amount of other fans) enjoy the show and how it works:
It's a movie with riffing on top. The movie is the vehicle for entertainment, the foundation. Everything else hangs on the movie. The riffs react to and depend on the movie. The viewer reacts to the movie first, then the riff that itself reacts to the movie. The host segments are tertiary and are built on top of the movie and the riffs.
But the movie is vital.
If the viewer can't connect to the movie, if the movie has been cut up and edited down past the point of a followable narrative, the viewer can't care about what's happening on screen, it's just constant noise.
Add riffs on top and its basically just a reaction video like the ones on YouTube where someone watches the most exciting or funny or emotional parts of a movie/video game/etc. You as the viewer don't understand any of the context, you're just watching the "best bits". And frankly I find that a pretty empty experience.
But! And this is something I just realized on this last rewatch, the rapid fire riffing in the first half of Season 11 mostly overcomes the issue altogether. While I admit that I'm a traditionalist when it comes to how the show should be about the movie first and the riffing on top, the overwhelming amount of riffs (with a solid amount of them being actually funny) overcomes this issue. It becomes ABOUT the riffs, which I'm not wholly comfortable with in principle but I can forgive when its entertaining. It becomes its own thing. It isn't classic MST, but it works. This was most evident in Cry Wilderness.
But this didn't last. And its not hard to understand why, that kind of pace is untenable. So when the pace of riffs slowed mid-season the show shifted back towards the classic movie-riff dynamic where the movie needs to be the foundation for the riffs, but the movies had already been edited down so much that it was a weak foundation and I personally had a hard time keeping attention on the episode.
The riffs weren't enough anymore and I couldn't follow the film enough to care.
But! And I will give Season 11 this: the riffs, even once they slowed down, were generally passable. Not quite enough that I want to revisit most of the episodes. There's still enough annoyances throughout the episodes to make revisiting not worth it for most of them, but they are generally good riffs.
Now...Season 12...
Season 12 fixed a few things, but broke a few others that outweighed what they fixed.
The riffs were now pre-recorded by all 3 performers in one sitting as opposed to totally separate in Season 11. So the riffs sounded more natural, less edited together. Barron toned down his Servo. The host segments seemed to be rehearsed and had a bit more polish.
But...the movies were now even shorter, barely over and hour, making 2+ hour movies like Killer Fish totally impossible to follow. Cutting out the best, goofiest bits of what should be a slam dunk like Mac and Me. Making a boring movie like Lords of the Deep even MORE boring because we don't know or care about anything happening on screen because all the establishing and characterization (what there was of it) is now gone.
At this point the movies are just a blur of pre-edited, selected funny things the hosts can react against. They're YouTube reaction videos.
And on top of it, the riffing went wayyyyy down in quality. The normal pace of riffing remained, but the actual content of riffs had a notable shift to lowest-common-denominator humor. Broad toilet jokes and "nerd culture" humor. Anything remotely obscure was readily explained (the Myst and Diogenes riffs from Day Time Ended still infuriate me years later).
In the old show they often said they didn't ask who would get it, but that the right people would get it. They clearly were concerned about being too esoteric in Season 12.
In all Season 12 is a slog. The episodes are shorter, but they feel longer. I kept checking how much time had passed. The riffing is so bad, the movies so inconsequential that I have a really hard time getting through 35-40 minutes much less the whole thing.
Now, its obvious (in spite of what they've said publicly) that the changes made in Season 12 were to try and make the show more attractive to Netflix. And I think we all know Netflix was always the goal when Season 11 was announced.
Now, the interesting thing will be to see what kind of show they put together without the pretext of making it for some other company's format (presumably).
I'm hopeful that they've finally realized they're making these for fans and don't feel the need to cut up the movies so much/make the riffing super accessible so it works better on Netflix for the general public.
I'm sure I have a whole bunch of other thoughts and episode-specific nitpicks, but that's just my overall thoughts on the Netflix era.
In any case, I wasn't going to watch 20 full episodes, I just didn't have the time, but I wanted to revisit a majority of the episodes. So I watched the first 35-40 minutes of a majority of each season, avoiding the episodes I'd watched more than once or twice previously so I wouldn't recall as much.
I didn't want to make a new thread since this is mostly just my musings in retrospect for the brief Netflix era.
I revisited Cry Wilderness, Starcrash, The Land That Time Forgot, Loves of Hercules, Wizards 1 & 2, Carnival Magic, Christmas That Almost Wasn't, Atlantic Rim, Lords of the Deep & Day Time Ended. So a majority.
Some I watched a bit further than 35-40 mins, but all at least that much.
The main issues I recall with Season 11 are still issues. The pre-riffing/editing issues in the theater. The TOO rapid-fire of the riffs is present in the first half of the season and eases back by the end. The whole thing still seems very assembly line, particularly the host segments which all seem rushed, unrehearsed and half-done.
But! The saving grace is that Season 11 had decent riffing. Not GREAT with any consistency, but fairly decent riffing throughout. There's far too much of it and could've used a good edit to pick out the best bits, but I get they had LOTS of guest writers to include.
There are issues there though. The formatting of riffs is occasionally wonky, they do "bits" a bit too often that go on too long. And Barron's delivery of Servo in Season 11 is absolutely dreadful. And they lean WAY too heavily on forced catchphrases (Paul, Bang, Capsule, Pretty Nice, etc) that echo Crow's fake catchphrase (You know you want me baby!) but miss the point that sketch was trying to make.
But otherwise, the actual content of the riffs is generally fairly good...for the first half of the season or so. There's a reason most of the episodes I rewatched (that I hadn't seen more than once or twice) were in the back half of Season 11. The riff pacing does get better, but also oddly stale and dull, just not as funny. This got worse in Season 12 (though that's easier to pinpoint why, as Season 12's writing sucked, but more on that later).
I THINK I know why this drop off happened, and it has to do with the editing of the movies and the pace of the riffs. One stayed consistent throughout the season and the other decreased.
So as we all know, the films are more edited down than they used to be. In the old show the average theater time was something like 72-76 minutes, sometimes breaking past 80 minutes. Season 11 averaged something like 66-70 minutes. Season 12 was shorter, 65 mins or less.
In the old show we were watching the overwhelming majority of a movie, especially some of those cheap oldies that were only 70ish minutes already. Enough movie was there to follow the plot. They might've cut an extraneous side-plot here and there, but you could generally follow the movie itself with the riffing on top of it. The editors knew how much they could cut down before the movie became totally incoherent. And I think that's the key to how I personally (and I think a decent amount of other fans) enjoy the show and how it works:
It's a movie with riffing on top. The movie is the vehicle for entertainment, the foundation. Everything else hangs on the movie. The riffs react to and depend on the movie. The viewer reacts to the movie first, then the riff that itself reacts to the movie. The host segments are tertiary and are built on top of the movie and the riffs.
But the movie is vital.
If the viewer can't connect to the movie, if the movie has been cut up and edited down past the point of a followable narrative, the viewer can't care about what's happening on screen, it's just constant noise.
Add riffs on top and its basically just a reaction video like the ones on YouTube where someone watches the most exciting or funny or emotional parts of a movie/video game/etc. You as the viewer don't understand any of the context, you're just watching the "best bits". And frankly I find that a pretty empty experience.
But! And this is something I just realized on this last rewatch, the rapid fire riffing in the first half of Season 11 mostly overcomes the issue altogether. While I admit that I'm a traditionalist when it comes to how the show should be about the movie first and the riffing on top, the overwhelming amount of riffs (with a solid amount of them being actually funny) overcomes this issue. It becomes ABOUT the riffs, which I'm not wholly comfortable with in principle but I can forgive when its entertaining. It becomes its own thing. It isn't classic MST, but it works. This was most evident in Cry Wilderness.
But this didn't last. And its not hard to understand why, that kind of pace is untenable. So when the pace of riffs slowed mid-season the show shifted back towards the classic movie-riff dynamic where the movie needs to be the foundation for the riffs, but the movies had already been edited down so much that it was a weak foundation and I personally had a hard time keeping attention on the episode.
The riffs weren't enough anymore and I couldn't follow the film enough to care.
But! And I will give Season 11 this: the riffs, even once they slowed down, were generally passable. Not quite enough that I want to revisit most of the episodes. There's still enough annoyances throughout the episodes to make revisiting not worth it for most of them, but they are generally good riffs.
Now...Season 12...
Season 12 fixed a few things, but broke a few others that outweighed what they fixed.
The riffs were now pre-recorded by all 3 performers in one sitting as opposed to totally separate in Season 11. So the riffs sounded more natural, less edited together. Barron toned down his Servo. The host segments seemed to be rehearsed and had a bit more polish.
But...the movies were now even shorter, barely over and hour, making 2+ hour movies like Killer Fish totally impossible to follow. Cutting out the best, goofiest bits of what should be a slam dunk like Mac and Me. Making a boring movie like Lords of the Deep even MORE boring because we don't know or care about anything happening on screen because all the establishing and characterization (what there was of it) is now gone.
At this point the movies are just a blur of pre-edited, selected funny things the hosts can react against. They're YouTube reaction videos.
And on top of it, the riffing went wayyyyy down in quality. The normal pace of riffing remained, but the actual content of riffs had a notable shift to lowest-common-denominator humor. Broad toilet jokes and "nerd culture" humor. Anything remotely obscure was readily explained (the Myst and Diogenes riffs from Day Time Ended still infuriate me years later).
In the old show they often said they didn't ask who would get it, but that the right people would get it. They clearly were concerned about being too esoteric in Season 12.
In all Season 12 is a slog. The episodes are shorter, but they feel longer. I kept checking how much time had passed. The riffing is so bad, the movies so inconsequential that I have a really hard time getting through 35-40 minutes much less the whole thing.
Now, its obvious (in spite of what they've said publicly) that the changes made in Season 12 were to try and make the show more attractive to Netflix. And I think we all know Netflix was always the goal when Season 11 was announced.
Now, the interesting thing will be to see what kind of show they put together without the pretext of making it for some other company's format (presumably).
I'm hopeful that they've finally realized they're making these for fans and don't feel the need to cut up the movies so much/make the riffing super accessible so it works better on Netflix for the general public.
I'm sure I have a whole bunch of other thoughts and episode-specific nitpicks, but that's just my overall thoughts on the Netflix era.