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Post by mongo on Mar 27, 2012 21:33:49 GMT -5
Now that XXIII is out, I have included those four episodes as now being available through Shout. The four XXIV episodes are now included as being next in line.
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Post by mongo on Feb 7, 2012 11:29:24 GMT -5
It seems implausible that real astronomers would smoke heavily in the presence of sensitive optical instruments, but then again the actors really are smoking and they really are standing next to a big telescope, and presumably the people who ran the observatory didn't mind. That would never be permitted today, of course, but astronomers were remarkably lax about smoking around telescopes until fairly recently (the last 50 years or so). There is a story about the famed astronomer Fritz Zwicky, one of the top astronomers of the 20th century, and the 5m (200-inch) Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory in California. This telescope was so large that the observer's location was actually inside the telescope, suspended at the focal point above the huge primary mirror. There was a small crow's-nest type cage with a chair seat for the astronomer to sit on while he (astronomers were almost always men back then) waited for the current photographic exposure to finish. The story goes that Fritz Zwicky would sit in that cage all night, smoking one cigarette after another and tossing the butts onto the floor of the cage. Every morning after Zwicky was done, the telescope custodian (nobody would trust an astronomer to take care of the telescope) would sweep out a carpet of cigarette butts from the prime-focus cage. If a cigarette butt had ever fallen from the cage onto the mirror itself, it would have had to be re-silvered, at considerable cost in time and money, but fortunately none ever did -- although plenty of them did fall out of the cage, they all missed the mirror itself on the way down, landing on the floor beside the telescope instead.
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Post by mongo on Dec 5, 2011 13:07:48 GMT -5
Have updated the ratings as of the day before Box Set XXII is officially released.
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Post by mongo on Oct 23, 2011 12:29:47 GMT -5
What's interesting to me is that 19/25 of the top-rated episodes were released by Rhino/Shout, but only 10 of the bottom 25 were. That could mean that Rhino/Shout really knows what they're doing with MST3K releases, only releasing popular ones, or that people are rating episodes they haven't seen or haven't seen in decades. This conclusion seems to be supported when looking at the entire Rhino/Shout release list. There have been 100 episodes released (even if 2 of them were later recalled for copyright reasons). 63 of them rate as better than the average of all episodes according to this thread's poll results, and only 37 of them rate as lower than average. This includes the Gamera box set, which had only 1 out of 5 episodes rated as better than average. If that box set were excluded, then 65% -- almost two-thirds -- of the released episodes would be rated as above average, and only 35% would be rated as below average.
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Post by mongo on Oct 22, 2011 14:42:49 GMT -5
Just updated the list with the Box Set XXII episodes,.
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Post by mongo on Aug 21, 2011 17:03:40 GMT -5
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I have never understood the appeal of tattoos on women. As Scotty said, they are basically putting permanent graffiti on their bodies.
Ladies, you look better without tats. Honestly, you do.
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Post by mongo on Mar 24, 2011 20:14:31 GMT -5
Some people might be interested by this. It is generally accepted that the really good MST3K episodes start with a really bad movie. I decided to test this by getting the IMDb rating for each of the movies that were MSTed. As can be seen in the graph below, there is indeed a definite negative correlation between the IMDb rating of a movie, and the rating of its MSTed version -- on average, a really bad original movie results in a MST3K episode rating about one full point higher than for a good original movie. The horizontal numbers are the IMDb rating of the original movie (on a scale of 1 to 10), the vertical numbers are the ratings of the MST3K version, and the blue line is the linear trend of the original vs. MST3K versions' ratings.
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Post by mongo on Mar 12, 2011 15:03:16 GMT -5
I thought that there might be interest in a ranking of the various box sets using the above episode ratings. For each box set (including "The Essentials", I have computed the average rating of the episodes contained within. From highest to lowest:
8.333 -- Essentials (2 episodes) 7.782 -- Box Set 5 7.740 -- Box Set 2 (3 episodes) 7.694 -- Box Set 18 7.603 -- Box Set 24 7.452 -- Box Set 16 7.400 -- Box Set 20 7.399 -- Box Set 8 7.394 -- Box Set 10 7.385 -- Box Set 4 7.348 -- Box Set 22 7.330 -- Box Set 19 7.280 -- Box Set 11 7.250 -- Box Set 6 (3 episodes) 7.245 -- Box Set 1 7.225 -- Box Set 13 7.190 -- Box Set 7 7.178 -- Box Set 15 7.088 -- Box Set 12 7.021 -- Box Set 17 6.810 -- Box Set 9 6.788 -- Box Set 3 (3 episodes) 6.721 -- Box Set 23 6.688 -- Box Set 14 6.425 -- Box Set 21 (5 episodes)
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Post by mongo on Mar 7, 2011 9:41:14 GMT -5
The all-Gamera box set is XXI. We do not yet know what will be in XXII.
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Post by mongo on Mar 5, 2011 22:28:49 GMT -5
So I did. I had meant to say XXI, which is as far as we know which episodes will be included.
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Post by mongo on Mar 5, 2011 20:01:17 GMT -5
No, I get 96 episodes:
82 -- box sets 1-21 (not counting "shorts" DVDs or 10.2) 2 -- Essentials 9 -- Singles 1 -- Giant Gila Monster from box set 10.2 1 -- VHS Amazing Colossal Man 1 -- Movie
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Post by mongo on Mar 5, 2011 18:49:37 GMT -5
Just back from looking at Amazon. It looks like every OOP title is available for a price, even the VHS Amazing Colossal Man. So I guess that the total, once XXII is out, will be 96 episodes including the movie (or 54.23%)
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Post by mongo on Mar 5, 2011 18:07:10 GMT -5
The funny thing is, I have a Rhino copy of Amazing Colossal Man (which I can still watch on my old VHS player), but not Godzilla vs. Megalon. So I would say that both or neither of these two episodes should be counted. My preference would be to count neither, since they are no longer legally available for first purchase.
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Post by mongo on Mar 5, 2011 10:36:24 GMT -5
Now that we have a reasonable listing of episode ratings, I have revisited this question. Assuming that XXII consists of the two highest-rated "extremely likely" episodes and the two highest-rated "very likely" episodes, then the box set would consist of:
610 - The Violent Years 624 - Samson vs. The Vampire Women 817 - Horror of Party Beach 903 - The Puma Man
So it would be an all-Mike box set.
Using the same logic (two highest-rated remaining "extremely likely" episodes plus two highest-rated remaining "very likely" episodes) for XXIII, it would consist of:
420 - The Human Duplicators 422 - The Day the Earth Froze 620 - Danger! Death Ray 1007 - Track of the Moonbeast
which would be a balanced set, with two Joel and two Mike episodes.
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Post by mongo on Mar 5, 2011 10:11:05 GMT -5
mongo, There have actually been 94 episodes released or announced for release, not 93, counting the Giant Gila Monster and the extra episode in Vol 21 (5 episodes as opposed to the standard 4): 77 (vol 1-20, minus 3 shorts) + 1 (giant gila monster from vol 10.2 or single) + 5 (vol 21) + 10 (singles including manos) + 1 (santa claus from essentials, excluding manos and shorts) = 94 episodes So there are currently 82 unreleased episodes. (FYI, my spreadsheet said 94 in total and it took me awhile to figure out why). Oh, so you are counting Godzilla vs. Megalon in the total? I am not counting the two episodes which had been released and then withdrawn, otherwise I would have also included that episode plus The Amazing Colossal Man, which was released on VHS and then pulled, as well.
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