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Post by jadenh on May 7, 2020 3:32:18 GMT -5
It doesn't have absolutely everything, but there's a page on archive.org that has every episode of the series (including KTMA) and some of the specials. I also have some specials like MST Alive '92 and the scrapbook if anyone needs them.
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Post by jocksinclair on May 7, 2020 8:12:16 GMT -5
Maybe I'm super paranoid, or grasping at straws, but I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach that there's a conscientious effort by Shout? Joel? Both? to erase significant parts of MST3K history going on. It goes back to last year when the MST3K website was revamped to erase the Kickstarter and all the old interviews, articles, and comments related to it. (I'm still a little cheesed that the Thank You pages for both the Kickstarter and the Season 12 Pledge Drive were removed. I think the S12 page was up less than 12 weeks.) That's definitely super-paranoid. Joel and Shout are planning on monetizing the show, old and new, so they are flexing their muscles to stamp down on people profiting on piracy, which has always been wrong and illegal. Tape-sharing is a good thing. Tape-selling is a bad thing. Especially for the unreleased episodes, which are still available for free at DAP in DVD-R format, which is probably the EXACT SAME thing you're paying the guy for. EDIT: Wow, I didn't even realize this guy was also selling released episodes. I'm surprised it took this long for him to get shut down.
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Post by Prisoner416 on May 7, 2020 8:46:29 GMT -5
Yeah, that's bad, I didn't realize that. Still, a lot of this stuff is things that will never be released otherwise. The rough cuts, fancams of conventions... the prices for them are reasonable given the cost of data storage and hosting the site.
It would be nice if he made a massive public offering before closing shop given the quality of the material, but I'm guessing legal hit him hard.
...I was sure that he didn't offer any of the purchasable ones. Not sure when that changed.
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Post by jocksinclair on May 7, 2020 9:33:08 GMT -5
Yeah, that's bad, I didn't realize that. Still, a lot of this stuff is things that will never be released otherwise. The rough cuts, fancams of conventions... the prices for them are reasonable given the cost of data storage and hosting the site. It would be nice if he made a massive public offering before closing shop given the quality of the material, but I'm guessing legal hit him hard. ...I was sure that he didn't offer any of the purchasable ones. Not sure when that changed. The rough cuts are still available at DAP for free, which is where he undoubtedly copied them from. I don't think MST3k would have any right or power to stop him from selling convention footage (though I bet he got all of that from a fan for free too), although I suppose if they *really* want to stop it, they could threaten a lawsuit for his actions overall and force him to pull it as part of a settlement. Most likely, he started selling all of the episodes when he thought it was low-profile enough that he could get away with it, and now they've caught on and stopped him. That would explain why he lasted as long as he did -- they tend to turn a blind eye to people distributing things to fans which they can't legally offer themselves. But it was obviously long enough ago that the "Gamera" set was still in print and Shout hadn't re-printed volume 2 sets yet (just based on a quick scan of Season 3's offerings), so at least four years.
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Post by Troy's Dad on May 7, 2020 9:39:53 GMT -5
I don't know a lot about the owner of CheesyFlix, but I don't think he's just some guy stealing from other sources. He says he personally recorded some of the fan cam stuff, and looks like he was friends with the owner of mst3kinfo.com, so I have to imagine somebody that deep in the fandom personally supplied or was given original source material for his compilations and episodes.
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Post by jocksinclair on May 7, 2020 9:53:36 GMT -5
I don't know the guy, but generally speaking, the people who take fan-shared things and sell them to fans for profit tend to claim they did all the work themselves, and the claim generally doesn't hold up to proof. (I've seen this happen quite a lot because I'm part of a community where a sub-group of membership is dedicated to restoring either unreleased things or compromised releases, and many people simply quit sharing when their videos start being sold by people. In some cases, people will actually record the shared video back to VHS and sell the VHS on ebay as "recorded by me", which struck me as such a notably bizarre way to go about it that I can't believe it happened multiple times.) However, they also usually start off as actual fans, and they collect the stuff, and then they hit financial hard times, and they tell themselves "I'm just going to reinvest the money into my collection anyway..." and then suddenly they've spent a decade selling stuff that was distributed freely among fans for a profit. So it's certainly possible that he was the original source for some of the material. The fact that he is selling episodes which Shout itself is distributing while trying to hide behind "Keep circulating the tapes" irks me a lot, though, so I find it hard to look on him too sympathetically. If they arrest him, I'll start to sympathize, because I don't think he should be in prison or anything like that.
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Post by Prisoner416 on May 7, 2020 10:01:04 GMT -5
I don't know the guy, but generally speaking, the people who take fan-shared things and sell them to fans for profit tend to claim they did all the work themselves, and the claim generally doesn't hold up to proof. (I've seen this happen quite a lot because I'm part of a community where a sub-group of membership is dedicated to restoring either unreleased things or compromised releases, and many people simply quit sharing when their videos start being sold by people.) However, they also usually start off as actual fans, and they collect the stuff, and then they hit financial hard times, and they tell themselves "I'm just going to reinvest the money into my collection anyway..." and then suddenly they've spent a decade selling stuff that was distributed freely among fans for a profit. So it's certainly possible that he was the original source for some of the material. The fact that he is selling episodes which Shout itself is distributing while trying to hide behind "Keep circulating the tapes" irks me a lot, though, so I find it hard to look on him too sympathetically. If they arrest him, I'll start to sympathize, because I don't think he should be in prison or anything like that. The dude's legit, back when Lee Lovingood went down hard, a lot of people lost their orders. Cheepnis fulfilled my order and others at no cost. As I said, the profit margin for his offerings is not high. I don't mind him taking that little bit to keep everything active. From what I've seen, the material is also beyond what the DAP and other places offered.
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Post by jocksinclair on May 7, 2020 10:08:26 GMT -5
Now that you say the name "Cheepnis", I will acknowledge that I have seen references that his KTMA copies are pretty good -- PQ less than MST3kguy but AQ way better. (On the other hand, I'm virtually certain that the rough cuts are all from the same single source, as I can't imagine that they leaked out twice.)
I'm gonna take a step back from criticizing the guy and let people focus on archiving the rarities within his content, which should be the priority regardless. And then those archives should be shared for free with fans.
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Post by jadenh on May 7, 2020 10:18:08 GMT -5
Yeah, having every archived is what's most important to me at least. I put together a rough list of all the specials to potentially help people catalog everything. Some of these have still not been found yet, but most of these should be online and should be archived. List of Specials.txt (2.5 KB)
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Post by monkeypretzel on May 7, 2020 10:45:24 GMT -5
I don't recall RiffTrax pulling/replacing content, sources on that? A Conor Lastowka interview with Peter Hunter (who does RiffTrax social media) on their old DripTrax extras, before it became Patreon. It was a question about how the RiffTrax writing process has changed over the years. Conor: "I don't think that much else has changed in terms of that, you know? We've had stretches of uh, you know, jokes that have come and gone, like the type of things we don't make anymore. I think that we've, you know, there are times when we've had stuff in early RiffTrax that I, we don't do any more in terms of content, or sensitivity, like we went back and took some stuff out of, brother, some of the early ones, I mean I took some stuff out of, like, the Matrix movies just a couple weeks ago 'cause I was this shouldn't if by any chance this was someone's first uh, experience with RiffTrax, I don't want this to be something that they hear. It was just minor things, but stuff that I was happy to not have in there anymore." I believe Bill also talked about this on his Twitter, but he deletes his old tweets every so often. It might also be in one of his Funhouse podcast episodes/interviews, too. I understand why this was done because like the old MST3K episodes, some of those early RiffTrax have some jokes that did not age well and by current sensibilities are offensive. But it proves that anything can be changed anytime even by the good guys to make themselves look better.
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Post by Shark on May 7, 2020 10:51:29 GMT -5
I hope they go after the guy that sells the bootleg DVDs on eBay for $15 a pop.
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Post by Troy's Dad on May 7, 2020 10:56:03 GMT -5
Worth pointing out the Shout bonus disc for Serial Variety Pack didn't have anything new, though the unriffed serial chapters were included. The Radar Men DVD had an introduction by J. Elvis Weinstein. I don't think either are available anymore.
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Post by travis on May 7, 2020 12:05:30 GMT -5
Fortunately the majority of the show is available officially via Shout and there are plenty of us who are happy to "keep circulating the tapes" so I'm not worried about anything. Cheesyflix (who I bought from or traded with many times back in ye old days) is still technically selling bootlegs, so it was only a matter of time before Shout Factory shut him down. Especially since now that they have more invested in the series. Selling bootlegs of in-print episodes is a no-no in my book.
Of course I would like to see the rarities and outtakes compilations still made available (at least the stuff there is no chance of getting official releases of), preferably somewhere like YouTube where fans can watch it for free.
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Post by jocksinclair on May 7, 2020 12:05:54 GMT -5
May 7, 2020 11:56:03 GMT -4 Troy's Dad said:
Worth pointing out the Shout bonus disc for Serial Variety Pack didn't have anything new, though the unriffed serial chapters were included. The Radar Men DVD had an introduction by J. Elvis Weinstein. I don't think either are available anymore.
Yeah, you should update that file to indicate which ones have been released on official DVDs, or out of print discs, maybe even note official VHS releases for the Host Segment stuff, and which ones are only available as off-broadcast recordings.
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Post by jocksinclair on May 7, 2020 12:15:21 GMT -5
I hope they go after the guy that sells the bootleg DVDs on eBay for $15 a pop. It's very hard to get ebay to pull any bootlegs down, because they make such nice steady profit off of those sellers. The truth is, there will always be a place for guys like to this to sell their wares on the Internet. Close down ioffer, and people migrate to sell.com. Ebay will allow bootleggers to sell with impugnity. Shout can make it harder by shutting down actual websites with interactive menus where you can select exactly which legally-available episode you'd like to buy a bootleg of, but the video won't be lost forever. It will just be slightly more inconvenient to buy it from unofficial sources. (Or this is a guy who needs a quick influx of cash and just came out with a brilliant marketing tool to get all the fans to panic and clear out their wishlists with their Covid checks.)
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