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Post by majorjoe23 on Dec 19, 2021 12:28:10 GMT -5
Considering how much complaining there was about having to write for the whole! 83! minutes! of Gamera vs. Jiger, Wasn’t it either one tweet or one line in a Kickstarter update? But we wouldn’t want to derail the hyperbole train.
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Post by monkeypretzel on Dec 19, 2021 17:52:14 GMT -5
Lesley commented about it. There was more than one tweet about it from various writers. There were complaints about it in one of the livestreams, IIRC. And Matt wrote this in one of the extended updates about movie rights:
"While it’s true that some historical MST3K edits have removed large chunks of plot — to the consternation of some MSTies — the show just works better when it’s kept tight and agile. In season 13, you’ll see us riff the uncut Gamera vs. Jiger, which we agreed to as a condition of getting the rights for it. And you might not think those extra fourteen minutes would make a huge difference in how the riff feels, but when you’re writing it – or watching it – those fourteen extra minutes can feel like a hundred years, especially when most of it is people in rubber suits throwing each other around."
So you can call it hyperbole. But it was definitely a sore spot for the writers who wrote on that episode, and they let us know it.
Also...
This quote makes it clear that the "fourteen extra minutes" is what they had to do over their ideal/average movie length. So we have our answer: in all likelihood, the movie run times for Season 13 will be 70 minutes or shorter, with the exception of Gamera vs. Jiger at 83 minutes.
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Post by dudehitscar on Dec 19, 2021 17:56:44 GMT -5
in all likelihood, the movie run times for Season 13 will be 70 minutes or shorter, with the exception of Gamera vs. Jiger at 83 minutes. I hope so.
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Post by jadenh on Dec 19, 2021 19:06:16 GMT -5
"While it’s true that some historical MST3K edits have removed large chunks of plot — to the consternation of some MSTies — the show just works better when it’s kept tight and agile."
Really? I think the show works best when it's, y'know, making funny comments over a movie. If you cut the movie down so bad to where it doesn't even feel like a movie anymore, it kinda ruins the point of the show doesn't it? Yes, the movies featured on the show are "bad". No duh. However, I don't see any reason to cut it down unless it's for a content reason. If it can be made funny, then leave it in. And then the more the film is cut down, the less comprehenisble it is. And in this case, the lack of coherency isn't due to the filmmakers but the show itself. And that's bad. Even if the movies are shorter, the episodes are far less enjoyable.
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Post by monkeypretzel on Dec 19, 2021 22:21:35 GMT -5
It was hard to write for the endless driving scenes in Manos - but imagine that episode without those riffs, especially Tom's epic monologue at the end.
There was no point to keeping the "Idiot Control Now" song in Pod People, it didn't advance the plot or have any bearing on the rest of the movie - but imagine no "Idiot Control Now" host segment. Imagine no "It Stinks!" Imagine no subplot in Season 12.
A more recent example is the inter-scene slides in A Talking Cat?!? and Santa's Summer House for RiffTrax. These are just screensavers inserted as scene breaks. They serve no purpose, they aren't necessary. And yet...there are some funny riffs over each and every one of those pointless, purposeless, needless breaks that make the overall movie riff a lot better. No one would have missed them if they were cut because it was easier NOT to have to write jokes for them.
Sometimes you leave in the pointless, the boring, the unnecessary, because those moments of nothing can add up to a LOT of something to the general feel of the movie, the reason why it was selected to riff in the first place.
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Post by BoB3K on Dec 20, 2021 1:02:22 GMT -5
If you really can't riff a movie as is you should either a) find a new movie or b) find a new comedy writing job.
And people that advocate chopping out everything but the parts to be made fun of, I dunno, go watch some YouTube movie rant channels, or how about maybe Beavis and Butthead?
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Post by jadenh on Dec 20, 2021 1:28:36 GMT -5
I fear that one day, episodes of MST3K are gonna be like 30 minutes long. I'm probably being extreme and it's never gonna happen. But still, just the thought of it gives me shivers.
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Post by sol-survivor on Dec 20, 2021 3:21:56 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. When I watch something long, and some of my favorite movies are well over 2 hours long, if it's enjoyable to me it just seems to zip by no matter how many times I watch it. Watching something I'm not enjoying just becomes an ordeal. Back in the 80s I used to go to play Bingo once a week with some friends and relatives. That's another thing I enjoyed doing, but after an extremely long dry spell where I wasn't winning anything and all I could hear around me was people complaining about this, that, and every little thing it got to be too much of an ordeal for me to enjoy it any longer. I stopped going and never looked back. There is a parallel there with the revival, for me at least. Something I used to enjoy got all the fun sucked out of it. Too bad.
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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.
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Post by dudehitscar on Dec 20, 2021 12:34:20 GMT -5
I fear that one day, episodes of MST3K are gonna be like 30 minutes long. I'm probably being extreme and it's never gonna happen. But still, just the thought of it gives me shivers. hey I liked the Oscar specials! lol
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Post by majorjoe23 on Dec 13, 2023 9:10:34 GMT -5
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Post by Megalon on Dec 13, 2023 11:42:51 GMT -5
Netflix just released a bunch of its viewership numbers. The Return got 1.2 million hours of streams. The Gauntlet got 600,000 hours of streams. Even more interesting than the raw numbers to me are the rankings. Out of 18,220 shows, The Return ranked 7,458, which places it in the top half. (Note: These numbers are not all-time viewership numbers. They're only for the first half of 2023.)
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Post by majorjoe23 on Dec 13, 2023 12:35:00 GMT -5
Hmm, so if that's just the first half of 2023, I'd assume they were a lot higher in 2017 and 2018. For views 5-6 years after release that's pretty good.
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Post by monkeypretzel on Dec 13, 2023 13:48:42 GMT -5
How much I would love to know the numbers for the first six months after each season's release! But working with what we have...the Return season is 21 hours of content/14 episodes, the Gauntlet 9 hours/6 episodes. 1.2M/1.5 hrs = 800,000 views of one full episode. 600k/1.5 = 400,000 800K/14 episodes = 57,143 views per episode. 400K/6 episodes = 66,667 views per episode. There's 181 days from January 1st to June 30th. 57,143/181 = 316 episodes watched each day. 66,667/181 = 368 episodes watched per day. Assuming a person watches one MST3K Netflix episode a day, that's 684 unique users watching MST3K each day of the first half of 2023. Netflix had approximately 77.3 million subscribers in the US and Canada combined for Q3 2023. (Source: www.statista.com/statistics/250937/quarterly-number-of-netflix-streaming-subscribers-in-the-us/) I can't find a solid number for Q1 and Q2 but I think it's safe to assume it was no lower than ~75 million. 684 subscribers watching out of a base of 75 million - not including other English speaking markets like the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand - is Not Very Many. If you multiply that number one hundred times for the Season 11 premiere and shrink the subscriber base down to 50 million, which is reasonably accurate for the first half of 2017 (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jul/18/netflix-tops-100m-subscribers-international-customers-sign-up), it still only adds up to 0.1368% of the available subscriber base watching, far less than two-tenths of one percent. (68,400/50 million) Even a thousand times is still less than 1.5%.
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Post by BoB3K on Dec 13, 2023 15:36:26 GMT -5
Numbers, yay!
Good analysis monkeypretzel.
#1 is 812M. It looks like they don't go below 100K or .1M.
Season 11 at 1.2M = %0.14 of #1 spot. Season 12 at .6M = %0.07 of #1 spot.
But wow that number spread is totally not linear --
Average = 5.1M Median = 0.7M Std Dev = 18.7M (!)
So, those numbers are almost pointless. Too much noise, in this case just too many shows just hanging around. So let's trim a bunch--
Top 100 shows: 95M to 812M, average: 183M. So to be a top 100 show, you really want at least 100M to 200M views. Top 1000 shows: 21M to 812M, average: 53M. To be in the top 1000 show, you really want at least 20M to 50M views.
So back to MST3K numbers-- 1.2M is 5% of the bare minimum you want to even be in the top 1000. Or in other words. Essentially zero.
But, the real question is after all that analysis of how bad 600K to 1.2M is, I would be interested to see how that compares to Season 13 Gizmoplex numbers...
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