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Post by Udvarnoky on May 1, 2021 9:53:34 GMT -5
QUEST OF THE DELTA KNIGHTS is a personal favorite of mine, one of those episodes where I know the riffs to an embarrassing level of recall. Which is why I was so startled during a moment in the livestream, when I heard Mike deliver a different line than the one I'd heard countless times. The expected riff is this: Travis: Master...you're a spy! Mike: Well, I did some work for Billy Zane. You can hear this riff as broadcast here. I think the ShoutTV version of the episode is faithful, but that link is down at the moment for some reason, so I cannot confirm. Now watch that same moment in the archived stream of last night's watchalong. Travis: Master...you're a spy! Mike: You're drawn by Sergio Aragones. Mind blown. I wonder if the Billy Zane riff was a last second replacement (a TITANIC reference would have been pretty topical in 1998) and Shout! unknowingly possessed an alternate master with the original, more esoteric joke? Makes you wonder how many examples like this there were over the show's run that we'll never know about.
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Post by Deleted on May 1, 2021 10:55:18 GMT -5
If this is the only alternate line in the Shout transfer then it was probably a pretty late change before the episode aired. They recorded a lot of riffs after the theater segments were taped (not only can you hear this just from the audio of most episodes, but one such recording session is preserved at the end of the 1010 "rough cut" on YouTube), but the episodes would surely have been finalized before being sent to the network for broadcast. If the Shout transfer has more alternate lines then Shout's tape source might be a writer's review or another rough cut.
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Post by dudehitscar on May 1, 2021 11:40:58 GMT -5
interesting catch!
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Post by jadenh on May 1, 2021 14:04:13 GMT -5
Oh boy, more alternate riffs. It just keeps getting more and more confusing.
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Post by TV's Cowboy on May 1, 2021 14:12:10 GMT -5
If it had to guess it's that they confused Sergio Aragones with fellow Mad cartoonist Antonio Prohias who created Spy Vs Spy. So maybe they caught the possible error before airing and put in the Billy Zane ref in its place.
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Post by Megalon on May 1, 2021 14:21:40 GMT -5
If it had to guess it's that they confused Sergio Aragones with fellow Mad cartoonist Antonio Prohias who created Spy Vs Spy. So maybe they caught the possible error before airing and put in the Billy Zane ref in its place. Yeah, that makes the most sense. Though it's odd that they wouldn't just replace Segio Aragones' name with Antonio Prohias'. But maybe they couldn't find the name of the Spy vs. Spy creator in time, or decided it was too obscure in the end.
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Post by jocksinclair on May 2, 2021 14:33:57 GMT -5
Makes you wonder how many examples like this there were over the show's run that we'll never know about. Good catch! The Turkey Day version of 701 has a lot of variants like that, it's the only other circulating version I'm aware of, but of course it's such minute detail that it's hard to know if people have spotted all of them.
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Post by jocksinclair on May 2, 2021 15:41:55 GMT -5
One variant that I noticed -- this weekend, I was testing some stuff by cutting the extra riff from the MST Hour version of "Pod People" back into the DVD (or, rather, a composite of the two DVDs), and they don't quite fit together for a strange reason... the shadow placement doesn't match. For some reason, I always thought that the show was shot in such a way that the shadows and the movie were composited together basically "live in camera", the way they would do the weather on TV, but I guess that isn't the case, because the shadows on "Pod People" are the same take in the Hour version as the original version (once it overlaps), but placed differently in the frame. I don't think this could be a result of any distortion, I think it has to be shot separately and they are just two different composites. I don't know why it would've been redone, if I could find a more complete version of the Hour version, it might reveal more, but for now I just have the Youtube clip to go by.
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Post by Deleted on May 4, 2021 14:42:53 GMT -5
One variant that I noticed -- this weekend, I was testing some stuff by cutting the extra riff from the MST Hour version of "Pod People" back into the DVD (or, rather, a composite of the two DVDs), and they don't quite fit together for a strange reason... the shadow placement doesn't match. For some reason, I always thought that the show was shot in such a way that the shadows and the movie were composited together basically "live in camera", the way they would do the weather on TV, but I guess that isn't the case, because the shadows on "Pod People" are the same take in the Hour version as the original version (once it overlaps), but placed differently in the frame. I don't think this could be a result of any distortion, I think it has to be shot separately and they are just two different composites. I don't know why it would've been redone, if I could find a more complete version of the Hour version, it might reveal more, but for now I just have the Youtube clip to go by. At the risk of going off topic... I have never seen an MST Hour episode in its entirety. Except for that YouTube clip of 303, the only theater footage I’ve seen from those episodes comes from the Part 2 recaps… which isn’t really theater footage from the episodes themselves. The movie footage used during these has definitely been edited to comprise a short montage, but if you look closely, you’ll see that the Shadowrama plays uninterrupted over the various edits. The silhouettes apparently also come from the appropriate episodes (as seen in the changing length of Joel’s hair!); anyone wanna go throw and match the recap Shadowrama to their actual scenes? So they definitely had separate movie and theater elements to re-composite for the MST Hour episodes. Why go to the trouble? Possibly because it allowed them to subtly update the season 3 episodes, in particular, to reflect the show's current look. (From the beginning of Season 2 and lasting until 306, the Shadowrama appears really globby, and of course, we all know about the blue tint over b&w movies that was used from 108 to 404 - with the exception of 402.) The MST Hour was produced in mid Season 5 (summer 1993, according to the ACEG), by which time BBI had already long-since improved the Shadowrama compositing and solved the b&w problem. However, the following episodes with one or both of those issues were selected to be reused for the MST Hour:
Blue tint: 302, 307, 309, 311, 313, 317, 319, 320, 404. Blobby silhouettes: 301, 302, 303, 306.
If the recaps of those episodes are any indication of how the episodes themselves looked, then the tinting was removed and the Shadowrama's definition increased.
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Post by jocksinclair on May 4, 2021 15:48:53 GMT -5
That makes me really curious to find a full recording of the Hour version of 'It Conquered the World'. I'm not sure what happened to it, but the full episode version has never been in good shape, but if they have the two elements separate, it's quite possible that they could have fixed it for the Hour.
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