|
Post by MWaverly on Sept 5, 2021 18:31:22 GMT -5
I originally posted this on the MST3K subreddit.
Comedy Central originally loved Mystery Science Theater 3000 back when it aired there, but they‘re basically screwed by the network from 1993-1996. And here‘s why, along with Gramercy Pictures and the Sci-Fi Channel. 1. CC stopped making Best Brains do promos for MST3K. Most later promos mostly consisted of clips from episodes. 2. Penn Jillette voiceovers were played over Mighty Science Theater (the closing theme). The closing theme became louder in early summer because Penn voiceovers were broadcast despite the fact that more than simply the ending theme was playing. It Conquered The World had Peter Graves' rambling about humanity were drowned out by Penn voiceovers. Daddy-O had a closing credits sequence where the ending button refuses to remain pushed, and Penn voiceovers played over it in its entirety. And then, Penn himself apologized for the voiceovers after reading a letter from MSTie Jonathan Whitney, aka El Mystico. 3. Comedy Central gave small sums of money to the Brains to make Turkey Day promos, then Best Brains turned it down. Turkey Day 1993 was filmed at MSTie Debbie Tobin's Halloween party (Debbie, are you still out there?), and Turkey Day 1994 was hosted by Adam West, who appeared in Zombie Nightmare. 4. Comedy Central slapped their screen bug on the show, covering up Crow. 5. And later, CC slapped a crawl on the screen, which consisted of jokes and ads for CC programming, covering up the Shadowrama effect (or more accurately, the silhouettes) 6. Comedy Central tried to cut 5 to 7 minutes of Season 2 and 3 episodes, without Best Brains' consent. 7. Something called The Wheel of Fish had a booth at the 1994 MST3K ConventioCon. I know, this doesn't have anything to do with MST3K or Comedy Central's hatred of MST3K, but what even is The Wheel of Fish? A band whose music videos play on CC or MTV? A "Weird Al" Yankovic fan club? I have no idea. 8. Comedy Central removed MST3K's midnight time slots. After fans complained, the network responded with the next thing below… 9. A viewer's choice presentation called Play MSTie for Me (no relationship to the Best Brains VHS tapes), where viewers would vote for what episode they'd like to see. However, the same viewer-picked episodes started airing over and over again. Also, Comedy Central thinks MST3K viewers are rednecks in this promo for Play MSTie for Me (Starring TV's Max himself, Patton Oswalt!)
10. Comedy Central co-founder Vincent Favale said that CC removed midnight showings because of low ratings. Which is false. 11. When Doug Herzog became the president of CC, he wanted to make CC younger and hipper. Also, he was why MST3K was canceled on Comedy Central. 12. One ad for Turkey Day 1995 literally called Dr. Erdhardt "fake Frank" and called Joel the "fifth bot-tle" in a Beatles parody. 13. Doug Herzog said MST3K was canceled on Comedy Central because of low ratings. Again, this is false. 14. The MST3K Movie Special, which was basically just 4 episodes with clips from the movie sandwiched between them. 15. Comedy Central's second viewer's choice presentation was basically fake, because none of the episodes with the highest votes never appeared on the schedule. 16. MST3K got removed from Comedy Central. 17. CC pretends MST3K doesn't exist and wasn't a key factor in their early success. 18. Gramercy Pictures made the MST3K movie have no advertising, so they could advertise Barb Wire. 19. Same as 4, but the Sci-Fi screen bug is covering Crow, and it was moved to the left. 20. Same as 1. 21. Barry Schulman, who loved MST3K, got replaced with Bonnie Hammer, who hated MST3K. And she canceled it. 22. MST3K got removed from Sci-Fi.
|
|
|
Post by leeharveyosmond on Sept 5, 2021 20:14:33 GMT -5
quoting somebody from your reddit thread whose perspective i share:
"Let's face facts: Comedy Central nee The Comedy Channel picked up MST3K because it was a two-hour show that could be made relatively cheaply and fill time on their schedule. The late 80s in cable TV was the Wild West, where the networks were desperate for any content that would sell people on this whole 'pay for television programming' thing. Once it was established that cable TV was here to stay (for a little while at least), the ecology shifted and the networks' time became valuable real estate that production companies had to compete for."
if anything, i feel like you guys made it a bit worse with your demands, just completely unearned entitlement. that's all i've ever thought from reading about all of this in retrospect. (i was too young to have seen the show when it was originally on the air, all of three months old when season 3 premiered)
|
|
|
Post by MWaverly on Sept 5, 2021 20:58:14 GMT -5
Apparently E.E. Cummings wrote it! And I agree!
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Sept 6, 2021 9:42:26 GMT -5
The more I've thought about it some more of a...mature opinion I start to have.
It's a two-hour show that the network doesn't have a copyright to, that they also have to pay for not only production but licensing of a film that they didn't and won't show in any other capacity.
From a network perspective, it's unwieldy and probably not worth the trouble.
Think about it this way. When MST went to The Comedy Channel, it was a new channel, they had no programming other than reruns of old TV shows and crappy movies from the 50s/60s/70s. They needed to fill 24 hours of programming. It was cheap and easy to license crappy old films back in the late 80s. They have almost no other original programming to fund. Ta-da! Perfect fit.
By the time 1994/95 rolls around, Comedy Central is starting to fund their own shows like Dr. Katz, LimboLand, The Vacant Lot, Exit 57, etc. AND importing first run British stuff like AbFab, Who's Line and Drop The Dead Donkey, etc. Their programming is that stuff and newer reruns of stuff like Dream On. They're not as desperate to fill 24 hours. AND film licensing is getting to be much more cumbersome and expensive. Gone are the days of FVI and other fly-by-night shady distributors, people are starting to pay attention to what gets licensed to cable and demanding more money. Add that to the fact that this little company in Minnesota (who's show you don't own) is starting to make more demands on you on how their show is treated, and more importantly its starting to get fairly expensive per season. Season 3 cost 1 million per 24 episodes. BBI's 3 season deal included escalator language in regards to production cost, with the amount per season going up through Season 5. Season 6's contract was probably even more expensive. While many people talk about how relatively cheap it is to make MST, it was probably the most expensive CC show. After all, the rest were sketch shows and cartoons. And we haven't even mentioned the vocal fans. And the ratings, while never bad, probably didn't justify this ever-growing headache. CC was expanding, starting to get into a majority of cable packages nationwide, and had plans for going big and mainstream. And this annoying, money-sucking puppet show is the easy choice for the chopping block.
Sci-Fi, meanwhile was a tiny operation in 1996. In few homes nationwide. No real original programming to speak of besides glorified infomercials and the occasional talk show. Their programming mainly consisted of...reruns of old tv shows and crappy movies. See the pattern? And the same thing roughly happened at Sci-Fi as happened at CC. They got bought by a bigger company whose people replaced the mom&pop corporate types like Schullman, and they focused on taking the network national with big prestige original shows like Farscape. And when you're trying to fund award-winning TV (that you more-than-likely either outright own or have a stake in), the out of town puppet show owned by some guy in Minnesota is clearly going to be the thing that gets the axe.
And the less said about the mistake MST: The Movie was, the better.
MST3K was a right place right time phenomena. They were damned lucky. And we're lucky they slipped through the cracks for as long as they did. But let's not pretend there was a vast conspiracy against them. Shifting TV landscapes did the show in.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Sept 6, 2021 9:45:37 GMT -5
I'll go one step further. AMC wanted to pick up the show after season 10. Guess what they showed on AMC back in 1999? Crappy old movies and no real original programming. Notice a pattern yet? And if Jim hadn't have packed it in and they did go to AMC guess what would have happened? By 2002/2003 AMC began to change its format, started producing original programming and dramas and started to shift away from crappy old movies. Guess what hypothetical puppet show would have been on the chopping block.
|
|
|
Post by gorncaptain on Sept 6, 2021 15:05:56 GMT -5
quoting somebody from your reddit thread whose perspective i share: "Let's face facts: Comedy Central nee The Comedy Channel picked up MST3K because it was a two-hour show that could be made relatively cheaply and fill time on their schedule. The late 80s in cable TV was the Wild West, where the networks were desperate for any content that would sell people on this whole 'pay for television programming' thing. Once it was established that cable TV was here to stay (for a little while at least), the ecology shifted and the networks' time became valuable real estate that production companies had to compete for." if anything, i feel like you guys made it a bit worse with your demands, just completely unearned entitlement. that's all i've ever thought from reading about all of this in retrospect. (i was too young to have seen the show when it was originally on the air, all of three months old when season 3 premiered) Being passionate about a tv show is not entitlement. Comedy Central didn't know what to do with a cult show any more than NBC knew how to react to fans writing massive amounts of letters to keep Star Trek on the air. What does CC even have going for them these days except The Daily Show and South Park? And now they are trying to rebrand themselves as an Adult Swim clone, ironically with reruns of animated series AS had lost the broadcast rights to. How, pray tell should we have earned our "entitlement" to complain? We paid our basic cable bill and in some instances asked our cable companies to add CC just we could watch the heck out of the show. That's about all a viewer could do back then. Herzog came off as something of a jerk on his on-air apperances regarding the show. That likely unintentionally made things worse. IIRC, he didn't want to show what the ratings actually were either. In any case, there was friction between Best Brains and CC that would have been there irregardless of fans. I think they wanted the bots to riff on Presidential debates at one point. There were probably other dumb ideas floated by CC. Sci-Fi treated the show a lot better. I've not seen where Bonnie Hammer is actually on record as hating the show, but she didn't come off very well in her appearance in a special about the Battlestar Galactica reboot, talking about how she wanted to put a cute dog on the show or something. I got the impression she didn't know much about the genre in general, and she's probably the only tv exec in history who managed to infuriate the fanbases of three different cult shows, Farscape, the original BSG, and MST.
|
|
|
Post by monkeypretzel on Sept 6, 2021 22:23:06 GMT -5
I think the other thing to keep in mind was the insane amount of mergers that were going on in the television industry during the life of MST3K. The Comedy Channel was a very small part of the larger HBO networks, owned by Time, which was in the process in 1989 of merging with Warner Communications. When The Comedy Channel merged with Ha!, that brought in Viacom, who owned the MTV networks (MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon), but the MTV networks had been sold by Warner in 1984 to Viacom.
So in 1991 you have the TimeWarner/Viacom partnership Comedy Central. 1994, Viacom buys Paramount and gets their share of the USA Network, which is a joint venture of MCA/Universal (owned in 1994 by Matsushita Electric a/k/a Panasonic) and Paramount. USA Network also happens to own another small cable channel called the Sci-Fi Network. MCA/Universal, now owed by Seagram (yes, that Seagram, controlled by the Bronfman family) sues Viacom in 1996 because Viacom launched TV Land in direct competition, which violated a non-compete clause MCA had with Viacom over USA Network. Seagram wins and Viacom sells USA and Sci-Fi to Seagram in Fall 1997, who promptly turns around and sells them to Barry Diller in February 1998 because Edgar Bronfman didn't want the TV holdings of Universal.
Now, in this insane landscape of mergers and sales and lawsuits and partnerships, MST3K found a home simply because it was in the right place at the right time - twice, and because a few people who happened to be in charge at the networks at those right times liked the show. It was never that important to actually be cared about by the people who took over the jobs of the ones who liked it.
|
|
|
Post by kmorgan on Sept 7, 2021 21:32:29 GMT -5
I think a good part of it was just incoming execs wanting to put their own stamp on the operation. It's like when a new President is elected; even if the previous Chief Executive was doing something good, the new guy will discontinue it, because he (the new guy) didn't come up with it. So, Herzog and Hammer both decide to ditch MST3K because their predecessors brought it in. Then, they could remake the schedule in their own image, and thus get full credit for the successes (if any). It's just business as usual in the entertainment world, like when MGM brought in the Marx Brothers, but changed the movies from pure farces simply because Thalberg didn't like that approach. The only way a show can be protected from such a thing is if it is so popular and/or profitable that you run the risk of killing the golden goose if you mess with it. MST3K was both popular and profitable, but not to the level that would've made it bulletproof. Although, the fact that both Herzog and Hammer both didn't like and/or didn't understand the show made it more likely to get zapped.
|
|
|
Post by BoB3K on Sept 8, 2021 14:01:50 GMT -5
The only way a show can be protected from such a thing is if it is so popular and/or profitable that you run the risk of killing the golden goose if you mess with it. I dunno, I think they even do it then. I don't think there is any creative project big enough to keep 'the suits' from messing with it. I mean, their whole job is to try and make more money, and the simple fact of them being were they are means they're good at convincing others that their ideas are going to make that more money.
|
|
|
Post by comedyc on Sept 13, 2021 1:20:24 GMT -5
After watching many Broadcast Editions, the episodes complete with commercials, I remembered and realized something. MST3K had a symbiotic relationship with the networks it was on. MST3K would reference the other shows and commercials on the network, especially on Comedy Channel/Central. When the show was removed from the host body, a strange thing began to happen. The show went into full bloom, the flower now wide open. What was once a show with references you would understand just by watching the channel, now became classic pop culture, "had to be there" references. Which was clearly not the original intention, but a wonderful happy accident. You used to turn on CC, and see Clutch Cargo episode and a Sally Struthers commercial, then MST3K would very proto-meta reference those things. Now, a newbie would laugh, then look it up if they didn't know what Clutch Cargo was, for example. It's very trippy. I almost don't want to watch MST3K without commercials, because it feels like something's missing. Like part of the riff references. This could explain why MST3K can't seem to get a grasp in the new form. There's no channel to cling to and reference anymore. Instead, the show has become what it turned into. And that did not happen by design originally. Basically, nu-MST3K has become classic to recent pop culture references, instead of referring to the other things on the network. It had no choice but to become this, as the delivery system changed. But I realize and remember now that the networks were very much sewn into the heart of the show. Classic MST3K, especially the CC era, carries the Comedy Channel/Central around with it in it's DNA. Nu-MST3K just carries pop in general. It's a heavy burden. I'm so glad that the Broadcast Editions are on YT. Check them out, if you haven't. It really makes a world of difference.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Sept 13, 2021 10:14:39 GMT -5
Well said. That's the reason I started uploading them: context. Its the thing I feel the older shows are losing the further time moves on, especially for younger fans.
Plus, the commercials I feel help the pacing (at least in the 97 minute era). But that might just be me.
|
|