Likelihood For Shout Factory Release List

[Diet Kolos]

Nov 28, 2024 16:15:09 GMT -5 JLH said:

Keep your eyes peeled, I hear we may be getting another Extremely-Unlikely out of rights hell in the next few weeks, aside from Final Sacrifice.

Well, outside of the Paramount films (which who even knows why Shout never went after licensing after Olive went belly up)...

The only remaining Extremely Unlikey's are 201, 213 and Susan's movies. Susan's still alive, Toho is never going to cut a deal for Godzilla.

But Wade is long-dead. Its possible Shout worked out something with whoever is the executor of his estate/business. They presumably like money and the wishes of dead men only hold so much weight (especially when they have no family).

But yeah, I'd like Shout to do a physical release.
Maybe they've been waiting to have as many of these films available as possible to do one final non-Susan Hart box set.

201, 416, 905, 906 & 913 all in one box. Shout DOES still sell physical sets, even if hardly any brick and mortar stores do.

My biggest concern is what the quality of the master tapes are. When Shout was still releasing DVDs, the tapes were aging/had been stored terribly. I still can't watch some of their digital releases on Amazon Prime because of the terrible transfer quality.

[CrowTrobotfan92]

Considering it’s been nearly a decade now (I mean in 3 years it’s going to be 2027 before you know it)……. Who knows how much worse the tapes have gotten.

[kidflash]

One would imagine - if that's true - it presumably means the movie gets a standalone release too. Film Masters stuck copies of the episodes on their Blood Beast/Giant Leeches Blu-Ray releases, assume Shout would do the same here if possible.

[Diet Kolos]

Nov 28, 2024 16:15:09 GMT -5 JLH said:

Keep your eyes peeled, I hear we may be getting another Extremely-Unlikely out of rights hell in the next few weeks, aside from Final Sacrifice.

Can you tell us any more than that? Where you heard it? What the movie is even?

[Udvarnoky]

I imagine Shout! digitized all the episodes around the time they acquired the IP. It's just the sensible move, and it's the only way they'd have been able to offer all the host segments, which they've been doing for a while.

The concern I have is that not all episodes appear to be sourced from masters. It would be interesting to know what the actual inventory looked like once everything from BBI got received and catalogued. Certain episodes, like QUEST OF THE DELTA KNIGHTS, clearly come from dubs (and in the case of that episode, there's one joke that got replaced by the time it got to air, so what they're circulating isn't even the final version), and I'd hope it's by mistake rather than because the master or a superior copy doesn't exist anymore.

What I hope Shout! has done or will do is losslessly transfer every single tape that Mallon had, including redundant elements, so that it's all digitally banked and future-proofed. Duplicate copies of episodes (or, better yet, surviving shoot tapes, which would be first generation) could be used to repair tape hits and other faults that plague plenty of episodes. The chewed-up LOST CONTINENT could be made pristine again by borrowing the offending frames from the shoot tapes, if they still exist, or another copy.

I'd much prefer Shout! spend their resources on this kind of preservation over any of the upscaling/smoothing efforts they've been experimenting with. If they haven't done it yet, then yes, the prospect of continued tape degradation is a real worry, because they're well past the age of dependability.

[Diet Kolos]

I have severe doubts that Shout went out of their way to make digital copies of everything they got from Jim, unless it was something specifically being released onto DVD.
We could barely get MST Hour wraps whenever their episodes were actually being released. All that extra material from BBI was clearly a 2nd-thought to Shout.

Delta Knights being made from a pre-final ADR dub off a non-master makes me even more skeptical.
They've shown they don't particularly care about quality or preservation, unfortunately.

Going back to which episode it is, it is entirely possible that Shout finagled the rights to 213 from Toho. I seem to recall reading somewhere a few months ago that they were streaming some Godzilla films on their site.

But I'd be surprised if Toho ever gave the okay for an official release of an episode mocking their flagship, especially one that was made by dubious legal methods in the first place.

[CrowTrobotfan92]

The only way I’d EVER imagine them getting the rights to the “Godzilla” flicks is through a lot of (probably VERY dumb) luck that they just “happened” to license their movies from a North American company that just “happened” to gain the N.A. rights from Toho.

And yeah, the MST hour wraps being “slipped over” was BS, and I hated how absolutely passive-aggressive Shout were continually being just giving off vague “Oh, we forgot” or “Oh, sorry, we didn’t know this episode HAD wraps.” Right……

I’d say we still got VERY damn lucky the wraps for “I Accuse My Parents” even got a release at all.

[Diet Kolos]

And it really is a shame that there is seemingly zero interest on shouts part to dive into all the miscellaneous minutiae of stuff that the Brains shot over the years. And they did shoot quite a bit of stuff. Promos for almost every episode from 301 to 706 (the ones released as extras on that one DVD set were clearly sourced from YouTube). The Turkey Day 92 bumpers (again, the ones on the DVD came from an inferior version on YouTube. The ones I found a few years later blow those out of the water). Commercials for conventions and contests. Videos for studio tours and conventions. Tom and Crow made a video for the Minnesota State fair one year that's never seen the light of day. Tom and Crow hosting the 4th of July Weenie Roast on Comedy Central in 1992. Hell, all of the misc KTMA stuff (regardless of "source issues").

All of that stuff should be there in all of the material that Shout got in the sale.

[CrowTrobotfan92]

Oh man, the use of ripping those MST promos from YouTube pissed me off to absolutely no end. They did the same thing with the Sci-fi documentary “The Making of Mst3k” (for f*cks sake, you can see the Sci-fi logo!).

It’d be one thing if Best Brains didn’t physically have those on them and perhaps the tapes were sitting in the archives of Comedy Central and Sci-fi respectively, but I doubt that’s the case, and knowing Shout’s cheap use of “shortcuts” with some of their releases, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they didn’t bother asking Jim if he physically had this stuff on him prior to them acquiring the rights to the show.

[Udvarnoky]

There's plenty of legitimate criticism to be lobbed Shout!'s way, but we don't know for a fact that they're in possession of everything they ought to be. Did Mallon still have everything in 2015 that we knew him to have years before (i.e. K03)? Did every last item that was in the Minneapolis archive actually get shipped to Los Angeles? Were a percentage of the tapes outright unplayable by then? We have our hopes and suspicions, but it's ultimately a black box.

[CrowTrobotfan92]

Could be a mix of both honestly. It’s possible Jim may have lost some stuff overtime, but other cases it could be possible Shout is just sleeping on some stuff.

[BoB3K]

Nov 28, 2024 18:26:00 GMT -5 Diet Kolos said:

But I'd be surprised if Toho ever gave the okay for an official release of an episode mocking their flagship, especially one that was made by dubious legal methods in the first place.

Oh, yeah, right.  This probably is the biggest reason why they'll never get official releases.  They are inferior 3rd party dubs made cheap.  Which of course is more of the fun of watching them riffed, but probably not something Toho likes at all.

[CrowTrobotfan92]

I don’t think the dubs would honestly play a factor to that; my guess is Toho probably owns the rights to those dubs or they’ve fallen into the public domain.

The truth is they’re just a pain in the ass to deal with. They could very well be fine licensing out their movies to Shout just for individual movie releases but definitely not for the MST episodes.

[majorjoe23]

Final Sacrifice is back up for sale on the RiffTrax site now:

www.rifftrax.com/mst3k-the-final-sacrifice

[davidbeegah]

Dec 9, 2024 21:12:29 GMT -5 majorjoe23 said:

Final Sacrifice is back up for sale on the RiffTrax site now:

www.rifftrax.com/mst3k-the-final-sacrifice

This experiment is the current DEAL OF THE WEEK until 9:05am December 18th Pacific Time! You get $2.00 off. Once this is in your library if it's pulled up will still have in in your library. I have a few Rifftrax movies in my library that are no longer available for purchase.