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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 18, 2023 12:48:00 GMT -5
I just remembered what Frank's horribly mangled German in segment 5 is supposed to mean. 3 years of German in high school and college lies in the back of my brain, dormant, and it randomly popped into my head.
Its supposed to mean something like:
Yes, what a lovely time, sir. Would you like to hear a song?"
"But again, it's horribly mangled to comedic affect.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 15, 2023 22:41:03 GMT -5
At this point the most likely scenarios that are going to happen are:
1. His cousin remembers the episode and uploads it himself somewhere and gives a copy to Alex, who gives me a copy. I pay Alex for the digital copy and request the cousins contact info to buy the tape outright. I end up uploading my digital copy to my channel also (while giving credit).
2. Alex reminds his cousin at some point towards the end of the month/early January. At that time, Alex will hopefully pass along my offer to buy a copy/the tape itself at the same time. Alex hopefully gets a copy and passes it to me. At that point I announce what I have and upload to Youtube/Archive (or hold off if the physical tape is in play). What happens then will depend on how much the cousin feels like getting paid and what his emotional attachment to the tape actually is (other than what Alex assumes).
2a. Either the cousin doesn't feel like selling the tape and it ends there, or 2b. He's persuaded by the idea of making a big pile of cash and agrees to sell the tape (plus give me exclusive rights to upload it).
At that point, I'd fly up to Milwaukee, rent a car, drive out there and pick it up in person myself. I don't want that tape traveling through the mail at the busiest time of the year for parcels. I have family in Milwaukee so it wouldn't be too prohibitively expensive to fly up on a Friday and fly back on a Saturday night.
However...if for some reason between now and the end of the month/early January Alex disappears or stops responding on Discord, I'll just try to reach out to the cousin directly, either thru Facebook or an e-mail address I've found.
And if that falls through, I'll take it all public and the internet at-large can take over. I'm sure Garrett Gilchrist would go knock on doors for it, and he lives up there. And I wouldn't put it past him.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 15, 2023 21:28:33 GMT -5
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 14, 2023 15:26:59 GMT -5
Which makes me honestly think that his cousin may be a relatively casual fan.
Avid enough to know about K01-K03, and tell his cousin to be on lookout for them. But maybe not enough of a plugged-in fan to know that K01 and K02 were released by Joel several years PRIOR and were no longer lost by 2019.
Like, he may be a fan hobbyist, that does this kind of stuff "in the real world" but doesn't interact too often with people like us online and it isn't as big a deal to him.
Its strange, either way.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 14, 2023 15:22:45 GMT -5
Oh, yeah I just saw that it took him a year and a half to get it to his cousin. Not sure how I missed that part.
So it's the cousin that's been dragging his feet for most of the time.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 14, 2023 14:27:09 GMT -5
The thing that helps cement it for me are the tape boxes matching 2 of the brands that I know BBI used. And that they're 2 relatively obscure brands.
Of all my tape collecting I've NEVER seen those Target brand or the Sony Pro Grade tapes anywhere else.
And not only are they the same branding for the Sony's, the box design itself is the same. If you look online for images of the T-120PR, Sony changed the box design at some point to be blue, instead of the black and white I have from BBI and is in that picture.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 14, 2023 11:22:34 GMT -5
I'd probably want to figure out a way to view the tape immediatly When I was working on my restoration of "The State" a few years back, there was a guy who paid over $1000 at auction to buy VHS master dubs of season 1. This included 2 episodes which were technically unreleased, as MTV had rejected them and said "re-edit these two into one episode". Despite him being interested enough to pay four figures for the tapes, he sat on them for more than a year, and didn't recognize that the two episodes were unreleased. He even thought one of the fake commercials was real. And here's the amazing part -- the guy's wife worked in some sort of video post house where at any time she could digitize VHS tapes. To be clear, I'm not knocking or mocking the guy. If anything, I'm the weirdo who is still interested in "The State" 30 years after it aired. But in the area of fan-done media preservation and restoration, the best sources are always people for whom it's not that big a priority, because if they really cared, they would already have shared. That's not even the craziest weirdest random story from that restoration, just the most relevant.
Exactly. The people that don't know what they have are paradoxicaly usually the ones that have the best stuff. They're not sure what it is/what it's worth, so they hold onto it for deacdes and forget they have it until someone randomly asks and they remember. Or they need a little extra cash and sell it at a garage sale (or trade it for a case of beer on Facebook marketplace), As opposed to the people that DO know what they have, who will sell stuff to private collectors who will then hoard it and it'll never see the light of day again. Like Wade Williams.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 14, 2023 8:39:03 GMT -5
Looking through other obits, its a very big family. 6 uncles & aunts & 14 cousins on just that one side of the family spread out all over Wisconsin and Minnesota. Its not too much of a stretch that you wouldn't see one of your cousins at an event planned well enough ahead of time to remember to bring a VHS tape with you for 4+ years.
I myself am part of a group of 9 cousins (coincidentally also in MN & WI, besides me down in FL) and there are a few I haven't seen for more than a few hours once every 5 years.
Edit: Just pinned him down. The cousin lives in Madison. Alex lives in the Twin Cites, so a ~4 hour drive. So not surprising he doesn't see him very often.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 14, 2023 8:20:23 GMT -5
So at this point I'm pretty fairly convinced of Alex's story as he knows it. The question, as other people have said, becomes what's actually on the tape, if his cousin is mistaken or for some reason messing with Alex.
It just goes to show that if you buy VHS tapes as a collector, you should at least own a working VCR.
Reminds me, I was emailing Tom Noel of Tom's Temple back when I bought my BBI Vault Tapes, he mentioned that he bought some himself plus some tapes that supposedly had first or second gen KTMA episodes...BUT HE DIDN'T OWN A VCR TO CHECK. Drives me nuts.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 14, 2023 8:13:04 GMT -5
But the more details I find, the more I start to believe it.
And it would be one thing if this Alex guy went out of his way to point out all the corroborating details as proof, but he doesn't really seem to care one way or another. And the fact that I had to track him down to his Discord just to get more details out of him.
Plus, I've offered him hundreds for the tape or digital file at least thrice. He hasn't asked about getting paid or even acknowledged that I've offered.
It would be A LOT of work just to jerk me around. And conversely not enough work to not jerk around anyone else, but only me, lol.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 14, 2023 8:05:37 GMT -5
To clarify, I take it that it was Alex himself that was holding onto the tape for 4+ years and only recently got around to getting it to his cousin, who then digitized it in late November to confirm what it was, then his dad almost immediately died in the car wreck.
Why he'd hold onto a tape for 4+ years, I have no idea. Maybe he didn't want to mail it (the cousin seems to live in central Wisconsin), maybe they didn't see each other often. I don't know.
Maybe they had a big family Thanksgiving and he gave him the tape then.
I'm not going to pester the guy. At least until the end of the month if I don't hear anything.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 13, 2023 19:44:30 GMT -5
I'm Diet Kolos' brother, Neil Kolos.
Next episode!
508-Operation Double 007
Movie:
An Italian James Bond rip-off. And not content to just rip-off the tropes and plots of those movies like Super Dragon did, the producers went one step further and hired as many Bond-adjacent actors they could get their hands on.
Neil Connery is the "brother of our top agent". But his character's name is ALSO Neil Connery, not Neil Bond, so you can tell what kind of deep thought the producers went through here. Another example, Lois Maxwell (Moneypenny) is called...Ms. Maxwell. Real creatives behind this one, I tell ya.
Anywho, the bad guy from Thunderball (Adolfo Celi as Mr. Thayer aka Largo) kills a secret agent. That agent's girlfriend is currently being cared for by Neil, a plastic surgeon with hypnosis powers. Wait, what? Maybe the producers were more creative than I thought. He can also read lips. Nifty.
Neil gets roped into some light espionage by M and Moneypenny...I mean "Cunningham" and "Maxwell". Apparently the girlfriend was given secret info via hypnosis and only Neil can retrieve it. As is turns out, Thayer and his secret organization (which seems to consist mostly of scantily clad women) want to steal the world's gold reserves via blackmail or something. They need to steal an "atomic nucleus" first, and do so in the most flamboyant way.
Neil is on the trail and casually melts other people's minds and reads lips on the way. There are killer nuns, undercover beekeepers, blind rugmakers and grown men wearing pleather onesies while trying to look menacing. It eventually leads to a climactic(?) battle(?) beneath(?) a castle(?) where a be-pleather'd Thayer is planning to magnetize(?) everything(?). Lots of people get harpooned for some reason.
Host Segments:
Prologue: Joel's home movies. Segment 1: Lederhosen-hosen. Bobbin' Buzzard. Segment 2: I know... Segment 3: Sean and Neil: Parallel lives. Segment 4: Torgo shows back up with the Mads' Mr. Pibb. Segment 5: Dr. F sticks the bots to the wall.
Things that I noticed:
-Per the slate card, this episode was filmed (or edited) on 5/24/93.
-For legal reasons, the official release of the episode is called by the film's original name when released in US theaters "Operation Kid Brother".
-The Prologue hits close to home for me. About a decade ago I dug out a bunch of old VHS tapes of family vacations and events from the 50s/60s that had previously been silent 8mm home movies and was forced to watch them. They were exceptionally boring, also.
-One of the tapes in Segment 1 is title "Camp Fear".
-Frank's mark in Segment 1 is marked out with a very clear "F". He isn't standing on it.
-Famed film composer Ennio Morricone was the composer for the movie featured. Its not his best work. Even his Diabolik score blows this one out of the water.
-Early in the movie, Tom identifies a man in a fez as "Sukarno". This is a pretty darn obscure reference to the mononymous Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia from 1945-1967. He was known for wearing a fez.
-In Segment 2, Joel is wearing a shiny red robe. Not sure why though, his classic red smoking jacket would have sufficed.
-No mail in the last host segment.
Favorite riffs or quotes:
-Tom: Come over here and turn the music down!
-Tom: Hello, I'm Merv Griffin.
-Joel: I was just gonna press pause, but...nah.
-Crow: Now Michael Jackson's journey is complete.
-Joel: Here's the church, here's the steeple. Open the doors and go to sleep-le.
-Joel: Now, time for his catheter.
-Crow: Good god I'm ugly. Scared my own children out of the nursery today.
-Crow: They're playing the Penguin Song.
-Crow: Not in front of Sir Walter Raleigh!
-Crow: Norman! The calla lilies are raining hot lead!
-Joel: And Las Vegas was born!
-Maya: You read too many novels by Fleming. Crow: Jerry Fleming, Ian's brother.
-Crow: Hey, somebody punched the Foley guy.
-Tom: Prepare to meet Kali's brother, near hell.
Overall:
A step down. Perhaps because this episode is so close to the other Season 5 spy movie, Super Dragon, that it suffers in comparison. The movie itself feels like an episode Mike should be watching in the 2nd-half of Season 5.
The riffing starts very strong, but peters out significantly once charisma vacuum Neil Connery becomes the main focus of the movie. He just isn't interesting. Once the movie gets to the last 10-15 minutes the riffing becomes pretty sparse.
Host segments are a mixed bag. The only stand-out is Segment 2, which is very well put together and nicely layered. The Torgo appearance in Segment 4 feels very "We don't know what else to do". Frank's German turn is kind of funny, but not ha-ha funny. Segment 5 is amusing, and sticking the bots to the wall is a nice visual, and Dr. F's "I'm stuck to da wall!" is funny. But only just.
Well, they can't all be winners. One of the few "minor" episodes of Joel's half of Season 5. It isn't bad, but when there's so much better to choose from around it, the episode becomes a bit of an after-thought.
Score: B
Leave a comment, this means you!
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 13, 2023 19:14:43 GMT -5
And not only KTMA tapes, but maybe even weird lost extras like Mylar: What's it to You.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 13, 2023 19:07:23 GMT -5
Alright, so... Looking at my Vault Tapes, some interesting things. All of the vault tapes, even the ones from the Sci-Fi era, were hand-written on pre-made labels. See attachedSo that makes me think the ones in the Facebook marketplace ad were made later. But, adding to their provenance, I looked at the slip-covers and brands of what I have vs what's in the FB marketplace photo, and there are some matches. See attachedNotably the red/gold Target-brand and the black/white, which is a Sony T-120PR, "professional grade" tape. Don't see too many of those out in the wild, further lending credence. Taking a closer look at the photo from FB marketplace, its looking down into a cardboard box. I estimate there are somewhere between ~70-120 tapes. So roughly only a third or two-thirds of all OG episodes, depending on if the tapes are 2 or 3 deep. But either way, not all of the episodes. So its damn lucky there was even 1 KTMA in there. In the photo, I can see: K03 - Star Force 112 - Untamed Youth 209 - The Hellcats 212 - Godzilla vs Megalon 313 - Earth Vs The Spider 318 - Star Force 323 - Castle of Fu Manchu 403 - City Limits 406 - Attack of the Giant Leeches 420 - Human Duplicators 906 - Space Children One has to wonder what the beer-trader is doing with those tapes now. If it has ANY other KTMA episodes, he could make a mint on eBay.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 13, 2023 17:23:59 GMT -5
It's possible all of these tapes were made off of the masters at the end of the Sci-Fi era and then 10 years later Jim hired some guy to digitize them for the website so he could put little clips up and he told the guy when he was done he could keep the tapes.
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