#mstk3000

havin serious talks with Tom Servo about finger guns today. #centralpacomicon #mstk3000 #cosplay

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I love Mystery Science Theater 3000. I remember waking up early on Saturday mornings as a kid to catch it on the SciFi Channel. I'm a member of the Bart Simpson generation--I was a dorky 90s kid that craved irreverence and anarchy in my humor and nothing sums that up better than watching a movie and making fun of it. It's like breaking a taboo. There's humor everywhere, even in shitty, old movies. Watching MST3k was like watching a bad movie with good friends. Now it's coming back for some reason. It never really left, we had Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic. Hell, now everyone with recording equipment does jokey commentaries for movies. But now it's back with the same name, and I think that's all that matters to some people. I think part of the appeal to MST3k is that it was a bunch of unknown Midwestern guys coming together and making jokes. The fact that they're bringing on all these nerd celebrities and big name comedy writers like Dan Harmon kind of takes away from the original's quaint charm. It distorts the show's hokey veneer of the sci-fi stuff with the satellite and the cheap-looking robots, as if all these segments are filmed in a garage somewhere. We've already seen that without the thematics (Rifftrax and the like) so going back to that seems antiquated--but now it's going to be like "hey, there's actor and comedian Patton Oswalt", which was never the vibe of the original MST3k. That it got crowdfunded is also a good example of that blind nerd "take my money" quality that I'm not a fan of. It's the same mindset that thinks Stan Lee created all of the Marvel characters or that Joss Whedon is a "nerd god" who can do no wrong. There was more to the show than those robots. Considering that Michael J. Nelson, Bill Corbett and the rest have been pretty mum about the whole thing is pretty telling. Either there's bad blood or lack of interest, this new MST3k seems like it's just going to be the nostalgia bait version of a product we don't need anymore. Maybe it will be good. I don't know. There's just a weird desperation to the whole thing. Just because something is good doesn't mean it needs to come back.

Why does this show suddenly feel like it needs celebrities their fans barely know to be successful? Why can’t they just, y’know, make more episodes?

(vía https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mst3k/bringbackmst3k/)