The return of Mystery Science Theater 3000

[ghost of miles]

New MST3K shows on Netflix

[duaneiac]

I'm kind of looking forward to this.  I only saw a few episodes of the show when it was originally aired.  It was funny, but I wasn't a huge fan at the tiem.  A few years ago, I found some episodes of the show on DVD at the local library.  It was at a time in my life when the gift of laughter was most welcome and those shows made me laugh out loud.  I started watching episodes of the show on YouTube and even bought some of the DVD sets of the show.  The best shows, like many of the best movie comedies, stand up to repeated viewings and just recalling a favorite line (such as "Welcome to the Diane Arbus cafe!") will make me break out in a laugh.  And Christmas just isn't Christmas anymore without a viewing of MST3K's Santa Claus.  I also enjoy the Rifftrax projects that Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett do, which follow the same bad film riffing concept.

I hope the new series is good.  I wonder if they ill be focusing on more modern bad movies or if they still have a treasure trove of older films they can exploit.  I'm afraid they may now be making pop cultural references that an old guy like me will no longer understand.  But then I wonder how many young people watching episodes of the old series can understand all those pop culture references.

[ghost of miles]

I was a huge fan back in the 1990s when the show was first on--don't have Netflix, so not sure if or when I'll get around to watching these new ones.  TV viewing is so atomized now--I cut the cable cord about eight years ago and tend to watch most stuff via DVD (in itself a very outmoded concept now, it appears).  Two new shows that I'd like to see, Stranger Things and The Man In The High Castle, are on Netflix and Amazon Prime respectively, and I haven't been motivated enough to purchase either service yet in order to watch them.  More inclined to spend time reading and listening to music anyway these days.

[duaneiac]

I have watched the first 6 episodes and so far I would give it an overall grade of B-.  I do not like the new Gypsy at all.  I'm sure it might be seen as kind of sexist now that the only "feminine" character in the original cast (until Pearl Forrester showed up) was kind of dim, but I liked having one character on the show who was sort of sweet and not full of snark.  (Plus, Gypsy was the greatest thing to happen for Richard Basehart since Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea went off the air.).  The new Gypsy, although still not seen all that much, is just another smart-alecky robot.

I am undecided about the new "test subject", "Jonah Heston".  He hasn't made much of an impression on me one way or the other yet.  I do like Patton Oswalt as "TV's son of TV's Frank" and wish he were used a little more.  There was a funny cameo by Jerry Seinfeld in one episode.

The quality of the jokes has been uneven.  A few of the lines have definitely been LOL funny and they have made some references to classic lines from the old series ("Watch out for snakes!", "SLEEEEP!" and even a reference to Rowsdower).  They do seem to be relying on more fart jokes than I recall being used in the original shows.  Maybe the movies they are using now are  more "dialog heavy", but it also seems that the jokes are not as fast and frequent because they don't want to talk over the dialog of the movie.  The skits in-between segments of the movies have not been all that great.

If nothing else, I did finally get to see Avalanche, a 1970's disaster movie starring Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow (with all the blazing onscreen passion you might well imagine from that pairing) that I never got around to seeing before.

[ghost of miles]

Thanks for this review; I've been curious as to what others have thought of the reboot.  (I still haven't seen any of the new episodes yet.)