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Vol. XXV ReviewOur pal Bruce Westbrook is out with his review of Vol. XXV — due out a week from tomorrow!
62 Replies to “Vol. XXV Review”Commenting at Satellite News
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Can’t wait! I have mine pre-ordered from Amazon for same-day-as-release delivery. I wonder which episodes will appear on Volume 26.
I agree with the reviewer that Season 8 was probably the best, ending with
Prince of Space, Time Chasers, and OatMB.
Also with his liking themes to the sketches. And I thought it would have
been better to keep with the endless chase (Mike could always destroy
more planets :) ). MN seemed largely concerned with laziness, going with
the easier to deal with set of Castle Forrester.
Well, Josh was involved with a lot of stuff, and as he was only in the two seasons counting KTMA, I hardly think 18 minutes is too long, but we’ll see.
And again, I would love to see a short doc on Sam Newfield on a future set.
So he calls it Operation Big Brother. Maybe he couldn’t use the title which replaced the title which replaced the title. :rotfl:
“Also on the disc is a Life After MST3K with original cast member J. Elvis Weinstein — a rather lengthy (at 18 minutes) survey of his life after moving to LA to write for TV. I say lengthy because it was hard for me to maintain interest in all the company-town talk and name-dropping details.”
Yes, those of us who are friends with J. Elvis are so sick of his constant name dropping. All day long it’s “Dave ‘Gruber’ Allen” this, and “Andy Kindler” that, and “Did you know I’m personal friends with Trace Beaulieu?” Yeah, yeah, you’ve been telling us that for the last 18 minutes, we’re impressed, you shallow frak!
And don’t get me started on his “company-town talk!” He never talks about the companies in town that are important to me, like Pink Berry and Jamba Juice, just bull**** companies that sell musical and editing equipment, and companies that sell food and supplies for his beloved dog. I’ve heard that even people who’ve covered the entertainment industry for 20 years have no interest in that crap.
Personally, I hate name-dropping, as I’ve often said to my pals Rachel Maddow and Katy Perry (seriously, I know both of them personally, no, really, I do, I totally do!).
But in all sincerity I honestly think that one of most impressive things about me is that I’m friends with J. Elvis Weinstein.
Oh, hi, Frank!
I enjoy season eight and I think it was refreshing to see places other than Deep 13 in the host segments after 128 episodes, but on the other hand I see where Mike and the others were coming from. After all, the writers and performers basically viewed the host segments as something that was intended to be a mild supplement for the movie riffing. If you start having a lot of increasingly complicated on-screen hijinks, you run the risk of making it difficult for casual viewers to follow. Besides, it wasn’t just a problem for the writers. MST3K never had a huge budget or large studio space, so it became a new headache for the set designers and builders to meet SCI-FI’s guidelines on a realistic timetable.
Of course the major problem with having a season eight story arc was trying to serialize a show with individually licensed movies and the subsequent problems involved in maintaining a proper viewing order. SCI-FI screwed this up almost immediately by never airing the episodes in the right order following their initial premieres. Eventually they lost broadcast rights to a lot of the movies, including all the Universal films that made up the first nine episodes of the season, which established the new characters. The only (official) way to watch the show now is to check out the Shout Factory DVDs and since they have to deal with so many copyright headaches, we usually get a selection of four random episodes, taking the story arc material even more out of context.
So for those of us die-hard fans who follow the series so closely that we’re motivated to obtain every official episode so we can watch them all in chronological order, I think the story arc was a great thing. For everyone else, maybe not so much. I certainly wouldn’t view Mike’s desire to get back to something more consistent and rerun friendly as pure “laziness”. Considering how much he’s done for movie riffing since he joined the MST3K writing staff at the very beginning of season one, he’s probably one of the least lazy people in the biz.
Frank Conniff, you beautiful bastard, I love you. Please come back to Phoenix!
I bought mine from Shout! so I could get the free Commando Cody compilation DVD. It is the same price as Amazon (until Tuesday), but tax and shipping add about $11. Can’t wait to see a good copy of Robot Holocaust!
As for future releases, I hope they do a “sexy”-themed set for volume XXX (maybe Fire Maidens, Outlaw, Girls Town, and Sinister Urge)
@Eegah..A “sexy”-themed set sounds great,but how about a Juvenile Delinquent-themed set,too? With UNTAMED YOUTH,TEENAGE CRIME WAVE,HIGH SCHOOL BIG SHOT and GIRLS TOWN complete with original trailers and an interview with Mamie Van Doren..
“The Robot Holocaust disc — with another clever menu — has a five-minute intro by Joel Hodgson, who recounts it being one of the first shows MST did post-KTMA. As such, it meant working on the fly, and the SOL set wasn’t even quite finished until season two. The invention exchange was lifted from Hodgson’s own comedy act, and the show as a whole was “kind of improvised.”
One of the first?! It was the 9th episode made! Is episode 110 in the same situation as 104?
The MSTies in my home do appreciate the fact that Sci-Fi Channel added three more seasons to the run of MST3K and we enjoyed those episodes as they are. However, the idea that the show improved somehow after losing its creator and other essential cast members who helped build the show is beyond ridiculous. We’ll always enjoy the episodes from the first few seasons of the show the most before Joel, Trace and Frank began to trickle out of the show each for reasons of their own. If the show hadn’t been so great as it was created in the first few seasons we never would have been hooked on it enough to stay with it later on even when we were occasionally disappointed in some of the changes and writing in later episodes of the last few years.
@Brandon: I assume Joel meant that it was “one of the first” in a broad sense, simply because it was made during the first official season on The Comedy Channel. I doubt he meant that it’s one of the first four episodes they shot.
About the specifics of the review in question:
1) Josh Weinstein helped launch MST3K and the SOL into orbit literally and figuratively. We enjoy many season one episodes of MST3K immensely and enjoy Josh’s performances in the show. We’ve also enjoyed seeing Josh Weinstein in Cinematic Titanic and meeting him after the shows. I’m confident the interview feature on the new DVD set will be interesting and fun to watch.
2) The review in question at times seems like a poorly written and angry fan-boy amateurish rant, but it appears to be an amateur blog so that’s not a big surprise. Surely there must be better written and more notable reviews out there that would have been more worthwhile to share here. No one would probably even see that blog if it wasn’t featured here on Satellite News. I don’t think it deserves the attention it’s getting.
Thanks to Frank Conniff for the wonderful sarcastic comments above here in this thread.
Of all the discs in the new set I’m most looking forward to seeing the nice DVD version of Robot Holocaust. It’s one of those episodes that really helped establish the direction of the show and there are many call backs to it in later episodes. Hilarious stuff.
Great review. Can’t wait for the DVD to come out, esp since it’s our introduction to future episodes with big-studio movies. :)
As they say, to each their own. I think all the seasons have their strengths and weaknesses, but to quote Mr. B, “I love em all.” Even KTMA has a certain charm when viewed in it’s original historical context as part of the cable show’s overall development. The fact that many fans believe the series maintained a consistent level of quality (or improved) in spite of the fact that its creator and other essential cast members left, is truly remarkable. I don’t usually see fans make comments like this when similar things happen on other shows. The SCI-FI Era also had the added disadvantage of executives effectively “hiding” the first 128 episodes of the show. It was definitely intended as a continuation, but executives expected it to stand on it’s own with new viewers who weren’t given the opportunity to see the older episodes. That couldn’t have been easy and I think the writers and performers did extremely well in spite of all that.
Thanks to Frank I’m now picturing Katy Perry kissing Rachel Maddow. In Deep 13. And I like it. :inlove:
Obviously I haven’t seen the special features from this set yet, but if anything I’m disappointed that Josh’s segment is ONLY 18 minutes. He’s a fascinating, hilarious, and talented fella.
@Ford Prefect: Well said, you hoopy frood. I agree completely.
To Mr. B(ob):
Good to know you’re so confident, sight unseen, that Josh’s interview will be “interesting and fun to watch.” Hey, I hope you do enjoy it when you do get to see it. I simply said that, for me, it was “rather dry,” and that’s putting it in a context with other MST creators’ segments in this largely tasty “Life After MST” series. I am supposed to review this disc, aren’t I?
Of course, I also said that I respect Josh. Yet I’m accosted about my opinions. Oh well.
You also call my review “a poorly written and angry fan-boy amateurish rant.”
“Rant”? Speak of the devil. “Amateurish”? For the record, I covered the entertainment business professionally for five daily newspapers for 30 years, including the Houston Chronicle. (If you read my entire review, I’m surprised you didn’t pick up on this.) And in that time, I was an ardent MST advocate. In fact, I’ve had the honor of touring Best Brains’ studios in Eden Prairie, have interviewed just about everyone in the cast and crew — sometimes several times — and have had good relationships with them and with the fine folks at Satellite News. Now writing a personal blog, I still take professional pride in my work and do the best that I can. Your credentials?
But as I’ve always said, everyone’s a critic — including me. As such, I try to respect people’s opinions and not brusquely dismiss them. I do respect that, in your opinion, MST was far better in its first seasons than on Sci Fi. Of course, that’s an opinion, and I still hold my own opinion that Season 8 was the best. For me, it was. Why is that a problem for you?
FordPerfect: “The SCI-FI Era also had the added disadvantage of executives effectively “hiding” the first 128 episodes of the show.”
Yeah, that’s something that always got me about SciFi. They *claimed* in press releases that they could only secure rights to b-movies for new episodes, and they didn’t have the money to resecure rights to b-movies shown during the Comedy Central era.
Except then they later went and aired The Crawling Eye, The Black Scorpion, Godzilla Vs. Megalon, Bloodlust, unriffed, so that was definitely B.S.
Wow, a self-proclaimed professional critic who can’t take criticism. If a critic can’t quietly and professionally accept the reactions they get to their blogs (it’s not really a column in this case) and feel the need to get personal that’s just one more bit of amateurish writing and behavior. Hilarious.
I also noticed that though the blog writer felt the need to chime in here in a most unprofessional manner he avoided any direct confrontation over Frank Conniff’s scathing sarcasm above. I wonder why?
Why does 30 years of employment as a journalist make me a “self-proclaimed” professional? Why does respecting your opinion while offering my own mean I “can’t take criticism?” And in what way did I “get personal”?
There’s plenty of criticism of your blog here from many different people, yet you chose to respond directly only to me. D’uh, that’s getting personal.
The most scathing criticism of your blog here comes from one of the writers and performers from the show, Frank Conniff. If you ignored his criticism out of a desire to avoid offending him or his friend and fellow performer, Josh Weinstein, I’d say you already failed spectacularly on that count judging from the comments Mr. Conniff already posted here.
Oh Bruce, can’t you just blindly praise everything that is related to MST all the time? Why must you give any “criticism” in a critical piece of journalism? I find your even-tempered approach to your review to be rather dry! Dry I tells ya.
Actually, I didn’t see Frank’s comment as “scathing criticism” so much as amusing.
But I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. I respond to you and I “can’t take criticism.” I don’t respond to Frank and I’m “avoiding any direct confrontation.”
Hey Bruce, since you’re here and all, what did you think of the Commando Cody disk? Are the Cody-related host bits included? Interviews with the octogenarian hulls of the serial’s actors? Anything extra?
Did I read a different review than everybody else? This is how he concludes it: “Four more great entries into MST’s digitally preserved catalog, with another impressive array of extras which might impress even a snobbish Observer. I know they impressed me. I hope you enjoy them too.”
I’d hate to see the reaction if he’d trashed the set!
Wish I could help you on that one, Crow T. Robert, but Shout! didn’t send me the Commando Cody disc. I know some fans are stoked about it. Hope you get to see it soon.
Frank Conniff’s comments were amusing and much more. They were also harsh criticism of specific comments in that review. The reader(s) either “get it” or they don’t.
Thanks, Bruce!
As with the Sandy Frank’s, I’m hoping Shout! can get the other Universal titles. And maybe Ballyhoo can whip up a documentary about B-movie giant William Alland.
I read Frank’s comments with the same voice in my head that sometimes goes: “But ohhhhhh! that posture!”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the storylines may have been a pain in the ass for the MST3K crew, but years later, when viewed in order, they’re really good. I think it was worth the effort.
#2
In total agreement. When you look at the shows, once they made it to Castle Forrester they seemed to atrophy. There was a “pop” to the stories in season 8 when they were randomly roaming around space. They had some really good ones in the last two years(GIRL IN GOLD BOOTS, GORGO, etc.), but episodes from beginning to end in season 8 I think are better, from the storylines to the riffing.
One Mistie’s opinion. :)
REVENGE OF THE CREATURE is one of my favorite episodes. Since it was a Universal film, I honestly never would’ve expected the MST3K version to ever be released on DVD. This gives me high hopes that RIDING WITH DEATH and THE MOLE PEOPLE may be on their way next.
That, ‘Frank Conniff’ poster is a bit of a loud mouth. Anyone know who he is?
regardless of what is said here or anywhere else I am looking forward to the new DVD set.
Ya know what’s great, boys and girls? The fact that a cable show that’s been off the air for more than a decade can still inspire such passionate discussion, as well as video merchandising. I’d be hard pressed to think of anything comparable. Oh, yes, tons of network shows which reached a far wider audience (and, thanks to TVs insatiable appetite for material, keep getting rerun) are still beloved and honored, but a show that reached a fraction of that audience to still be so important to so many is pretty cool.
(As for me, I’m thrilled Amazon will deliver this to me day of release — this despite having broadcast quality DVDs of all these episodes. I will buy whatever Shout gives me, so bring it on!).
Oh, and cool down a bit, will you people? You should really just relax.
Hey, Bruce is our ‘one of us.’ I loved that Houston Chronicle would have write-ups on MST and the Brains’ various projects. Bruce was even kind enough to respond to my nerdy corrections to the headlines and bylines in his articles!
Buying this set through Shout Factory in order to get the Commander Cody DVD tosses on $31.99 in shipping to Canada, compared to $7.98 and $9.54 import fees from Amazon (or better still, $6.48 from Amazon.ca). I’d love that bonus DVD, but not for that much. I’ll probably buy this set somewhere down the road when/if it goes on sale.
Rockox,
I feel your pain. I lived in Canada for a few years and I just regarded shipping from the U.S. as an expatriate tax. If I wanted things in a timely manner, it was just a way of life.
There’s a network I get called THiS owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. I noticed that as “Jack the Giant Killer” by Rifftrax and MST3K pack #XXV are now available, THiS is showing the original versions of “Jack the Giant Killer” and “Operation: Kid Brother”. (I just taped that this morning.)
It looks like someone working on the channel is a MSTie or is it just a coincidence?
Thanks Frank. J.Elvis Weinstein is one cool cat.I’ve met him at 4 CT shows and he’s great and very talented and easy to talk with, even if it’s just for a few seconds in the meet and greet line. I hate when anyone talks about writing for a newspaper for x number of years like that means they’re a great talent. Your stuff is used to line my bird cage and my bird shows what he thinks of your work.
Wow!, who would have thought that Bruce Westbrook would be such a polarizing person amongst fans?
Jeez, all Bruce did was say that he found the interview with J. Elvis Weinstein to be dull. Maybe what Josh talks about in the interview really is just dull shop-talk to an old reporter whose heard that sort of thing before? We, on the other hand, might find it interesting. Don’t get all pissy.
I suspect that Bruce’s admiration for the Sci-Fi Channel era touched a nerve with some people who then used his, slightly, negative opinion on the Josh interview as an excuse to attack him.
I have to disagree with that reviewer’s long opening rant. While the riffing of the show was as good as ever, I think, the storyline lines were extremely unfunny the first time I saw them, and make re-watching episodes excruciatingly painful. One of my favorites if The Deadly Mantis, but I have to put up with 30 minutes of a bad ripoff of the last Planet of the Apes movie.
I’ve often felt it a shame that I can’t really be honest on these MST websites. I have a few opinions about episodes or MST personnel that I wouldn’t dare say, as I’m a sensitive lady, and really couldn’t take the abuse. Some of the above comments only prove this to me.
@JeremyR,
You must have not seen the Deadly Mantis in a while. Only the first host segment has anything to do with the Planet of the Apes. After that, its blown up and they get into the “Endless chase” specified in the theme song. Also, if you dislike a particular host segment or segments, you can do what I always do and fast forward through it.
Jeezie creezie, can’t we all just get along? Gah, you guys are the reason I never go to conventions, for fear that they’ll be filled with bitter screaming nerds like you. I have many other interests, but MST has been a long-abiding joy in my life, whatever the format. I think I need a bumper sticker now that says “Joel, Protect Me From Your Followers” or something. Take 10 seconds to breathe, everyone, please.
Can’t wait! But must. Called out of my retail job twice during the week of Black Friday, so am short on funds, and anyone who would buy something from my Amazon wish list has plucked all the Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax DVDS… That said, “Those are the kind of problems you want to have!”
Thanks to all MSTies who grasp that I simply tried to review a DVD and express my opinions without condemning anyone else’s. It’s sad that this largely glowing review with muted criticisms still brought out some strangely emotional and sharp attacks on me, including that my review was “an angry fan-boy amateurish rant.” And to Capt Ross Hagen, I only mentioned my background as a professional journalist in response to that claim of amateurism. (I’ll accept being a fanboy!) I wasn’t trying to lord over anyone — just set the record straight. And for the record, I can write cutting criticism, too, but don’t consider that appropriate for a beloved show whose memory should be cherished.
I like Mr. B(ob) because I find that I generally agree with his opinions on favorites, dislikes, etc.
I also was very impressed with Josh Weinstein when I saw CT Live. He may have been the funniest one, and he was a really nice guy when I met him in the autograph line.
That being said, maybe his interview was boring. I doubt it, because I love that behind the scenes stuff, but I haven’t seen the interview yet. Heck, I never thought it possible that a Star Wars movie could be boring, but there you go.
The thing I find funny is that on this board, people get so bent out of shape if someone dares disagree that every single thing MST3K is awesome and nothing is never not so! Jeez, it’s the internet people. Have you ever read boards about Star Wars, LOTR or comics? People can disagree. It’s not a big deal.
Here – I’ll fix it all. Season 8 was the best season. Of the Mike era (to me). And the host segments were also the best of the Mike era (to me). It’s the Season 6 ones we’re slogging through now that I can’t fathom how people defend/claim are their favorites. But hey, we disagree. I’m just glad they kept the show going. I’m all about the Season 2-5.5 Joel era, but there are gems in the Mike era too, Rowsdower, Boggy Creek, Time Chasers, etc.
But to be afraid to have any opinion other than ‘it’s all great and without reproach’ is pointless.
That ‘Frank Coniff’ poster guy is a great person and a funny and insightful person.
Wish there were more like him.