Gavin Jasper at Den of Geek has one.
So does Liz Shannon Miller of IndieWire.
And Page Branson has one at Do You Even Comic Book.
Thanks to Tim for assistance.
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Season 12 ReviewsWe’ll add more as we get them:
85 Replies to “Season 12 Reviews”Commenting at Satellite News
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Well, THAT was quick–I liked M&M (as that was the episode I was most looking forward to), but had the sinking feeling early on that “Pret-ty niiice!” was groomed to be the Mike-style inexplicable Cult-Ready Repeatable Funny-Sounding Out-of-Context Parrot-Catchphrase to be marketed for posterity, now that the new generation believed an episode was incomplete without one…..Rowsdower!
Chief! McCloud.
Wow.
Eric J. actually likes something.
Alert the media.
I did enjoy how in the whole “chief… McCloud” line, they started off with “Paul, Jim…” Nice cry wilderness call back.
Season 12 was great. My only “complaint” is losing a host segment. But even that they found a kind of work around. So, thumbs up.
Pretty nice!
I’ve been laughing a lot watching these new season. It feels like some good, Joel-era season 3 or 4.
I watched one. That was enough (it was actually MORE than enough).
Worst. Season. Ever.
Eeewwww!
Jim Henson’s _____ babies.
You do it, I’m bitter.
Watch out for snakes!
Tee-shirt worthy catchphrases are a longstanding MST tradition, and they all make us happy. In fact, the only MST-related leitmotif that is really tedious is reflexive Mike-bashing, which was insufferably lame when it started back in the ’90s. Every day I fall on my knees and thank the Lord that I discovered MST in ’95, and MST online even later–I missed all that back in the day.
Anyway . . . I’ve watched Mac & Me and Atlantic Rim so far. I’ll save my extensive comments for the later WDTs, but suffice it to say that these are even worse movies than the Season 11 ones that shocked me to my core. M&M just jumped Starcrash as the worst movie I’ve ever sat all the way through. OMG . . . ! The ending filled me with ineffable rage. However, both make for great MST3K episodes! Riffing on M&M was top-notch, and AR was even better.
Supernatural is still on the air? Dear Gawd!!!!!
Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll say the same of the next season. :P Now go to bed, old man!
LOL — if I have trouble falling asleep, I’ll just put one of this season on .
Atlantic Rim is brutal. So bad that it makes me miss Future War.
Boy howdy, you are not kidding. I still don’t know what on earth is going on in this film. At least Sharknado was coherent.
OTOH, Mac and Me was a blast – I’ll be returning to that one very soon.
I think Mac and Me is easily the best made movie ever featured on MST3K. It’s shot well, and sounds great, other than the obvious looping. It’s right up there with Moon Zero Two in that respect.
Now, the movie itself, a glorious train wreck!
Me, I use Space Travelers to put me to sleep. I like the episode, it has a nice lulling factor to it.
Maybe the person who wants to use season 12 to help him sleep should try 1205, Killer Fish. It has James Fransicus in it, just like Space Travelers.
Now, we all know that honor goes to season 8
I’ve been enjoying it! I discovered the show in ’94 and can still dig the new stuff.
*repeats repeated show criticism again ad nauseam, it’s my only interesting character trait*
Speak for yourself, not for “we all”. Some of us think that season 8 is the best.
It’s like Manos’s wives “your all my favorite!”.
Nice article on the new season here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/arts/television/mystery-science-theater-3000-netflix-mst3k.html
However, I feel that Kevin deserved a mention.
And yet still found time to complain about Mike and Mike fans.
Sure. Judge an entire season on one episode. That sounds fair. Are you EVER happy about anything that doesn’t star Joel?
Really? I didn’t realize any of the movie characters actually said “Chief! McCloud” in a funny voice in the first quarter of Pod People, so that the guys could parrot it back as its own inherent joke for the next hour…
Now get on the horn, we need more bull butter!
Yes, Asylum movies are so fun to joke about when you look at the cheap titles on the cover, aren’t they, until you sit down with 90 minutes of made-for-cable acting in Green-O-Vision, with those MS Paint fire explosions that don’t seem to exist in the real world, and seem to be pasted on like Instagram.
I remember one critic describing a bad Bill Murray comedy by saying that Murray “Wore his disinterest in the movie like a badge of honor”–That’s pretty much how I would describe Graham Greene in this movie.
You almost respect his one stoic Tonto expression as the admiral, as he gets to bark out Colonel Potter orders, and he seemed to be having a lot more fun than Eric Roberts had in all his Asylum movies.
Well, it didn’t get an Oscar nomination like
MaroonedSpace Travellers, but if you’re talking about production quality, having new cheap public-domain access to reasonably-budgeted 80’s MGM/UA movies that played actual theaters may bring the quality up a tad, if they feel like going for a few more…Hey, “Solarbabies”, just saying, could happen. :)They always have to start a new series with a “symbolic” bad movie for reputation (like the Crawling Eye, the Creature, or Reptilicus), and more folks know M&M by reputation than from experience.
I never got the not-Joel hate and 25 freaking years later it still doesn’t make sense.
Couple of you guys need to get on some meds.
my own 2 cents. mac and me was very good, and the movie was so awful. atlantic rim was great. the movie reminded of the rifftrax movie megaforce. the main character in atlantic rim was a douchebag baby. the douchist. lords of the deep was good the problem was the movie is so dull and nothing really happens. great last hot segment though. the day time ended was great. it was on those sci-fi movies that made no sense. the killer fish was a great episode. the movie wasn’t that bad. ator was to me the weakest episode because the rifftrax version was allot funnier. overall i say it was a very good season.
Stranded in Space was a failed tv pilot.
I don’t think the new movies are public domain.
The Joel years gifted us with, dare I say, more catchphrases than the Mike years. But even if they didn’t, the point remains – it’s been going on since the beginning. So your post is invalid.
Eric – improve your account.
Gare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpzw6iJL9bc
EDIT- Also seriously your argument of “well it didn’t originate from a movie so it doesn’t count” is beyond weak. “cheif Mccloud” is just as much a “Cult-Ready Repeatable Funny-Sounding Out-of-Context Parrot-Catchphrase” as “Rowsdower” is.
LOL. I’ll bite… how is Season 12 worse than season 11 based on only seeing about 15% of it.
lol. even when joel and the new cast mess up… it’s still Mike’s fault. I must say you are really good at triggering folks here with your trolling.
Corrected–Oh, like YOU can tell the FVI re-titles apart. ;)
And if the 80’s MGM, UA and Orion titles (incl. American Int’l and Golan/Globus) haven’t officially sank into public domain after MGM’s last bankruptcy in ’10, they sure are showing up on every other darn streaming channel for free–For those who’ve ever tried to throw a rock in any direction on streaming without hitting Mac & Me, let alone “1984”, “Curse of the Pink Panther”, “Ninja III: the Domination”, “Teen Wolf 1 & 2” or “Troll 1 & 2”.
Have to admit, RT Megaforce’s “I’m the douchiest!” immediately sprang to mind for me too when we saw our “hero” in Rim. (Correctly spelled and in proper case, but…)
And Lords of the Deep has the same late-80’s backroom warehouse-and-jumpsuits homemade scifi look to it that Space You-Know-What had, that the guys here ALSO become more distracted by their own silly improvised running-gag than the lack of anything riffable onscreen:
Another case of trying to bite the Netflix hand that feeds them, but the running “Now streaming on Quadra…A Flickle original!” is the BigMcLargeHuge for the desperately oversaturated Streaming age–Where we wish half the new services would stop trying to make new series and just pack it up already like AT&T did.
WTF? I like Mike BETTER than Joel. Why would you assume otherwise? (Oh, I get it, you have reading problems and somehow think my name is Eric). Besides, isn’t Joel behind this reboot? (Which is why Eric himself likes it. No, I won’t speak for him — let’s just say I think it might cloud his judgement).
In any case, when not one single riff makes me laugh then, hell, yes, I can judge the rest of the season by this. That’s the first time that has EVER happened in any episode I’ve ever watched (even last year). I suppose you can still love a football team that loses 99 to 0 without getting a single yard but honestly, I can’t watch this trainwreck anymore. I *know* I’m not the target audience, that’s clear. And I’m happy (really, truly) that others who are like it. The people involved in making it all seem very earnest, nice people, who aren’t mean-spirited or in any way profiting from the misery of others. I just don’t want to be part of that misery.
Mike “ex-genius” Kelley: and, yes folks, I know that agreeing with EricJ doesn’t make me one of the cool kids here, but while he’s definitely prejudiced for Joel the more I study MST3K the more I think he’s right about Mike not being as good. And I used to think Mike was the best.
Gee I wonder why folks thought you liked Joel more..
I only watched episodes 3,4, and 5, starting with 3 since I have no interest in Mac & Me or Atlantic Rift, but those 3 episodes were really, really funny and a big improvement over last season. They’ve gotten much better at riffing with the movie, not at it.
Love S12, love MST3K…but, so sick of reading dumb and bitter criticisms here that I disagree with. The trolls have ruined a once wonderful site.
Huge thanks to the site runners for their years of amazing work. But…I’m out.
I’ll be enjoying the show while Mike Kelley and Eric J can continue trolling and being generally unpleasant.
I’ll quote my hero (quoting Wizard of Oz)….”Sorry folks, I can’t come back! I don’t know how it works! Goodbye!!”
Droppo:
Stay!
Don’t let the trolls win.
Use the Ignore button, or try the blocking app Touches recommended.
In the meantime, enjoy this clip.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=24NvWYPbGlk
Think what you’re trying to hit at here is exactly what X-Genius tried to soften his blows with: The good people who made the new series are “less mean” and aren’t “profiting off the misery of others”, because they hired comics who LIKE to watch movies, and be goofy in the audience. For good or bad, they’re going into the movies game, and are just there to crack hip jokes.
Before (hand-sway) “the Gauntlet”, the new comics hadn’t quite gelled on the idea that these movies were trying to crack their sanity, so they’re just getting started on the
“No more rock-climbing!” humor, but at least they’re not smugly sniggering their way through it and grousing about why the end credits haven’t happened yet.
The SciFi and RT eras both had unfocused rage-issues at the idea of watching movies in general–either the time wasted that you’ll never get back!, or the idea that they’re all made by cheap Roger Cormans and overpaid Shia LaBeoufs–and that appealed to a lot of young viewers at the age when they wanted to rage back at a lot of things in their lives, bad movies and pop culture included, and wanted their own Messiah of Anger to lead them…Feel free to insert any personal autobiographical histories here.
(Remember when the joy of being a SciFi-era Mike fan was to vote up every single S8&9 episode on the IMDb Worst 100, and go out and shout obscure episode-specific catchphrases in the real world, to hold up your little red book of Revolution and reveal the good news to the Gentiles?) ;)
JH&B, OTOH, just seem to be kicking back and going with the goofiness, which Hodgson basically said at the beginning was pretty much the original-series vibe he was going for. They tried to shape their pacing during the live tours, but while the RT tours seem to be completely focused on the comics, the new tours and Titanics kept more of the rowdy in-theater audience dynamic. Being a group audience is something most kids learn in a big theater, but probably never experienced in a cineplex.
…SO: Hopefully that clears up a few of the complaints whenever certain posters go off about “MK&B Hate Movies!”, and you won’t feel that sense of inner doubt and confusion.
I know I sound like a broken record, but consider joining the MST3K subreddit, http://www.reddit.com/r/mst3k. It’s very positive overall, while still having good critical discussion, and trolls get downvoted. There’s pretty much no “Joel good, Mike bad!” or vice versa, and the “get off my lawn attitude” is mostly non-existent.
I just joined it. Hooray! And within minutes, I found a link to another MST site (with links to watch every episode online, mainly via YouTube/Netflix). I’m so much happier now.
Not one bit.
Look man, different groups riff in different ways. I don’t see RT’s style as hatred or anger – Kevin for instance has always been pretty bombastic, no matter what the role.
But the bottom line is this – WE KNOW.
Dude, you do this every time. You are the absolute definition of a troll. Thus, when you continue to do it, you are admitting that you are nothing more than a troll.
As you saw above with Droppo – your crap is driving people away. If you’re *truly* a fan, and not a troll… then tell is – is that really what you want? To be one of the root causes of people leaving?
There’s some glimmers of civility there, Eric. I really think you can be better, and sound less pompous and off-putting, if only you’d try.
Improve your account.
Gare
Season 12 feels less like episodes and more like sequels to “MST3K: The Movie.”
90% of EricJ’s posts are annoying garbage, but I do sympathize with some of his points about the Mike-era. But I don’t really think those flaws are on Mike Nelson, I think they’re more the fault of Kevin Murphy, unchecked by departed fellow Brains. Kevin has his strong points, and he can be really funny when steered in the right direction, but left to his own devices he does NOT have the comic timing or natural talent of his peers, and the resulting insecurity brings a lot of negativity and over-the-topness to the stuff he does. And he can come off like a real dick in the episode guides and interviews that’s out of sync with MST3K (remember when he went off on Hollywood writers rooms in the Laserblast entry? like “Harvard pencil pushers writing ape**** follies” A. Trace, Josh, Joel and Frank all write in Hollywood during this time and B. wtf have you ever done besides this one show you rode your career on?). This can also be seen back in the Joel era when Kevin would play Servo like a bully, step on lines and shout.
Mike on the other hand, is one of the funniest people in the world, was a great riffer, and brought a lot of literary intelligence to the riffs. I also think he’s type A and practical to a fault, and let the business model of keeping Rifftrax alive supersede perhaps some of his more artistic instincts. But he’s a great MST3K host and I think he brought the spark to the riffing that Joel brought to the show’s sketches/worldbuilding.
Anyway, Droppo don’t go! You’re a legend on this board with good opinions. And hey, you’ve been vocal about your feelings re: Pearl, so come on. It’s okay to dissent.
The Mac and Me episode is a modern classic!
So, any more reviews since those three?
I try to place blame evenly, since Kevin directed the majority of SciFi-era shows compared to Mike–And if you look back even to the CC-era, most of the patience-issue jokes about the movie “wasting our time” if the scene runs on five seconds longer than it ideally should (“That’s right, movie, show us every detail, spare us nothing!“), seem to be coming from Kevin/Servo.
Mike’s onscreen comic persona likes to be the Aging Smug Jock-Bully, Bill is the Annoyingly Desperate/Insecure Hootster, but Kevin seems to want to be the preemptive-attack Shock Comic: Even during the CC era, when Servo was the hip-worldly “Cool guy” to contrast wisecracking Trace-Crow and laid-back Joel, most of Kevin’s riffs were either inappropriate news headlines (like the kid who really did “kill himself if Battlestar Galactica ever gets cancelled”), cynical real-world negativity about foreign countries or All That Is Good, or simply just screaming all his cathartic anger like a psychotic axe-murderer.
That seemed to fuel the tone change when Kevin had more creative influence in the SciFi era, that the heckling was simply there to let out the comics’ OWN frustration at having to watch the movie five or six times in the writers’ room. Whether or not the audience–who would be seeing it for the first time–had any clue why they were so upset and hair-trigger impatient or raging over every little production detail, and tended to think “Huhuh, cool, movie deserves to be beaten up!”
Just look at the comments we had back during S11 from first-time fans: “Why is Jonah so nice to the movies and just cracking jokes, they’re bad and evil and wasting his time; he should be screaming and shouting and tearing them new ones!” There’s some blame you can split equally.
Back to the subject of S12:
Last season, if we thought Hampton’s Crow was “maybe” trying to sound like Bill Corbett’s…this year, Hampton’s worked on his imitation all summer, and he’s pumping it wayyy up into the red zone.
There’s three Crow voices–There’s Trace’s impish “Baby Crow” from S1 & 2, his “Wisecracker” voice from the rest of the CC era, and then there’s Bill’s “wacky” buddy-pal “Hey, guys, am I annoying you yet??” voice, where he tags along like a little brother and over-delivers every line as the most brilliant riff he’s ever thought up.
That’s the one that Hampton seems to be turning up to 15: When we get the Mac & Me routine of “This is just like the movie I saw, with the kid and the alien!” “You mean E.T.?” “No, not THAT one!”, you can hear Hampton’s Corbett-style sell the lines LOUDER! and WACKIER! the more he thinks he’s got the killer routine going…If it was a Bill routine, the act of annoying his pals would have been the joke, but since it’s the Jonah era, they cap it off with “You mean ‘Meatballs 2’?”“ That’s it!” I practically drink-sprayed on that line–Not only did JH&B give the routine an actual punchline, their 80’s-HBO past managed to remember that Meatballs 2 was a lame E.T. parody. Back to movie-geek jokes the Right People would Get.:)
Still, just saying:
In “Lords of the Deep”, we actually get a “Look familiar, Jonah?” joke that Hampton continues to milk and rib-nudge for three more lines after we already got it–
Ham, dude, (slap!) snap out of it! You’re getting too far into your role–Don’t let the evil Bill Corbett dybbuk take over your soul, fight it, FIGHT it!! ;)
Having only been a fan since around 1998, and getting to the MST websites much later, I’ve always wondered what the flame wars were like. Thanks to the last few months or so on this site, now I know.
Cynical real-world negativity about foreign countries.
That’s an aspect of the Sci-Fi era I never understood. Why attack other countries, even as a joke?
Lawgiver:
I’ve been a MSTie since 1993.
The flame wars were worse, much worse.
Ignore the trolls.
Wow, I so appreciate the kind comments! Truly unexpected.
Accordingly, I have decided to listen to my fellow MSTies (and The Undead) and….STAY!!!!
Droppo:
Yay! :-)
And now *I’ll* leave for good (look, all I *ever* did was say I didn’t like the reboot. I didn’t harp on it — one comment per each show for last year because I paid for it and we were doing that here — and ONE comment here that I then had to defend myself. Is that a troll? Then all you “THIS IS THE BEST SEASON EVER!!!” are trolls as well. Even worse, because you attack anyone who doesn’t agree with you (again, unlike me).
I would bring politics in here but that’s not appropriate — but I will say that not letting folks have contrary opinions isn’t free speech of any sort.
But go ahead, have your lovefest. I promise I won’t be back (really — I have no need of this asskissing group who seemingly have no particular standards other than “if it’s MST3K, it’s GOOD!”).
This is too bad… I guess I’m out of the loop on this, as I didn’t really pick up on any of what he was saying (I mean maybe a smidge, but nothing to warrant this reaction).
Anyway, hope you come back.
Gare