This is the sort of thing I would do if I wasn’t so busy…and so lazy: A guy named Andrew
COUNTED EVERY RIFF IN EVERY EPISODE. He also timed every episode. The result: a boggling statistic:
riffs per minute.
Oh, and
here’s a ton of data.
This statistic is, admittedly, ultimately meaningless: more riffs doesn’t necessarily mean better. But still, I love the fact that somebody spent time dissecting the episodes like this. It’s definitely heading for Ward E.
Andrew, we salute you! Excelsior!
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“more riffs doesn’t necessarily mean better”
I dunno, look at the episodes with double-digit RPMs. They’re some of my favorites. Warrior of the Lost World, Cave Dwellers, Mitchell…
City Limits had the highest RPM value, though. Not the greatest episode in my opinion.
Anyway, excuse me while I go tape the nose bridge on my glasses.
That’s amazing. I’m going to have so much fun with this list. Wait, where’s the KTMA statistics? I wanna know how Joel did all by his lonesome in K05 Gamera!
Still, as Tim and Eric would say, great job!
Man, a lot of great movies got d’s!
And apparently individual tastes differ greatly too. A lot of those episodes he gave low grades on were some of my favorites, while many of those A-grade ones just plain weren’t. Still I salute this guy for his dedication. This must have taken at least half a year to put together.
I don’t see an over all show stat. Is the list truly complete without a stat to show how many RPMs the Brains gave us over their decade long run in the sun? You know if I don’t find this stat I’m probably gonna calculate it. Should I be admitting that in public?
Beautiful Mind: I’m sure he has one! He will probably post it here after he reads your comment.
I’m amazed at how uninterested I am in these amounts. Still, that’s quite a thing for somebody to…erm, do!
Of course then I’d like to see them split up into seasons.
Like it’d be interesting to see which of the 24 episode seasons (3 through 6) were higher in riffs. Would be cool also to graph some of these to see any peeks or lows. Like is there a difference between 9 and 10, possibly due to the fact they knew it was all over soon and you could chart it? And then even break down eras and hosts. For instance the amount of riffs in Joel’s season 5 and Mike’s. And which individual host delivered more in respective season sections. You could go as geek as it gets with these stats. 
Andrew, you are a god! GREAT job!
I’ll echo the request for histograms and pie charts, not to mention the KTMA analysis. A line graph showing trends of riffiness through time would be interesting.
WOW!
I couldn’t believe the ton of data link. Andrew didn’t just count riffs, he counted who gave them and in what segment. That’s a real labor of love.
Well, that’s it. I’m giving up MST3K. I’m just not insane enough to call myself a fan.
Man, I wish I had that kind of willpower. I wonder if he can still just sit back and enjoy the show after doing all this.
Andrew I hope you have a girl friend! ( or if your on the other team ( aka Seinfeld ) that’s cool too ). Anyway great job on these stats! It just shows you how bad Season 1 is and just comes to show you that when Jim Mallon states that ” Season 1 means : a work in progress ” he really meant it. I never will have a favorite episode from Season 1. I would rather watch K-12 Fugitive ALien than any other episode from Season 1 ( it just featured Josh and Joel in that episode not Trace ). But I would disagree that Mike’s worst episode is 907-Hobgoblins NO WAY! That’s one of Mike’s best Sci Fi episodes. To me it’s not the point of riffs per minute it’s the quality of the riffs and also the movie will make the riffs even funnier. Goofy movies like 911-Devil Fish and 318-Fugitive Alien 2 are episodes that I love becuase the movie will play into their comedic geniuses. Most of the movies they did were so awful that is was also so funny.
Mitchell always seemed overrated, I think its just liked because of its Joels last episode, and I swear there were not that many riffs in it! Where as season 10 always seemed like it had the most!
What amazes me is how many they had, even in the movies that gave them the least to work with. They broke 10/m with “Monster a Go-Go/Circus on Ice” and “The Creeping Terror,” and just barely missed with “Manos: The Hands of Fate/Hired! pt.2.”
And “Strange Creatures,” which is about as little of a film as you can have without leaving the lens cap on, topped the Sci-Fi Era list.
It seems my suspicion that shorts are particularly dense with riffs only holds true against about half their respective movies. The average for all shorts is about .5 higher than for all movies, but I notice that “all shorts” doesn’t include Commando Cody, whereas “all movies” does include Season 1.
I actually thought Diobolik and Space Mutiny would be higher.
Well there were some movies where I thought they talked to much lol!
I’m with Zeus. Although it seems weird to knock a guy for incompleteness when he’s put in this much work, but why no KTMA?
Still, an impressive achievement in data collection.
impressive
The next step is full transcripts.
AKA: Andrew, Mst3k God (thanks, Pythagoras!)
Pythagoras, KTMA 1-3 are AWOL and several other KTMA’s were repeated later, so I didn’t even bother. However, if you would like to fill in the blanks…
frankstv, My heart, too, was broken as several of my favorites got disappointing grades. But I was calculating quantity, not quality. Girlfriend? Women just slow stuff down, thru no fault of their own.
Seriously, my wife loves MST3K, as long as it’s Space Mutiny. So no ala-Seinfeld. Not that there’s anything WRONG with that!
Diamond Joe, the RPM2.TXT is the finished project and RPMSUM.TXT is before I did the Commando Cody shorts (since Season 1 was not my favorite).
Please write me at secretboxoftoys@yahoo if you have any other questions.
Also check out my (still young) review site at http://www.geocities.com/secretboxoftoys/main.htm for more neatoness.
Zeus, please hack and mangle the data as you see fit. Drop me a line if you’d like any other info or some raw data for your own geeky purposes. If you load RPM2.TXT into excel and then graph the RPMs in chronological order, it tells a very interesting story about MST3K, especially when you consider what was going on at certain points in the history of the series.
Yeah, I need some tape on my glasses.
But how is this statistically significant? Correlation does not imply causation! What can we infer from this data?!?!
I have favorites in every “riff-per-minute” segment.
Warrior of the Lost World, Mole People, Clonus, Secret Agent Super Dragon, Horror of Party Beach, Phantom Planet, Pod People, Quest of the Delta Knights - they’re all over the riff map! I think I secretly just like these movies.
And, while I’ve never seen season 1, its lower riff volume makes sense.
Eileen, you’re right. The data itself is meaningless, especially since there are as many “favorite lists” as there are Msties. But since I have to feel good about putting a few years into something, I strongly believe that correlation prooves causation in this case, especially when you chronologically graph the RPMs and add a 5-show simple moving average. That trend’s relationship to the “behind the scenes” stuff is undeniable. And quantifying something like that and seeing the results was pretty mind-blowing (120K riffs!).
Just wait until I release my beer comsumption data concerning the project! Stephen Hawking, who?
I like seeing the riffs calculated per show, but I don’t think having them associated with a riffer is very helpful, since the riffer is not necessarily the writer (this only holds true in the improvised KTMA episodes).
Since it would be impossible to know who wrote each riff, a suitable idea would be to classify the subjects (literary, movie/television, music, art, philosophy, etc). Then we’ll be able to say things like “episodes with more references to 80s fashion seem to fair better.”
I expect a corrected riff distribution by the end of the month. Thank you.
Thanks Andrew, I love wasting time looking at and thinking about stuff like this.
Episode quality is unquantifiable. But when looking at quantity alone as an indication of anything, we must keep in mind that a movie allows for more riffing when it has less spoken dialogue. The cast has to let us hear at least some of what the movie characters are saying so that we get an idea of what is going on and they can make fun of it later. Longer silent scenes would necessitate more rapid riffing. Therefore in order to get a clearer picture and make the RPM a more significant unit we need the data showing what percentage of the movie’s total time is taken up by original dialogue, and then break it down into what we were allowed to hear “uninterrupted” by riffs and how much of it was talked over.
Chris and Bernal, I call “Not It”.
Chris, you’re right, and I love that MST3K riffing was “organized chaos”. The theater riffing was mostly scripted and timed, but there was wiggle room for some improv, which there was plenty of.
Bernal, I agree that MST3K did an awesome job of letting us hear the movie instead of just talking over it. The flip side of that coin is that there were also a lot of riffs aimed at movie dialog (”Flag on the moon”) and less dialog could mean less riff fodder. Also, they never hesitated to talk over the movie if they had something good to say.
[...] now a remarkable, and perhaps terrifying, piece of info from Satellite News. A MSTie by the name of Andrew decided to watch every single episode of Mystery Science Theater [...]
Hmmmm…looks like in the episodes with the most deviation in riffs per riffer, Tom was the biggest riff-hog.
I KNEW IT