News from Joel and the MST3K Live team:

On Sunday, May 3rd at 6 p.m. ET / 3 p.m. PT, join the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 LIVE as they bring a special at-home event to MSTies worldwide! Join Emergency Host Emily Crenshaw (Emily Marsh), Tom Servo (Conor McGiffin), Crow T. Robot (Nate Begle), and GPC (Yvonne Freese), as they perform live via videoconference a Riff-Along of Experiment 111- MOON ZERO TWO. The event will feature new additional riffs, with visits from Joel Hodgson, who will field questions and comments from the Riff-Along audience via social media. The two-hour event will also include a brand new riff of the short film “Circus Day.”

More info here.
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THOUGHTS
• To begin with, I should explain: I planned to see the most recent Live Show, I even bought a ticket. But family issues kept me from attending. So this entire crew was new to me.
• I heard pretty much unanimous praise of the new crew from those attended the Live Show, and I have to admit, the group looks and sounds strong and delivered their lines well. (I don’t really know if any of the on-camera performers are also writers.) I definitely laughed.
• Joel made some news last night, at least for me. IF there is a 13th season, the new host will be Emily Marsh (her character name will be Emily Crenshaw). As Tom Servo, Conor McGiffin will be doing the voice work. As Crow T. Robot, Nate Begle will be doing the voice work. And as GPC (see below), the voice work will be done by Yvonne Freese. Freese will also play a new character, Mega-Synthia, one of Pearl Forrester’s many clones.
• One other change: the newly renamed GPC has been downsized to “more less the same size as Crow and Tom,” just to make her easier to handle. Joel said that, when he built the bot, “I was just trying to build the biggest puppet I could.” Some fans will remember that, to work Gypsy, Jim needed a harness that was normally used in a marching band to carry a tuba. And then in season 11, they built her that complicated rig that only partially addressed her overwhelming size. By the way, during the closing segment of the episode, the old Gypsy appears, and Freese, as the new GPC, quipped: “Ah, my sad dragon phase.”
• What’s with GPC? Several commenters have already explained and Joel himself explicitly stated it during the show. When the show relaunched, Joel began receiving concerns about the fact that Gypsy’s name is now considered a slur. Joel said he took the concerns to heart and this is the result.
• No word on how the efforts to make a 13th season happen are going.
• In the after-show thing on Facebook, Joel expressed frustration with IMDB, which is treating the KTMA season like all the others. Joel insisted the KTMA season is “NOT CANON.”
• The show was a little ragged, but mostly everything went off pretty well, at least on the YouTube channel, which was where I was watching it. In the Facebook chat, Ivan Askwith, the mastermind behind the Kickstarter, said it felt very similar to slightly ragged but captivating live show when the 11th season launched.
• Joel and the cast read letters from doctors, nurses and others on the front line of the pandemic. All of them said despite the awful experiences they’ve had, MST3K has been a welcome distraction. Best wishes to all those folks.