Looking Ahead, Looking Back
Mar. 20th, 2026 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerPerpetual personal uncertainty about “Rifftrax” didn’t block out all thought of contributing to their Kickstarter to return to Mystery Science Theater 3000 for four episodes, but I didn’t rush to make that contribution. Announcements to keep up interest piqued my interest with the news Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff would contribute to one episode; my introduction to Mystery Science Theater having been through MSTings that had “Dr. Forrester and TV’s Frank experimenting on Mike” had something to do with that, although I suppose I have to balance “maybe the ‘riffing’ got a bit meaner afterwards” against “the characters could be ‘casually cruel’ to each other in the ‘host segments’ then.” However, my uneasy caution kicked in again when the second announcement of a movie to be “riffed” involved a “Star Wars ripoff” (which, like “Space Mutiny,” just happened to recycle special effects from an earlier ripoff...)
What might have helped in the end was another movie announcement, this one of a 1960s monster movie with a monster costume that just might beat anything else in the “MST3K canon” for sheer lack of effort. I pledged for the Kickstarter a few days before it closed, well over the minimal target if right around where Joel Hodgson and company’s final effort to date stalled out. Afterwards I was tempted to make a post about that, but couldn’t quite find the time for it in the first days afterwards.
Today, though, after being pointed to an alternative iPhone browser and installing it I thought to test it by looking at “Satellite News.” Curious about the number of replies to a post there I took a closer look, and someone was passing along the news the third “KTMA episode” had turned up on videotape at last. I double-checked that on the Mystery Science Theater forum I’d been visiting for Kickstarter news even as I was saving the YouTube video to my own computer. It is a pretty major find, reminiscent of news of two Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s being found in recent days, but I will admit that this takes down the “firewall” I mentioned years ago against wanting to slog through the multiple-generation-copy versions of the sparsely riffed episodes that followed on the way to the show getting on cable...
What might have helped in the end was another movie announcement, this one of a 1960s monster movie with a monster costume that just might beat anything else in the “MST3K canon” for sheer lack of effort. I pledged for the Kickstarter a few days before it closed, well over the minimal target if right around where Joel Hodgson and company’s final effort to date stalled out. Afterwards I was tempted to make a post about that, but couldn’t quite find the time for it in the first days afterwards.
Today, though, after being pointed to an alternative iPhone browser and installing it I thought to test it by looking at “Satellite News.” Curious about the number of replies to a post there I took a closer look, and someone was passing along the news the third “KTMA episode” had turned up on videotape at last. I double-checked that on the Mystery Science Theater forum I’d been visiting for Kickstarter news even as I was saving the YouTube video to my own computer. It is a pretty major find, reminiscent of news of two Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s being found in recent days, but I will admit that this takes down the “firewall” I mentioned years ago against wanting to slog through the multiple-generation-copy versions of the sparsely riffed episodes that followed on the way to the show getting on cable...