Since 2007, Trace only had a short break in 2014 between Cinematic Titanic ending & starting up The Mads with Frank, so he's been at it for 90% of the past decade. Glad he's still doing it, too, as he's always been my favorite riffer.

I love the laid-back conversational nature of their riffs, too. There are a whole lot of them out there by now & they're all worth checking out. They've done at least a dozen shorts & a full-length riff of "Gravity", which is pretty great, too.

Yeah, they're finally hitting our city in August, so I'm definitely checking it out!

I've heard Trace & Frank talk about Shout distributing Cinematic Titanic, but I haven't heard anything about them working with them on the Mads stuff. If that's true, I'll be psyched to check it out if / when it makes its way to whatever format I can view it on!

Trace & Frank really need to start doing some VOD work with Rifftrax ala Bridget & Mary Jo. Their riff at last year's MST3K Reunion show, "More Dates For Kay", was the highlight of the night & I'm really excited to see what they do for this one. Obviously, there's a good relationship between all of them, & I can't…

The royalties he gets for the Ghostbusters movies, the Honey I Shrunk the Kids movies, & Little Shop of Horrors alone are probably enough to sustain him. I assume Strange Brew brings in a fair amount, too, though it's not on TV as often as those movies are.

Yep, the 4th game was Kickstarted 2 years ago! It's a throwback to the original's top down roguelike gameplay, which is a wise move. Development is almost done & Adult Swim is distributing to all major platforms in the fall.

Agreed. I think they had to jump through a lot of hoops to feature *any* shorts on Sci-Fi due to the "sci-fi only" mandate, but they should really choose some for the next season. I love Rifftrax shorts (the arena they're most consistently funny in IMHO), but really want to see the new guys take some on next season.

It seems like Joel selected a "greatest hits" package of films based on the "non-fringe" fan favorites of the classic series. If you're trying to introduce the series to a new audience, it makes sense to start out with a bunch of engaging crowd-pleasers to ensure the movies would be watchable enough to entice people…

Carnival Magic was the most incompetent / "out there" film this season, but I crave hardcore "so incompetent it's borderline outsider art" shit like Creeping Terror or Coleman Francis's oeuvre. I fear that with Joel's mandate for good, HD prints we won't be seeing much of that stuff anytime soon.

Agreed about the desire to see season 1 / KTMA movies re-riffed, and the automatic shrug / eyeroll when a re-riff of a classic is announced. I'm hesitant to shell out $40 for a live re-riff of EEGAH, but I'm totally in for the new riff.
My exception to the re-riff rule: I actually really loved Cinematic Titanic's…

BTW Just got a request to take the playlist down; looks like others have been sharing it, too. Whoops.

I think the puppeteering is better than Bill's first few episodes as Crow (where he'd just kinda lean him on the desk, barely move his eyes or head, & open & close his mouth randomly while he talked), but it for sure ain't Trace or Kevin-quality. Crow's functioning arms are pretty unnecessary so far, but maybe that…

The deal under Best Brains was that Mallon, as producer, took the lion's share of profits from reruns and DVD sales. He had a say in everyone's contracts, & everyone was a hired gun with the exception of Kevin, Trace, & Joel, who were original BB stakeholders (so they saw some profits, but not to the extent that…

It was producer Jim Mallon & Joel that didn't get along, leading to Joel's departure. The cast / writers don't have any beef with each other.

Now that you mention it, Starfighters has some really funny host segments. Crow & Servo "docking" to the Starfighters theme music, The United Servo Men's Academy Chorus, & the aforementioned Cowboy Mike's. Not a good newbie episode due to the brutal dullness of the film, but some really funny host segments.

I think the mandated story arc thing produced some decent-to-great host segments, but, god, The Roman Times arc that Space Mutiny was a part of was just a comedy black hole.

The fatal flaw with introducing people to MST3K with Space Mutiny is that its host segments are some of the worst outside of the first season. The Roman Times arc is really, truly terrible & the satellite's stuff (which were generally dependable during the SciFi era when the Mads whiffed it) is pretty weak, too. I try…

Yeah, that Gypsy thing is… not good so far.

I would say Mike was really the music guy on MST3K, seeing as he wrote nearly all the songs other than the theme from the beginning, but I think they both really loved music & wanted to put in songs whenever they could.