In the not-too-distant future, a boy ... no, a man ... NO, a ROBOT must face evils the likes of can be seen only in the worst movies of all time. Not every hacked ROM can be a work of art like Cory Arcangel's Clouds, but make no mistake, I totally want to get my manos on a working cartridge copy of this hacked Mega Man 3 ROM for my personal collection.
I give you Tom Servo, as reviewed by Dr. Boogie over at I-Mockery. It's a clever endeavor that falls short of "amazing" by a longshot, but the sheer dork-factor of trying to remake Mega Man 3 in their image makes up for a lot. I loved MST3K growing up, and now I get to play it, Capcom-style!
Leaving a lot to be desired, at least the designer chose to give Joel, and not Mike, a prominent storyline role, which you can read about in the review.
What you can also find on I-Mockery are other hacked ROM reviews with varying degrees of disturbing concepts, executions, and rape...lots of rape. If you really want, you can check out such titles as Evil Dead, Baby Dodge Ball, Nude Punch-Out, Dick Dug, and the one that wins the door prize for "Game with the Most F***ed-up Creator Who Has Too Much Free Time," Little Remo: The Child Abuser. Most, if not all, ROMs have download links at the bottom of the reviews.
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Contest:
5:02 PM on 01.23.2007
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After Trace left the show, they decided to change up the format and have actual story arcs. I'm not sure if that's what made you feel the writing completely fell apart or not (I prefer the older episodes being self-contained myself), but the actual in-theatre riffing wasn't much different at all.
I've always loved the Joel as a Dad to the bots dynamic myself, but I also enjoyed Mike being the bottom rung of the ladder on the SOL. Also, both Mike & Joel hosted for about the same amount of time, Mike took over half way through season 5 (Mitchell!) Both of them were great for different reasons ultimately.
Anyone want some unlicensed MST3K? I've got stacks of converted self-made DVD's... Did about 40 episodes of conversions. Yay!
Like him or not, when Bill Corbett joined, writing actually improved. Mike was and always had been the SOLE writer on the show. When Trace left, Bill started helping Mike out with writing duties, which allowed Mike to actually direct an episode, finally, in the 8th season.
What Trace, Joel, Kevin, Jim, and Mary Jo did were basically pitch jokes at Mike constantly who did nothing but write. It wasn't until Joel started to leave that Mike actually started to get to add his own material in. You can tell. All the other "writers" did was punch up what comments Mike had written down from the multiple viewing sessions. To call what they did to create the show "writing" is pretty liberal, honestly. I liked the show in all it's variations, but the process got more refined as it got on in years...
If you watch some of the behind the scenes stuff they did, it's pretty obvious that there wasn't much but Mike during production doing writing. He had the only mac in the office, as well as be the only one who'd use a mac. There's a mac sitting in the writing room. You do the math.
BTW - They kept Mike on a Mac because he kicked so much ass at Doom they didn't want him practicing while they were, so they put him on a Mac so he couldn't play.
MST3K is my favorite show of all time.
Though it really went downhill when it moved to the Sci-Fi Channel. As Churchhills Dog said, after Trace left, it just wasn't the same. Even more so than when Joel left.
God, this reminds me, I still have to pick up the last few DVD collections Rino put out!
Think I'll watch Manos tonight too!
As they use to say: "Keep circulating those tapes!"
I also, like in 2004, got to help stage an MST3K parody. A mormon guy called up my production company and wanted to riff on an old Mormon family film (some brainwashing thing, I dunno, it sucked ass), and I was the only one in the office that knew what he was wanting to do. I built a fake row of seats out of some foam blocks, set the thing up, and lo and behold, the mormon guy shows up with 2 PERFECT replicas of Crow and Tom Servo. So perfect, that he hadn't thought through that you can never see through Servo's head. So, I had to go buy a gumball head (which aren't made this way anymore, sadly, they're all sports-ball shapes now) and paint the interior of it's head and wire the jaw for movement with his puppet setup.
So, it ended up that the production went really well, it looked really slick, but unfortunately, the jokes were lame as fuck. Awful jokes. Not even funny. I guess people can watch a show, but that doesn't mean they can do it themselves. It was still pretty neat to see, and being that I was the only person in the office that knew how to do most of the show's production, I was quite proud of myself, even if the show ended up sucking horribly.
Note: Everyone always assumes they do a chroma key, to achieve the silhouette, which isn't accurate. It's a luma key. What a luma key does is turn the silhouette footage black and white, and separate the white background from the black shadow. Chroma key just produces a colored shadow that looks odd over the movie. The original episodes on KTMA used this method, and there was always a blue shimmer on Servo's head during movie segments.
I have copies of every episode of MST3K except the first four KTMA episodes (which NOBODY outside of Best Brains has). Took me months to get them all. DAP ftw :)
Volume 10 got recalled for some reason, good luck finding it. Nutjobs are trying to push it on ebay for over $100.
I found it on a cart at Best Buy where it'd been pulled already for recall. I'd have missed it completely if I'd showed up 3 minutes later.
Volume 1 and 3 are going out of print soon, so buy now if you can find them.
If you want DVD's, my email is my user name (at) google's email service .com
It's only about 40 episodes, but some of it is stuff Rhino will never get to release. Lots of season 8-10 as well, since I had better dupes of those to transfer.
My copy of "The Violent Urge" has a 1 minute dropout from a power outage and I DO have a Sandy Frank film, "Time of the Apes". I'd do more of them if I could find time to transfer them at work. It takes about 6 hours per episode...
Oh, and for those who want an MST3K fix (or those who never saw it when it was on) quite a few full episodes are up on Google Video.
I still need 6, 9, and 10. I really don't want to pay over $100 for 10, but I might just end up doing that if I have to.
dvddesign, I'll definitely e-mail you later about those episodes. I'm very interested in getting the ones that probably will never see the light of day from Rino.
I haven't taken collecting all the episodes seriously yet, but I think I'm going to start doing that. I was just kind of hoping the DVD's would eventually release them all because I really wanted the episodes in as high a quality as possible, but since that doesn't look like it will ever happen...
I also really really want to either buy or make my own working replicas of Tom and Crow. I'd love to do a fan episode on of these days too.
MST3K Bot building instructions/parts. You're welcome!
Rhino unfortunately will never be able to get the rights to all the episodes, simply because post-MST3K certain movies have gotten more expensive, or in the case of people like Sandy Frank the show REALLY pissed off the rights holders. Bittorrent is your friend here, and MST3K.com has an episode guide to help you track down the episodes you don't have. :)