And this stream apparently includes some episodes from one of their attempts to revive the format, minus all of the fluff that makes it MST3K. As a person who has adopted a great deal of his sense of humor from this old show, I am somewhat astounded by how difficult it is for me to enjoy the idea without the bots and the satellite of love. Even though the humor is exactly the same, with most jokes indistinguishable from things they would say on MST3K, without the framing and without seeing the characters in the foreground the format just seems so... mean spirited.
I know the criticism isn't baseless and I know it isn't always meant to be an attack, that the spirit of Rifftrax and such is mostly meant to be celebration of B-movie, but it still feels so wrong to sit there and make fun of the efforts of any creative team (no matter how exploitative their intentions) without at least embarrassing yourself at least as much. The special effects, the characters, the scripted segments, it all felt like the comics putting skin in the b-movie game before sitting back and contributing as peers. By going out there and putting something to film, inspired by the films they use to make their bones, it feels to me like MST3K earns the right to contend in their space.
But Film Crew, they still have scripted segments. Why doesn't that earn anything? Well, they're not putting anything out there that wasn't there before, are they? They have the same cast and the same jokes just without the characters and the familiar framing device of noncon film showings. It's just less than before, an attempt to recapture, an exploitation rather than a capitalization. You have said that all that other stuff was a distraction, or at least something that could afford to be sacrificed.
And I think that's where furry enters into it somewhere. I think making characters and showing people characters doing things is the most important thing humans can do. I think you need to have a robot being an asshole, because its a fake thing rather than a human that enjoys the smug satisfaction of the audience agreeing that the thing the movie is doing is bad when the robot makes fun of it. When you animate an original design into the consciousness of the world you are capable of so much more than a person is, and that is something we should really respect. We want to see the guys and we should be allowed to see the guys.
I'm sure most of this has been said before but I don't post otherwise so
