I'd like to see them be a little looser with their requirement of high quality widescreen prints. It's going to be really hard to get really old low budget movies that way. Which are the majority of the type of movie they should be riffing.
I could see their reasoning for HQ Widescreen. If they are going to release these episodes on home video, then they are going to want good prints so they can release the same films uncut as a bonus. So when they release episode #1 on Blu-Ray, they can also release the uncut
Reptilicus. That way someone looking to purchase the movie
Reptilicus will end up purchasing the episode. The same thing Rhino was doing with some of the MST3K releases, only they did so with the same poor quality prints used for the series. People don't buy poor quality prints on home video anymore. If someone is going to buy a crap movie like
Manos: The Hands of Fate then they are going to want it sourced from a restored print of the original camera negative shown in it's original aspect ratio. The company that uses one of the cheap prints from the past will lose sales to the company that went to the trouble of releasing the quality print. The thing I liked about the Rifftrax DVDs was that you could switch to the original track, and it would be a quality DVD release of the film. They probably sold a lot of DVDs to people just looking to buy a good copy of
Carnival of Souls or
The House on Haunted HillBTW, the quality of the film prints on the original MST3K was horrendous. Not just the use of worn theatrical prints, but the bad video transfers. I am convinced most of the PD films came from the local Woolworth, and what you saw on MST3K was mastered from a LP budget video.
-Jonah back and not another new host.
That really depends on if Jonah only agreed to a single year. It is sort of like with
Doctor Who, and how the actors playing the Doctor could stay on the show as long as a decade, or only agree to stay on for a single season. Not many people these days wish to commit to a series indefinitely as the did in the past. People with even the minutest sliver of fame get a lot of lucrative offers, which they don't want to pass up because they are bound to a streaming video show. The only way they could keep Jonah on the show would be to offer him a lot of $$$ in a long term pay or pay contract, which I don't know if MST3K could afford. Otherwise, he is only there until he gets a better offer to do something else, and MST3K will need to find a different host.
-Shorts.
I second shorts. Not that there isn't an abundance of riffed shorts to be found around here SOMEWHERE, but there's something about that little appetizer before the movie that makes them both more delicious.
Lets not forget that the only reason why shorts existed on MST3K in the first place was because they had a lot of movies that ran far shorter than their two hour time slot, and unless they were going to have extra long host segments, needed something for filler. I don't know if there is any incentive for the streaming video episodes to fit a specific running time, therefore no incentive for shorts.
Also, the shorts used for MST3K were old and worn and not widescreen. They would need to find HD widescreen shorts for the new MST3K episodes, and I don't really think many of those exist.
Felicia Day to actually act more threatening as Kinga Forrester. I don't feel like she has that lovable jerk role as good as Trace and Mary Jo did Clayton and Pearl. I think Patton Oswalt as TV's Son of TV's Frank is perfect, though.
In my opinion, everyone in the current cast was chosen because they had some sort of cult following and could bring a new batch of nerds to MST3K. For example, Felicia Day has a huge following from the Joss Whedon nerds. She already had an established screen persona which she probably does not want to stray too far from.
Topic: A Season 12 Wishlist (Read 2174 times)
