The Rifftrax crew are going to make four episodes of MST3k this year!

The Youtube video + Kickstarter just dropped and already we’re way over the $20k needed. Mike, Bill, and Kevin will be joined by Mary Jo to do a Mike and Pearl set of episodes. Many details are nonexistent, but evidently Joel sold the rest of his share in the franchise to Shout! and they’re going to make more MST3k going forward.

You may remember back when the revival first was announced, Mike politely expressed no interest in involvement, saying he was just a hired hand on MST3k but Rifftrax was his baby (words to that effect). So it’s a real shock, not just the sudden drop of more episodes, but that it’s Mike of all people. I have no defined preference in Joel vs. Mike (and I like Jonah and Emily too), but Mike will be a thrill to see in action again. Rifftrax has been consistently funny when I listen/watch, even if they get a little in-jokey-among-buddies sometimes. They’ve still got it.

The show passing into corporate hands should cause me alarm, but it’s Shout! (or, well, their owners). They were involved in the three previous seasons of the revival. I trust them for now.

I guess whatever exclusivity deal they had with Netflix has run out.

Obviously I’m disappointed that we only got / have only gotten three seasons out of the relaunch, but c’mon. That’s three seasons, a bunch of shorts, another set of Mads, and two more hosts than I expected to ever see again. I’m thrilled for that much.

I think they did a lot right and they picked up a lot of the right things to bring forward from the initial run. I do think having a fixed camera for 99% of the host segments was maybe the worst call they made. It dampened a lot of the palling-around, made it feel less like you were there with familiar friends and more like you were in the audience watching a, well, a puppet theater skit.

I watched “Cry Wilderness” the other day to celebrate. They really were firing on nearly all cylinders from the start. I remember taking a while to warm up to the Mads’ performances but, like Pearl’s crew, that was on me and not on the show. Kinga and TV’s Son are great when I rewatch any of these episodes. Speaking of Pearl’s crew, their segment in this episode feels perfectly executed, where the first time I saw it it felt overlong and a bit self-indulgent. The riffs still felt crowded at times, but much less so once you’ve gotten used to the pacing. Just a few weaker comments here and there not giving better ones a chance to breathe. I don’t know how much that pacing was being over-excited to jam everyone’s ideas in, and how much was Netflix’s direction. I read about someone on another show talking about their Netflix experience, and they had Netflix telling them exactly where to add jokes because Netflix’s analytics showed there would otherwise be an X% drop in audience engagement at this or that exact timestamp.

I think Best Brains made mistakes that led to the fourth season failing, particularly the timing trying to work around the world situation, moving off of the very supportive Kickstarter website (more advertising there than I ever saw on Netflix, story old as time . . .), and not generating enough funds from the year-round operation of the new website to defray new episode costs. But it’s easier and more interesting to nitpick, and less easy to talk in detail about how good these three seasons turned out. I’m still positive and happy for what we have. If there are more seasons, I hope they (1) go to a dynamic camera for host segments and (2) let the host and bots be a little meaner to each other. Even Pearl was mostly defanged in the relaunch, less malevolent and more a jerk who’s trying to get along despite her nature. I enjoyed these dynamics as they turned out, but sometimes the old show was at its funniest when Tom and Crow were picking on each other or on their human buddy.