Oh well OK then, if you say so. I’m done discussing it anyway, so enjoy your moral victory.
Are you sure there were no cuts? Some of the DVD versions come with the original movie, and at least one, I’m sure, had a note saying cut material was restored. Given the number of ads on the show, there would certainly be incentive to cut boring parts or parts where they couldn’t come up with good jokes. Given how movie length varied, I don’t remember greatly varying host segments to make up.
In any case, I like the good ones, though the quality is spotty, as you’d expect. The tradition goes back to at least Shakespeare (he would have been a great gag writer) and no doubt before. When I was a kid I watched a show called Andy’s Gang, with Andy Devine, the sidekick of Hopalong Cassidy, I think. One segment had a puppet called Froggy MSTieing fairy tales. Jeff Greenfield once wrote that the lack of respect for authority displayed by Froggy was the root cause of the turmoil of the '60s.
I loved MST3K. I’m reasonably sure I’d still love it today.
It just wouldn’t be the same without my father watching though. Every episode, he would say ‘This would be a good show if they would just shut up so I could watch the movie!’. He was serious. He never quite grasped the concept of the show.
Of the ones I’d seen before, I’m unaware of any cuts. That’s why I invited those who claim there are cuts to say what was cut, and where. I haven’t heard anything yet.
Doing a quick search on the Net, I’m surprised to find no listing for cut scenes from the series. Al;l I could find was this page:
http://www.edwoodonline.com/thehunt/mst3k.html
Regarding The Sinister Urge:
If this was a TV version of the movie, I’d put my money on the distributor doing the cutting. Although if it was sex scenes, it wouldn’t be surprising if MST3K cut them. That’s different from editing for pacing or whatever.
As for The Violent Years, it’s not clear that MST3K edited that or not, either. I haven’t seen the film in either version, so I can’t say.
There are plenty of times where the film has bogged down in dullness on MST3K, but they make a joke out of it, or do something to break up the monotony. I haven’t seen any evidence that they cut anything in the interest of pacing – they seem to embrace the dullness as an excuse for more jokes.
Oh yes they did. I present the following: Boggy Creek 2: And the Legend Continues (to be not heard about by anyone) cut scenes
Note the mad dog part. Note especially how the professor doesn’t know how to shoot and runs out of bullets because he’s an idiot.
I used to tape it and zip past the silly spaceship stuff and go right to the lambasting of the actual movie parts.
Also, they cut out a couple of scenes in Squirm:
-
The red-headed leads have lunch and talk about what the mom is constantly knitting. (It was a scarf for a neighbor. Because it gets so cold in Georgia in the winter.)
-
When red-headed man gets back to the house, he finds the downstairs completely filled with worms. Mom is sitting on the couch, also covered in worms, knitting the worms into the scarf. They should have kept that one in IMHO.
It was a satellite, but not just any satellite. It was the Satellite Of Love.
I’m sure they never cut only for pacing. If the movie ran long, they’d cut the boring parts, but if it was shorter they’d leave them in.
On one of the DVDs they had an extensive interview with some of the off-camera people. They mentioned censoring the comments to be family friendly. Since I watch them from Netflix, I don’t remember which movie this was packaged with. I saw the MSTieing of Hollywood After Dark, and the comments were much racier. The impression that I got from that interview was that they did cut for time, and that they never had enough time to do artistic cutting. Not that these movies would ever be artistic.
BTW, you must watch these movies a lot or have a very good memory - I’d never miss some chunks of bad movies.
They get a bit more explicit in the Cinematic Titanic stuff as well. As I recall, one of the big things about This Island Earth was that Servo got to say “shit” a couple of times.
What can I say, I love MST3K. But it is something that has to be enjoyed in a group. That way, everyone can heckle along with Mike/Joel and the 'bots. And “This Island Earth” is one of my favorite episodes. It was pretty silly, but not so horribly bad and boring that it couldn’t be saved (as happens frequently).
Line I use in real life (when something dramatic happens): "Normal view, normal view, NORMAL VIEW!!!
Also: “Into the weenie-mobile, Weenie Man away!”
I’m home now, and have access to my Eegah DVD. In the original version’s chapter breaks, the missing scenes are conveniently labeled for our viewing pleasure. There are six of them. Let’s see what we’ve got:
Missing Scene #1: Before the opening titles, there’s the production company’s logo, followed by a brief (about seven seconds) shot of the wind blowing across a sand dune. Actually, it’s kind of pretty.
Missing Scene #2: Arch “Tomatoface” Hall Jr, his girlfriend with the creepy hair, and her dad are in a restaurant. Boldly starting the narrative in media res, the girlfriend is talking about having seen a prehistoric giant. Everyone else is skeptical and condescending. The scene lasts under two minutes.
Missing Scene #3: Arch and his girl are camping out in the desert. The girl is worried about her dad, who I guess has already been kidnapped by Eegah. Big laughs when Arch rolls over on his transistor radio and accidentally turns it on. Eegah shows up and eats the remains of their cookout while they’re asleep. Arch rolls over on his transistor again and the noise scares him off. (Him being Eegah, not Arch Hall, Jr.) The next morning, they drive off in his bitchin’ dune buggy, and find dad’s wrecked camera. The whole sequence is maybe five minutes long.
Missing Scene #4: Back in his cave, Eegah tries to give what’sherface a bone. Not that kind of bone, you degenerates. The cut comes about halfway through the scene. What’s actually missing is just her being dragged into the cave. About 30 seconds of material.
Missing Scene #5: Newly shorn Eegah takes creepy hair girl outside and gives her a shoulder massage. We get a shot of her bra. Also, lots of hilarious close-ups of Kiel’s face as he’s feeling the babe up. About three minutes cut here.
Missing Scene #6: After the girl gets away, Eegah goes back inside and has an emotional heart-to-heart with his parents. Richard Kiel: Not An Actor. He heads out to find the girl, and stumbles into the backyard patio of a pair of bickering suburbanites, where he is frightened by a small dog. Another good five minutes cut here.
All in all, the original cut of the movie is about fifteen minutes longer than what ended up in the MST episode. This is off the Rhino DVD. I’ve got two other Rhino MST episodes: Mitchell and The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. Mitchell does not include an uncut version of the movie, although I note that the IMDB lists its running time as 97 minutes, which is also the running time of the MST episode, including sketches and credits. So something must have been cut there, unless the IMDB entry got it’s running time for the movie off the back of the MST DVD box.
TBTWD does have an uncut version, but the missing scenes aren’t called out in the chapter breaks. It does run to an hour and twenty two minutes. In the episode itself, subtracting time for credits and host segments, the movie runs about an hour and fifteen minutes, so there’s only about seven minutes of cuts, there.
I “discovered” the Satellite of Love very late, when I was on a 4-month-long roadtrip. Because of that, it became necessary to stay in a hotel with the Sci-Fi Channel every Friday night so I could watch it on Saturday mornings.
I just finished watching the “Collector’s Edition” of Ghostbusters…the commentary track has an video option where Reitman, Ramos and Joe Medjuck (?) do the silhouette routine. The commentary is good, but they ain’t got nothin’ on the MST3K gang.
Oh, and a suggestion for newbies to the show: try some shorts first. Many are on YouTube. You can also get an idea of the difference in styles between the Joel and Mike eras. Plus there are some terrific ones throughout all the seasons.
May I suggest Mr. B Natural? It was one of the first shorts I ever saw and it had me on the floor convulsing with laughter.
You can also try this one out about the **Highway of tomorrow or something **to see a good Mike era short.
Agreed. I find the breaks really irritating and rarely funny. (I think they give off a “trying too hard” feeling, even though they are undoubtedly trying just as hard during the movie commentary. Difference is, it works there.)
Sorry to contradict fellow MSTie CalMeachum, but yeah, there are edits to MSTed movies for runtime sometimes.