I’ve searched the forums on this (as best I could; I’m very bad at searching) and found various threads about MST3K. I know SciFi and Comedy Central have copyrights on different episodes. But why, in the name of all things holy, will SciFi not release the episodes it owns on VHS or DVD? I’ve been taping them on SciFi, but after realizing about fifteen minutes ago that a) SciFi will not be airing another episode for a month because apparently, random old movies attract more viewers than MST3K and b) of all the SciFi episodes, I have only seen about fifteen and I want to see the rest.
I know Rhino Records has released some of the old ones and that MSTies are willing to trade, but I don’t have any tapes worthy of trading and I really want to see the newer episodes. Why would SciFi (or Comedy Central, for that matter) not release these episodes? It seems like they would make quite a bit of money out of it and I am anxious to get my hands on these tapes.
Any help would be appreciated.
(Oh, and sorry if I asked an oft discussed and obvious question; as I said, I’m bad at searching and it is also about 12:20 AM here. For the same reason, please excuse typos and such. Thanks.)
A) They are. Some of them, anyway. “The Girl in the Golden Boots,” for instance, is a Sci-Fi era episode with an announced release.
B) As for the others, you have to remember that the MST3K people only own the rights to their part of the show. They had to get permission from the people who own the movie’s rights to make the episode in the first place, and they’d have to get their permission to release them on video. A lot of these people either want too much money or changed their minds about being MST3K’ed. Sandy Frank, for instance, who owns the rights to all the Godzilla, Gamera, and a few other episodes, has publicly said that he wished he’d never allowed them to use his movies and will never give them permission to rerelase those eps.
I’ve been living in hope that somehow, sometime, all the eps would be released on DVD so that I could live in MST bliss forever after.
(Actually, we do now have most of them on CD from the DAP site–there are even a few old first-first-season episodes–but I was still hoping.) Keep circulating the tapes!
That’s the irony of MST3K: I’ve watched repeatedly bad movies like “The Magic Sword,” the Hercules movies and “Stranded in Space” because they’ve been Misted.
I’ve seen Pod People more times than Citizen Kane; hell, more times than the movies listed in Roger Ebert’s top 100 list.
pesch, I’m with you. That’s why I’m surprised that people apparently don’t spring at the chance (or at least, they do, but wind up regretting it). I understand being parodied by Weird Al is a treat for most artists; I would have thought the same thing true for MST3K.
Just after arriving on Sci Fi, Mike and Mary Jo Pehl (Mrs. Forrester) appeared on a show (Sci Fi Vortex) where they defended their show against some dickweed who claimed that the show was detrimental to sci-fi in general.
They said that after the show picked a huge following, several companies who own rights for probably-never-to-be-seen-otherwise movies called them and begged them to take their movies. Several actors (Beverly Garland was especially accomodating) were actually thrilled to have gained a new legion of fans. They took the ribbing quite well. Joe Don Baker and Sandy Frank obviously take themselves waaaayyyyy too seriously.