MST3K (season seven closing thoughts)
Goodbye, season seven.
You packed a strong punch. There wasn't an episode in the entire season that I didn't like, a feat I don't see repeating in the future. It helped, of course, that there were only six episodes; there wasn't a lot of room for things to go bad. It might have also helped, for me, that all but two of the movie selections were from "my era." Movies -- especially bad ones -- from the 1970s and 1980s are my favorites and I enjoyed watching the guys take them on. I think that had this actually been the final season of the show, this would've been an excellent send off.
With the close of the final episode of this season, every single original cast member from the KTMA days has left. It's odd to think that so many of the creative forces that shaped the show are gone. The fact that MST3K went on to survive for years after so many losses suggests that the concept, if handled intelligently and with care, will work no matter how badly the show gets shaken up.
Before I started this project, I'd most recently taped from reruns, converted to DVD and watched Sci-Fi era episodes. I've seen a great deal of seasons 9 and 10 and most of the last third of season 8. That, however, was three years ago. Now, I can't remember the sound of Bill Corbett's Crow or what the new set looks like. This huge transition is going to be interesting. I wonder how much they'll reference the Comedy Central era? Will Pearl mention what happened to her brand new star baby Clayton? Will the riffing still reference previous movies from the other network and previous riffs said about those movies? Will Sci-Fi's mandated host segment storyline ruin that part of the show, or shake it up and make it more interesting? I'll find out soon.
The Numbers
- Total Length
- 10 hours, 23 minutes, 19 seconds
(92 min average for 6 episodes)
(24 min average for 3 specials) - Years Spanned
- 1946-1988
(1972 average) - Shorts Years Spanned
- 1948-1956
(1952 average) - Time to Watch
- 13 days
- Time to Broadcast Originally
- 106 days
- Speed
- 8.2x
- Turkey Day Episodes
- 1 (17%)
701 (23 Nov 1995) - Number of "CLAYDIN!"s said
- ∞
- Black and White to Color Ratio
- 2:4
