DVD Review: MST3K: 20th Anniversary Edition
There's still life in this show yet...
“Mystery Science Theater 3000″ was and remains my favorite show ever to light up a television set. My buddies and I gathered around the TV for entire weekends (yeah, we were virgins for some time) watching Joel or Mike, Tom Servo, and Crow shred the shit out of films that make Uwe Boll’s filmography look like a roll call of Stanley Kubrick films. We were obsessed. Taping and trading episodes like porn fiends. When we tired of rewatching an episode for the tenth time, we’d take it on ourselves to find a bad film and zing it - something we still do to this day. The show not only strengthened the bond between friends and influenced our sense of humors something fierce, but in many ways it cultivated my nerdy love of cinema.
So yeah, I’m a fan of the show.
The four disc 20th Anniversary Edition set gives us the previously unreleased and quite funny episodes of “First Spaceship on Venus,” “Werewolf,” “Future War,” and the series’ finale (one of the best series’ finales ever) “Laserblast.” Sure, episodes of “MST3K” have been available on DVD for years, and other than the inclusion of an uncut version of the episode’s movie, extras were absent. However, that’s the issue the 20th Anniversary Edition attempts to cure.
The set presents a 3-part documentary on “MST3K’s” history. Keeping with the minimalist tone of the show, the doc is a no-frills rotating door of interviews with the show’s key players as they recall their years on “MST3K.” What it lacks in polish, it makes up with a truly comprehensive overview of the show from its local channel KTMA days (where we get a few nuggets of very rare footage from the KTMA show) through its Comedy Central seasons to the final years on the Sci-fi Channel.
Along with the 3-Part look at the show, the set also throws in a half-an-hour’s worth of footage from the 2008 San Diego Comic Con reunion panel. Other than the fact that the camera man apparently suffered from advance stages of Parkinson’s, this bonus is my favorite. You see, I was at Comic Con this year and the number one thing on my must-see list, circled and highlighted on my program, was this panel. However, like a fool, I took my time getting in line and by the time I made it to the line’s location, the overlords of Comic Con were no longer allowing anyone else to join the ranks. Reasoning: There was something like 5,000 people in line for a room that only held 2,000. One should never underestimate the drawing power of cult-show, especially when it books a room at ground zero of nerdom.
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