Friday, April 10, 2020

MST3K Season 0: The many failures and fixings of the Hoity-Toity Apple Ipad: from Vacuum Cleaner to the Bicycle Pump Breakthrough!

I'm reading the back story of the show. http://www.mst3kinfo.com/history/page5.html So I saw the show in its original year or two on our local "UHF" channel in Twin Cities, Minnesota. I actually like those episodes better. They are ad-libbed - not scripted - so it's total improv. Then when it got nationally syndicated - turns out that Tom Servo got fired - he was only 18 years old. I thought he was the funniest to be sure.  http://www.mst3ktemple.com/history.html So in the later seasons - to follow all the riffs - I read the annotations to get all the "pop culture" references. I literally don't have time to WATCH the movie! haha. They just STUFF in references that I don't know so I have to read the annotations. So it's actually more of an initiation into pop culture for me. Also - there are a lot of obscure LOCAL references to Twin Cities Minnesota stuff. I think I've identified riffs that are not included in the official "annotation" website. So I get flash back from 30 years ago - when the show first aired and I was the SAME age as that young comic that got fired at age 18. And so I get reminded of these long lost LOCAL memories by watching this nationally syndicated show...

I went to Joel's twitter and he promotes Greta Thunberg. Joel CREATED the show but he also quit when it got too commercialized - and they made a movie. ... Also people thought he was a stoner but he said that he pulled an all nighter before the first show. So his eyelids were for real just droopy. So he kept that character up - for the first couple seasons (since he was working another job anyway so he was tired for real). haha


http://www.mst3kinfo.com/

https://www.annotatedmst.com/episodes/

I never liked Apple computers - the first PC I ever saw was an Apple in the basement of my buddies - in the early 80s (1984?). I didn't use it much but it seemed hoighty-toighty. https://www.wired.com/2014/04/mst3k-oral-history/
But in the first season we basically went in cold without watching the films....
The long lost very first episodes of MST3K have been found and officially released 
 We didn’t pre-watch any of the films or even attempt to write any jokes; it’s just us, starting out, ‘blue skying’ it. Naturally, if I could have known that, almost 30 years later, there would be a group of about 50,000 folks looking at these as a sort of ‘historical document,’ I probably would have tried to find ways to put more time into them. But, as they say, it is what it is.“
There was so much space in these movies to make jokes. And that allowed us to explore really deep references that were amusing to us.
So I never used our Ipad that was acquired 7 years ago - I don't like the whole "one finger" touch screen thing. So then when I was told that the external audio wasn't working - first I had to realize that the external audio was directly connected to the screen rotation. https://www.pastemagazine.com/comedy/best-mst3k-episodes/ranking-every-mst3k-episode-from-worst-to-best/

 Watching every episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 without commercial breaks of any kind takes 287 hours. Watching it with the sort of commercial breaks it had in its broadcast days is 382 hours. That’s almost SIX TIMES longer than watching the six seasons of Game of Thrones from start to finish. And that’s not including the show’s 21 “season 0” episodes on local Minneapolis TV station KTMA before getting picked up for the official “season 1” on The Comedy Channel/Comedy Central in 1989.

And the toggle buttons are strangely worded - so that "Unmute" means you need to press the button to stop the mute while Mute with a crossed out sign means that it's not muted. One displays the current status but when you press it then the next displays what you need to do to CHANGE the current status!

If you look at those episodes, they’re real hit-or-miss. It was just off the top of our heads.
And part of our attitude was because of the band the Replacements. In Minnesota we were so excited about them because they were so unpredictable and talented. But they hated the industry. That’s what was on everyone’s minds: If you let the executives tell you what to do, they’ll wreck your product forever. And as a comic, I had the same worry.
I figured someone must have been toking up a lot when they designed that Ipad. So then I resign myself to what appears to be an APPLE glitch across the board of Iphones and Ipads - the "Stuck in Headphone Mode" glitch.

So there is a list of solutions given. I tried all of them and none worked. Then there are supposed "downloads" to repair this problem - but the downloads don't work either!

So I keep digging into the Apple support forum or other various online posts.

I got a job in a T-shirt factory putting appliqués on T-shirts. I also started collaging these robots out of objects I found at the Salvation Army. http://www.mst3kinfo.com/maillist.html
 “I really kind of cued off of SCTV because I loved that show when it came out,” says Hodgson of MST3K‘s inspirations. “I realized that [show], and Dr. Who, surprisingly — both of those shows kind of showed me that as long as you remain consistent in the quality, it would work. Dr. Who was consistently low quality. It was like a very ambitious show that was always really cheap-looking, but because they kept the tone the same, you accepted it.” https://itcamefromblog.com/2017/04/23/joel-hodgson-on-the-zeitgeist-spark-of-mst3k/
Someone loads up a youtube video how ONLY the vacuum cleaner finally solved their Ipad "stuck in headphone mode" glitch - not the cotton swab cleaning method that was advocated - not even "five hours" of attempting for that to work. Nope - the vacuum cleaner did it!

Only the vacuum cleaner did NOT work. Nor did completely erasing all the content and settings - wiping the thing clean - after storing it into "Icloud" - and then reloading it. Nope. Nothing.

I think Josh and I were pulling down $25 a show, and I think Joel’s budget was a little higher, because he had to build props. We thought, well, let’s see how far this goes. We didn’t really know how long the show would last or if anyone was even watching it.
Then we put the station’s phone number up on the screen and started getting feedback. That’s when we realized, hey, there’s more than just four or five people watching this.
I had almost given up but then I read someone else saying that their total Reset had not worked for them either.

Then I read someone saying that it could be a circuit wiring problem inside the actual machine.

But someone had mentioned how Compressed Air worked and so they used a bicycle pump - with the thin long needle attachment. Only I did not HAVE the long needle attachment for my bicycle pump.

So I had given up but then I was watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 - the "zero" season when it's really just ad libs and not scripted. Joel riffs out (I think it's this film) - https://mst3k.fandom.com/wiki/MST3K_318_-_Star_Force:_Fugitive_Alien_II

Looks like a bicycle pump!!

So if you have not seen those shows - they are on youtube and very funny. I had first seen MST3K on "channel 23" when it first started out on our local UHF channel in the Twin Cities Minnesota. I don't even remember watching it much but instantly enjoying it greatly. Then I was staying at my gf's relatives with her - years later - maybe 6 years later - and the relative said how much he liked that show. So I agreed but I did not watch cable nor even t.v. so that proves to me that I MUST have seen it during it's Zero Season.

  By around March or April [of 1989], we were all kind of burned out. And it just happened at that time that HBO decided—based on the success of music TV—that they could create comedy TV, and they were looking for programming. We went through our tapes and pulled out seven minutes of the best material we had.

Season Zero apparently is considered the worst since it is just starting out - but that's why I like it the best - it's not CANNED - not scripted at all. The idea was to riff as PART of the movie - not AGAINST the movie. So there are fewer riffs - unlike the later scripted shows. The movie is allowed to be funny on its own terms or just be enjoyed on its own terms. The commentary riffs are simply weaved in sparingly. That's why I like Season Zero so much  - although admittedly I've only seen a few of them.

 And the reason the show got to grow was because nobody wanted to come out to Minnesota.
Bill Corbett (writer-performer): The Best Brains office was in this industrial park in a second-ring suburb, by all these medical-­equipment buildings. It could not have been more generic-­looking. When people took the Best Brains tour, they were often shocked: “Is somebody going to kidnap us and kill us?”
Mallon: We had to take a warehouse space and turn it into a feasible studio—and also pay staff and support people—on next to no money. So hardly anybody made anything on the first [Comedy Channel] season. But everyone was getting to do what they’d dreamed of, which was to make a living making television comedy. Even if it was a poor living, it was intoxicating. And that energy helped carry the day for the first season.

My last movie was Humanoid Woman - an Eastern European Sci-fi flick and the lady has Telekinetic Powers - or I mean Humanoid. So she is able to just go through the walls. That is the most unbelievable part of the film but based on the qigong masters - a few people have reported seeing two different qigong masters with that ability to walk through walls!!

But you’re watching the movie in second-by-second increments. It becomes an extremely grueling process...
 And a lot of time, the pain that the movie gave us would be incorporated into our riffing and our comments. That fit into the basic premise of the show—that Joel and the bots were being subjected to cruel experiments by watching these movies, and making jokes was a way to help them get through it.


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