MST3K Turkey Day Marathon

Aw man, this was a staple for me on Thanksgiving back in the Comedy Central days. I'd have the VCR running constantly. Great show, great marathon, too bad it's gone.

Thanks for the news! I was just complaining last night about the lack of Turkey Day Marathons. I should have known somebody'd figure a way around it.

Only go to see one episode before the stream quit(Zombie Nightmare, one of my favorites). I'll keep refreshing the media library to see if it pops back up.

I'm glad to see others fondly remember this fine tradition. Yesterday morning I popped in the DVD of Sidehackers and spent a couple hours with Joel and the bots. The smell of Pumpkin Pie baking just isn't the same without MST3K.

God,this brings back so many fond memories.
If there has ever been,overall, a funnier show then MST3K in the Comedy Central years I have to yet see it.
Watching the :"Turkey Day Marathon" was as much a part of Thanksgiving as Turkey and Sutffing.
Yes, I think the show's quality did fall sharply after the move to the Sci Fi channel (because they lost the core writing staff in the move) but on Comedy Central the show was drop dead funny most of the time.
And even a good percentage of the Sci Fi channel episodes are amusing, if not up to the Comedy Central standards.
I am glad in the newest DVD collection they finally have "Monster a Go Go", possibly the worst film they ever showed on MST3K, even worse then Manos,as hard as that may be to believe. At least "Manos" had something resembeling a plot, however ineptly done. "Monsters a Go Go" does not, literally, have a plot. Just a bunch of scenes shoved together.
And it just ain't Christmas around my house without "Santa Clause COnquers The Martians" and "Santa Clause", the two Holiday MST3K's. "Santa Clause" a Mexican film in which Santa goes mano a mano with Satan, has got to be seen to be disbelieved.

When they moved to Sci-Fi, they were also heavily restricted as to the kind of films they could show. So gone were the biker films and teen caper comedies and what not. They had to pick films from Universal's sci-fi library, and I think that limited them tremendously.

But man, those Comedy Central days.... I was in the Information Club, and you'd get a postcard in the mail with the schedule for that year's Turkey Day, and I'd sit there and program my VCR and figure out when I had to be back home to switch tapes to get all the episodes I needed. Plus the special Thanksgiving interstitials they did were usually solid gold.

R.I.P. S.O.L.

I was very sad when the short subjects were axed with the move to the sci fi channel. Rememeber "Mr B Natural" and all those 50's educational films they had such fun with?
I think the limitations placed on them on Sci Fi did not help matters, but the loss of Trace Beaulieu as head writer was what sent the quality on a downward track, although they sitll had the occasional good episode.

Well, as much as liked Mike and thought he was good in his own right, it was Joel leaving that really started the decline for me. He had this sleepy whimsy about him that was just so charming and was a nice contrast with the snarkiness of the bots. Mike just seemed like a human Tom and Crow sometimes.

And TV's Frank leaving certainly didn't help matters either -- that lead to them introducing Pearl Forrester and eventually to her being the lead bad guy, and good god was that ever painful to watch.

My stance on the whole Joel vs. Mike (though it should really be Comedy Central vs. Sci-Fi) is that, overall, the Joel skits were a lot funnier, but the Mike riffs were a lot funnier.

Towards the end, though, most of the Sci-Fi skits were downright painful. The Sci-Fi Channel also started off by requiring them to have plot arcs during the skits; they hated to have to come up with plots, but I think the restriction really helped them in terms of skit-writing. It was only when the the restriction was ended (Castle Forrester) that, for me, the skits began to be really terrible. I'd say that the quality of riffing never declined throughout the whole run of the show. Though the tone of the riffing changed a bit, I personally think it got better, and that's where the real meat of the show is for me.

I'm glad I have both eras. How can you argue when you've got both "Sampo means flavor!" and "Total slam on anteaters outta nowhere!" or "What kind of sins could a man commit in a single lifetime..." and, um, "Rowsdower!"

Actually Pearl Forrester becoming the lead bad guy was due to Trace Beaulieu deciding to leave. He, apparently, was really the heart of the writing team from the early days on, and, as much as fun as he was as Dr.Clayton Forrester, that was really his main contribution to the show.
I don't think the Sci Fi shows totally sucked...the "StarMan" films inspired them back to the old heights and some of the other episoded were funny, but the skits were just plain bad all the way through during the Sci Fi years.
The MST3K movie was a huge mistake.
They spent almost an entire year making it, only brought out a few new episodes of the show because of that, which cost them ratings, which cost them in the end the Comedy Central gig.The show never covered from the momentum they lost because of making the movie.
And the film never even got a general release. They should have realised that
doing a movie based on a currently running TV Show very,very,seldom works.
And the movie was not that great, it would have been considered an just OK episode of the show.
BTW people forget that Joel left the show in 1993, and Mike was the host for over three seasons on "Comedy Central.".
So Mike versus Joel (I like them both about the same) is not the same as Comedy Central vs Sci fi. Making it Mike vs Joel leaves out the loss of the core writing staff (Trace and Frank) and more inteference from management over at Sci Fi, which are the two main reasons for the show's general slide in quality.
BTW the Russo/Finnish films were among my favorites..."The Day The Earth Froze" in particular, which is a very fucked up retelling of "The Kalevela" the Finnish National epic. The films bears the same resembelance to the Finnish Saga as the Hercules films do to Greek Mythology.
Joel and Mike admitted that one reason they did all the Tolkien jokes in "Day The Earth Froze" was a very in joke that some people picked up on:"The Kalevala" was principal source that Tolkein was inspired by in "Lord Of The Rings".

I agree that was a huge blow to the show. Not so much because of the on screen personalities but that Trace and Frank were so important to the writing staff.

Oh, I know that, but Frank leaving left Dr. F without a second banana and Pearl was created to fill that void. I just like to think that if Frank doesn't leave, she's never created and therefore is never able to take over.
Didn't mean to make it Joel vs. Mike, but personally for me, the show lost a little something when Joel left that it was never able to recover.

My real point was that to equate Joel with Comedy Channel and Mike with Sci fi is wack, since Mike was host for nearly half of the run on Comedy Channel.
I think you did see some decline in the last couple of years on Comedy Channel, but that might have been becuase of all the time and energy put into the ill fated "MST3K:The Movie" fiasco.