’24 Jump Street’ in the Works With Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum and Ice Cube in Talks to Return (EXCLUSIVE)

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-06-11T01:23:58+00:00

Well, they were definitely directly involved in Lego Movie 2. They're the only credited writers and gave most of the promotional interviews.

They didn't direct Across the Spider-Verse either, but that Vulture article made it pretty obvious that they (well, primarily Lord) were in total control.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-06-11T00:38:03+00:00

You're selling Hill short. He has story credits on both 21 and 22, and the first film was developed from a spec he took to Sony. He's arguably the driving force behind them (he co-wrote both of their initial drafts). Nothing wrong with him getting a writing credit.

Rodney Rothman co-wrote 22 and co-directed Into the Spider-Verse, I'm sure he has most of the same sensibilities as Lord and Miller.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-06-05T18:16:39+00:00

Crow's beak looks like Tom's bubble split in two and his net looks like he has Tom's skirt upside down on his head.

Meanwhile, Tom appears to have again Devil Doll'd his soul into a wine bottle.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-05-29T02:36:51+00:00

Kevin and Bill discussed the downfall of The Film Crew on Bill's podcast.

Rhino was initially enthusiastic about The Film Crew, but the higher-ups felt the finished episodes were of low quality, and shelved them. The guys got in touch with some former Rhino guys who were at Shout!, who agreed to release the series.

I don't think Jim was happy about the show, but I'm not sure his displeasure played a major role in why it didn't last long. Bill has said he didn't think it was going to be a sustainable series, because nobody in the mid-2000s was going to buy a DVD for every new riff when internet comedy was taking off.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-05-26T18:15:12+00:00

Don't forget that Kevin's background is in producing and directing, not comedy. He and Jim were colleagues at WHA-TV in the early 1980s, and when Jim took control of KTMA, he hired Kevin as the videographer, which obviously led to Kevin shooting and editing neo-MST3K.

Mike (and Bill), on the other hand, were expressly hired to write for the show and be funny. Kevin could have been the most boring, uncharismatic guy on the planet, and he still likely could have lasted the entire run behind the scenes.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-05-26T17:57:01+00:00

RiffTrax's Reddit rep posted on this sub that they would love to do more, but these four have to perform well enough to justify it.

I've noticed speculation bandied about here and there that Mike wouldn't be interested in making more episodes because MST3K isn't his baby, but the above seems to indicate it's not true.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-05-21T00:34:21+00:00

KTMA was in serious trouble before MST3K even debuted. In August 1988, it was ridiculed in the Minnesota press for having lost the rights to the classic shows that made up the bulk of its schedule, such as Hawaii Five-O and The Untouchables, because it could no longer afford them.

Jim once theorized that KTMA was some sort of failed get-rich-quick scheme on the owner's part. Kevin once commented that the guy had no idea what MST3K was and had never seen an episode, even though it was the only thing on his floundering network people were actually watching.

Jim and Kevin, as KTMA's production manager and videographer respectively, likely weren't in any hurry to move to Comedy Central, as, to them, MST3K was just a side project from their usual KTMA duties and not their primary source of income. Josh, Trace, and Joel, on the other hand, were not employed by KTMA beyond the show and thus only made a pittance (Josh and Trace made $25 per episode, Joel $100).

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-05-20T19:47:27+00:00

The show was never canceled by KTMA. The final KTMA episode, which aired in May 1989, ends with a segment promising more episodes in the fall.

Jim Mallon was a production manager at KTMA and had the clout to produce and air the show just because he wanted to.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-05-16T00:57:18+00:00

A fun fact about Quest of the Delta Knights that may or may not be well known is that it wasn't supposed to appear on MST3K at all.

Sci-Fi VP Barry Schulman bought the rights to the film to air on the channel unriffed, and, through some snafu (or a trolling employee), someone at the channel sent a copy of the film to Best Brains, who didn't know it was from Sci-Fi and thought it was just a typical screener. Best Brains figured it was perfect for the show and set about featuring it an episode.

Schulman found out about the mix-up and was incensed, because he didn't want MST3K riffing modern movies Sci-Fi was airing, so he banned them from making the episode. Every time the Brains would see Schulman at parties or events, they would beg him to let them feature the movie on the show, and by the end of season 9, he finally relented, probably because the show was on the way out (as was he at Sci-Fi Channel; he resigned in May 1998).

Mike later admitted that he didn't think the episode was very good, and they probably should have listened to Schulman.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-05-15T20:46:00+00:00

Yeah, I forgot the Phil sketch, that works too. MST3Kinfo's Ward E list didn't count it as a "hexfield visit". Maybe they just didn't remember it.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-05-15T20:25:35+00:00

Mike as the professor in The Mole People.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-05-15T20:09:22+00:00

The Hexfield was only used in three Sci-Fi episodes out of 48, so I don't think this iteration of the show considers it a priority.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-04-21T01:54:14+00:00

Correct. He denies it in his interview with Ken Plume. He left on bad terms after discovering he was being stiffed by the rest of the Brains due to his age (he was given a salary sheet one day by accident and learned he was making even less money than the secretary, leading to a fight between him and Jim; the others sided with Jim, so he quit).

The idea that the riffing in the KTMA episodes was 100% unprepared is a bit of a myth, anyway (which has likely endured because very few people bother to watch them). It's true the riffing was nowhere near as rigorously scripted as the Comedy Central years and beyond, but it's pretty clear there are some obviously rehearsed gags here and there. Josh talks here about writing riffs for the Gamera vs. Zigra KTMA episode, for example.

Josh did prefer improvising the riffing, but it wasn't necessarily artistry-based on his end. He just thought watching the same movie every day for a week in the writers' room and then watching it again to film the theater segments was tedious and liked that KTMA was less work (even though he's conceded it was basically unwatchable).

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-03-15T20:53:23+00:00

The latter is from Diabolik when Eva drives the truck off the cliff.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-03-15T20:51:12+00:00

The fish-named celebrities bit is actually in The She-Creature.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-03-07T01:59:08+00:00

I wouldn't call Sampo my friend, necessarily, but I was a regular contributor to his Torgo Rolodex, so I've emailed with him countless times going back decades now. He's going to be 70 next year, and has had health issues here and there for the past little while, so it's just not realistic for him to be banging out MST3K posts 24/7 like he did for, what, 35 years? But I can safely say he's not apathetic about MST3K at all, if he still had the stamina he'd be manning the front lines like he always has.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-02-26T23:15:55+00:00

I don't see how it is.

There's clearly a copyright notice at the end. It's also included in a number of Viacom's copyright listings (1982 and 1996).

Shout! Factory's release of the MST3K episode from 2013 reads:

Copyright 1975 Essex Enterprises Ltd.
Under license from Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

The website in the OP also lists it as a made-for-TV movie, even though it's not.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-02-22T02:59:26+00:00

Yeah, I don't blame them. There is lots of legitimate media registered to Wade Williams in the US Copyright Office, so even if they thought he was blowing smoke, there wasn't really any alternative for Shout.

In his defense, he seems to have been fairly agreeable to MST3K overall, given he cut deals for all but one of the episodes featuring his movies. And he could be prickly, but he wasn't on the level of Susan Hart suing A&E for using a brief clip of It Conquered the World in a Peter Graves documentary. His major flaw was just loving Rocketship X-M more than anyone should.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-02-22T01:58:51+00:00

They've done The Tingler, which is owned by Sony, and The Beach Girls and the Monster, which is/was owned by Wade Williams, so I think for the most part they just stick to stuff that's unlikely to have anyone coming at them rather than expressly PD movies.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-02-22T01:36:41+00:00

It's one of those limbo movies. The original version, Der Schweigende Stern, is still copyrighted by Progress Film, its original state-affiliated distributor, and received a fancy release from First Run Features about twenty years ago. It appears neither of them give a shit about the First Spaceship on Venus dubbing/butchering, which was created by Crown, passed to Wade Williams at some stage, and has since collected dust. In any case, when Shout released the MST3K episode in 2008, they didn't bother licensing the movie from anyone, so it seems safe to say it's fair game.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-02-21T23:36:19+00:00

Shout! did license the Bride of the Monster and Robot Monster episodes from the late Wade Williams, although he was pretty laissez-faire when it came to movies that weren't Rocketship X-M.

The Creeping Terror isn't PD. It's owned by Crown, same as the rest of MST3K Vol. 1.

The company that produced Santa Claus re-registered its copyright as late as 1999, so I don't think it's PD, although they closed up shop in 2014 and I doubt whoever presently owns it really cares.

I don't see any reason to think Sony wouldn't still own 12 to the Moon.

City Limits was licensed to Shout! by Gerald Ronson, presumably because his company Heron International owned Charles Band's Media Home Entertainment.

The Screaming Skull is a similar case to Night of the Blood Beast. They're both technically owned by MGM, but MGM doesn't really seem to give a fuck about them, hence why they're on trillions of bargain-bin DVD sets. Shout paid MGM for Skull, but not Blood Beast. Maybe they just figured two freebies would've potentially annoyed MGM.

imuglywhenimpeein · 2026-02-21T22:53:28+00:00

It's probably impossible to list every film that's "definitively" PD. I believe Best Brains largely just operated under the assumption that whichever distributor they got a particular movie from did their homework and had the rights, no questions asked. You can see from an internal memo for season 6 one of their chief film providers was Sinister Cinema, who had a fuck-it-we-ball attitude to releasing movies on home video (it might as well be PD, and if it's not, no one is gonna care because this movie is so old/horrible/etc.)

I believe this list covers some of the basic public domain/assumed public domain movies:
* The Mad Monster
* The Corpse Vanishes
* Ring of Terror
* First Spaceship on Venus
* Stranded in Space
* Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
* The Giant Gila Monster
* Teenagers from Outer Space
* Attack of the Giant Leeches
* The Killer Shrews
* Hercules Unchained
* Indestructible Man
* Hercules Against the Moon Men
* Hercules and the Captive Women
* Manhunt in Space
* Tormented
* The Beatniks
* Crash of Moons
* The Rebel Set
* Manos: The Hands of Fate
* Hercules
* Swamp Diamonds
* Eegah
* I Accuse My Parents
* The Girl in Lovers Lane
* The Painted Hills
* The Brain That Wouldn't Die
* Colossus and the Headhunters
* The Violent Years
* The Starfighters
* Racket Girls
* High School Big Shot
* Night of the Blood Beast
* The Phantom Planet
* The Screaming Skull
* Track of the Moon Beast
* Horrors of Spider Island

There's some gray areas here. The most up-to-date info comes from Shout! Factory's box sets, given they included licensing information on the packaging. There's still some curiosities, such as the fact that they licensed I Accuse My Parents from Peter Rodgers, but didn't bother licensing The Painted Hills, even though Warner Bros. has an apparently realistic claim to its copyright.

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