I believe the real chemistry, cadence, delivery, and humor is with Nelson, Corbett, and Murphy. The irony is the show is not about the puppets, its about the relationships and the riffs.
I'm spending more money at rifftrax because they are hilarious and continue to deliver the content I enjoy.
Interestingly, with respect to pop-culture references, I believe they are becoming more obscwure as our media choices are divergent. For example, I might watch a little known show on YouTube rather than a major media broadcast. We see this behavior in music as well -- not as many platinum selling artists given varying consumer chiices, outlets, Indies, etc. I just didn't think the pop culture jokes will have as far a reach without a common foundation. Our people grew up with 3 major channels, bunny ears, party telephone lines, and a few good radio stations. Very different t than today's choices. I watched the kickstarted vids and did not think the new crowd was funny at all. It was too rehearsed, too staged, the lines felt forced. The "mad" (gamer girl) already resorted to cursing, something the show rarely if ever did.
biggest fear is they load up on dark, gamer, video game culture references. Another fear is they lose the homegrown, goofiness with campy props from their garage. Part of the beauty of the original shows were the viewer could watch and envision his buddies sitting on the couch making similar riffs during an awful movie.
I just don't see them catching lightning in a bottle again. It was fun for many seasons, but its time to move on. Sometimes we want to go back so bad, but we can never create that same feeling again. Anyhow, pls excuse spelling errors//on a tablet!
Even Pearl and Mike had it going it was the Sci Fi channel that did them in.
Don’t know if you remember but the fans took out a full page add wanting to keep it but the Sci Fi channel would not do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Science_Theater_3000
” Another campaign to save the show was mounted, including several MST3K fans taking contributions for a full-page ad in the trade publication Daily Variety magazine, but was unsuccessful.[26] The shows later moved to syndication.”
No other network would take it. So it went off the air and the fans were like bummer!
I think Joel would have tried this back then but really the internet was not as big and we did not have kickstarter or internet streaming.
It all proves sometimes you do get a second chance.