One reason the seats were bigger in the old days was that old-style NTSC television in the U.S. needed to have a “TV safe” area to account for the overscan of picture-tube TVs.
That’s why you can generally crop any TV show from about 1960-2000 to 16x10 and not lose any important information. MST3K is sometimes the exception to that in that they usually used material not made for TV, so there was sometimes important information at the top of the screen.
They didn’t account for overscan in the KTMA season, and that’s why we get the story of the woman who couldn’t see the seats at all and called in to ask why there were people talking.
EDIT: And I just went back and read Joel’s article which I should have done in the first place, where he explains “TV safe” a bit, making this post superfluous.
Nope, separate things! If they had ownership of the show, we wouldn’t be able to make new episodes without their permission.
They just (currently) have exclusivity on the footage that makes up Seasons 11 and 12. We couldn’t reuse that footage without their permission, which they did not grant.
If they do make such a show, they should recreate the proprietary segments with crayon drawings and voiceovers. Maybe repurpose some of the artwork seen in viewer mail.
You’re talking about the exclusivity of footage. Does that apply to audio as well?
Specifically, I was wondering if that exclusivity applies to the rearranged version of the MST3K end credits theme that we heard at the end of the Netflix episodes.
I’d enjoy seeing them go the Community route, and show us clips of shows/sketches/inventions that never existed before. Maybe use that to show off some more products of the Invention Exchange workshop, or fan-submitted inventions?
FWIW, the QVSanto host segment from 1301 featured a music bed featuring the piece called “Curious Vermin” that Paul and Storm made for The Return. So music seems to be its own thing. I don’t know if it was recreated for the episode, but it sounds identical to me.
