Perk? KTMA ep 3 and Green Slime pilot pleeeeease!! :)

One or two seasons ago, a promise of offering one or more KTMAs was later withdrawn because the picture quality of the master was deemed of poor quality. (A make-do was offered, though, and IIRC we did get K01 and K02.)

I’d like to submit that we still would like K03 no matter what it looks like. The fan copies we have of the rest of season are serviceable, but K03 remains as “lost” among us—no circulating the tapes of that one. It would be great to get that even if it IS full of dropouts and tape creases and such. I can understand if Shout! doesn’t want to put something in that condition onto a retail DVD, but as a download, we’d eat it up.

The Green Slime pilot would be great, too. Only a “cam”, recorded by an audience member, exists of that among MSTies, and since (I think) Joel no longer shows it at public appearances, it would be nice to have.

Pleeeeze? :slight_smile:

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K03 no longer exists to the best of our knowledge. If a fan has a copy, we’d be delighted to get ahold of it. But so far as we know that episode is truly lost.

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You mean it’s not in Jim Mallon’s secret vault?!

Time to riffle through all the attic chests in the KTMA broadcast area. Someone in that area has got to have an old VHS of the original broadcast. There’s always one rich guy with 20 VCR’s that records everything. The national guard must be called!

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Along with his bowler hat?

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Oh, I thought it was the one (ones?) they said were in too bad a shape to provide. Interesting!

I honestly do believe tapes exist somewhere. It’s just likely that the people who have them don’t realize what they’ve got.

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Some of the stories about lost films, and how or where they were found, are pretty fascinating (the original version of The Passion of Joan of Arc for example, was in a janitors closet in an Oslo mental hospital). Unfortunately, KTMA MST wasn’t distributed around the world, so you have one, limited area on which to hang your hopes on.

But maybe we’ll luck out, and it’ll be found, like, hidden in a janitor’s locker at a local gym.

Daddy - O 709

It was there all the time, only he couldn’t see it.

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K03 is in the same stash as the lost Doctor Who episodes (don’t bring logic into this just go with it). Find one, find them all!

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How about the lost Mylar short? The Venezuela short was found and released, but the Mylar short has not been and they made references to it in season 8. I really would love to see that one.

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Don’t forget the original Apollo 11 video feeds from the Moon!*

* Yes, yes, I know they were never missing! Don’t confuse me with the facts!

The Mylar short? This is news to me.

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From the MST3K Fandom entry:

"What’s It To You? Mylar (also known as Mylar: What’s It To You?) is an industrial short produced by the DuPont Corporation in 1955 to promote their brand of polyester film.

The short was intended to be used for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 CD-ROM, but that product was never completed. The master tape was apparently misplaced at the Best Brains offices, and has not re-surfaced.

Trace Beaulieu made brief reference to the short during a promotional spot that aired during Turkey Day '95."

mylar

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“Couldn’t help ya if I wanted to, fella; KTMA policy.”

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Oh, that’s absolutely heartbreaking. So K03, Green Slime Pilot, and Mylar short are what’s left to find. Here’s to MST3K Miracles…

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There seems to be some confusion here. Shout at one point was going to release a bonus disc of KTMA host segments with (I believe) Volume 38, but it was determined the quality was too low, so they switched to another bonus disc instead.

During the 2015 Kickstarter, Joel hinted that he would like to release the K01-K03 as a Kickstarter bonus. On Turkey day 2016, K01-K02 were released to Kickstarter backers. The quality was amazing.

In an interview with Satellite News back in (again, I believe, this is off the top of my head. I could be off about the year) 2006, then owner Jim Mallon confirmed he had tapes of K01-K03 in his possession, and not long after posted posted some clips from K03 on MST3K.com.

My guess: K03 was misplaced during Mallon’s digitizing process to put those clips on MST3K.com. Best case scenario, it’s in an old VCR in Jim’s basement and didn’t get sent to Joel/Shout during the transfer of materials when he sold them MST3K and existing assets. Worst case, it was damaged/destroyed during the digitization process.

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Misplaced? One of the fan sites mentions getting a prop from the set that was stolen by one of the interns. (Then they lost the prop and asked the intern to get another one for them, from what I remember.) Could be some intern decided that these mysteriously missing tapes were theirs for the taking. You can’t put things past interns. I mean, one of them at CNN decided that the secret end-of-the-world tape needed to be stolen and shown to the world.

It’s possible, but I’m not sure there were still interns associated with MST3K at that point. The auctioning off of props that could have resulted in things getting “lost” to interns was way back in ‘99-‘00, well before we know that Mallon still had a copy. Plus, any potential thief is being pretty lazy about releasing it to the web at this point.

I forgot to address The Green Slime. That was never mentioned in the Kickstarter, but around the end of Cinematic Titanic (2013-14), Joel showed The Green Slime at a convention and a fan recorded it and uploaded it to YouTube.

Since the film was released by Toei, I’m assuming they’re going to be as serious about their silly monster movies as Toho, and that an agreement for an official release is unlikely to happen. So the fan bootleg is likely to be the only release. But as of the last decade we at least have confirmation that Joel has a copy.