Yeah, I think Turkey Day is a bit overrated. It’s nice, but ut’s not the be-all-end-all. If they started the crowdfunder in the middle of an actors’ strike just so they could end it on Thanksgiving, that was a mistake.
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It looks like people were let go from the production company as early as December, so I’m guessing they waited as long as they could for the strikes to end.
@Rogarc, Lesley is currently showing her last month at Alternaversal as Dec 2023 on the public facing version of her Linkedin page, so you can note when people left in your tracker. Thank you for putting that together!
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Very much agree. There is no point at all in going completely silent and saying zilch to the loyal community for a year. It accomplishes nothing. It doesn’t build excitement. It doesn’t reward loyalty. It doesn’t retain interest. All it does is make all those things that much harder to rebuild. But a tiny … just a TINY … amount of communication with the community in this pause would go a long way to keeping people around and making fans feel like there was a point to it all.
The absolute worst thing they could do would be to pop back in November with their hat in their hand, no acknowledgement of their neglect, and a plaintive “Okay we’ll take your money now.” That would suck.
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If they come back for turkey day with nothing other than another swing at a $5mil crowdfunding campaign, I will indeed be disappointed too.
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My main point is IF they have solidified information, they need to go public with it as soon as it’s ready to be released, and NOT wait for any date of significance, because I don’t think a significant date buys them any advantage, but waiting definitely carries with it one or more negatives.
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A couple of minor updates made and improvement to chronological ordering:
Season 11 Kickstarter was a wild success for the time but probably was not budgeted accordingly.
In order to make the show, they licensed with Netflix which gave additional funds.
Netflix cancelled the show after season 12.
Season 13 Kickstarter funding was a success but there were many issues for people. Some related to supply chains and the difficulty of COVID. Some related to creative choices.
Season 14 was moved to a different crowdfunding platform. It had several hiccoughs (poor engagement, writer and actor strikes, economy,etc), and ultimately it failed.
Joel eventually sent a letter to fans stating that the support for the show may have opened new avenues and that if possible sometime this year we might get an update.
Following the completion of the Season 14 Crowdfundr, Lesley, Ivan, and Matt were let go from the company producing new MST3K. Exact timing of this is unclear, most of the stopped forum activity before or shortly after the Kickstarter, but Matt’s LinkedIn looks like he was employed until February 2024. Leslie’s LinkedIn indicates she was employed until December 2023. There has been no official announcement that the production company is closed.
The gizmoplex theater stopped working in the fall of 2023. Videos are still available in the gizmoplex. Just not the theater.
https://theater.gizmoplex.com/
Turkey day marathon evolved into a Forever-thon on youtube to supplement the twitch, Pluto, etc streams. There have been a couple of themed showings on YouTube to celebrate things like Sandy Frank’s birthday.
Jonah did an interview [WTF with Marc Maron] where he stated he thought the crowdfunding season 14 was probably not a great idea, [going to the well too many times].
Joel did an interview with Charlie Berens. Mostly he just reminisced. No new show info.
Felicia Day has an active social media, but there’s more about Pokemon than MST3K.
Emily has some videos about puppeting, but nothing new about MST3K.
There are multiple LLCs associated with MST3K. They are separate for the live shows, tv production etc. Most of them closed earlier this year 2024). I think one is still active. It’s unclear if they still have physical space–none of the space is visible from Google Maps and it’s too far for me to drive by.
The Facebook page updated the banner. It started posting a clip about once a week in May 2024. Before that no changes had occurred since February.
6/17/24 Lesley posted on Facebook that the company she worked for that made MST3K shutdown in January and she is looking for new work. Season 14, Gizmoplex, and MST3K … Nothin’ But Tumbleweeds - #450 by MonkeyPretzel
6/28:
One of our users confirmed that an LLC related to Shout! is the company running this forum based on the terms of service.
A bit of interesting detective work.
7/14: Blobfest featured riffing by Joel, Emily, and Matt of Beware the Blob! No news of season 14, good or bad.
As of now still no updates from Joel or anyone with power to make a new season. Joel has never been a frequent updated on socials, his last updates are from 2022 I think.
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At this point, Im just counting the days until Shout realizes that it’s still paying money for this forum, which is a potential legal liability, if, like, terroists use it to send messages to each other or something crazy like that, and shuts it down.
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If any terrorists join and refuse to follow our forum rules, we would use the same discipline mechanisms we use for everyone. Be sure to flag any terrorist posts as soon as you spot them. That would help us out a lot.
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Private messages is what I was speaking of, and the community would not know about it to be able to report.
I’m not making this up sadly:
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After no new video posts for about 6 months, the official YouTube channel just posted “Hobgoblins” in its entirety:
I know the turkey day marathon became a forever marathon, and those are all still going on, but before today, the latest activity from the official YouTube channel was posting like 7 minute clips from various season 13 episodes, and that was about half a year ago.
I don’t know that dropping a full episode means anything, but it is the official channel doing something different, so I figured I’d draw some attention to it.
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Yeah, I don’t think any website much less this one needs to fear legal liability because as your link CLEARLY states, “…the activities described herein may involve
constitutionally protected activities and may be insignificant
on their own. Action should not be taken solely based on
the exercise of constitutionally protected rights”
The only sites mentioned are literally the biggest sites on the internet, they have bigger fish to fry than this one.
I was in before and I’d be in again, but I would really, really like to see transparency with the numbers and process if they want to win back folks who are on the fence after last time. But of course, some folks will never pitch in a dime no matter what (all the while loudly proclaiming how they would have, if only- gripe gripe gripe)
Also, this is only me wildly speculating, but I wonder if the foreverthon might be a way they’re scraping numbers to use to shop around for a big-time sponsor/producer? If they could swing a 50%+ funding on their own I think crowdsourcing the balance would go down a lot easier.
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If the Forever-thon is trying to put together stats for that, I think they are miscalculating the popularity of the franchise. What helped the franchise in the past was not overwhelming numbers. Instead the franchise had the sort of passion that gets someone in Illinois to invite hundreds of strangers to swim in their pool and riff cheesy movies.
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I suspect the Foreverathon is a way to get cash from YouTube for running commercials in-between, which appears to be the only way to pull a long term profit from non-Netflix streaming as of right this moment.
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Or, the Foreverathon could be neither of those things.
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While I agree that it might not be the primary reason, I hope somebody is getting paid for running commercials during it. The volume on those things is BOLD!
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I think it’s a strapless evening gown…
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Most sensible. There is likely a reason for the streaming affairs, but there is not much info to decide a motive. It’s just a nice thing we should be thankful for.
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I know that you all don’t have to answer to us, but…
Just out of curiosity, are the mod team paid by Shout, or are you strictly volunteer?
If you have issues between yourselves that can’t be resolved, what authority do you appeal to?
In this times of uncertainty, I think these are important questions for us to hear the answer to.
I mean, if nobody is above overseeing, what’s to stop one mod from going nuts, or getting ticked off, wiping everything, banning everyone, or something crazy like that?
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Just a guess, but what I’d say stops that is the mods not being arseholes. Just a wild guess.
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