Rewound and watched it last night after the live stream had ended, and it was pretty funny (though my wife fell asleep halfway through.) They did indeed cut out the entire second return trip to the diving bell, the octopus/shark fight from the beginning, and I think a few chunks of silent walking (I also seem to recall there was a short scene of the two guys following Cave Torgo up to the volacano that wasn’t in this version.)
Overall, I noticed our fan riff easily had double or triple the number of jokes as their version. If we’d ever gotten around to trying to record it with stand-in actors, we would have had to pare it way back… though Frank and Trace are also bit more laid back and conversational when it comes to their riffing, probably out of necessity because it’s a live broadcast and you can’t go back and rerecord if you flub a difficult to say line.
In terms of landing the same jokes, I spotted a couple, but not many. The most obvious being the “here, breathe this” coffee gag in the diving bell towards the end, and the bit where the film mentions the phantom layer rising at night and descending at day being, so the did the exact same “so it’s a vampire?”
They also did an updated variation of my “burn this” gag with the film can, where they said “Here, destroy this. We’re going to write it off our taxes.”
Perhaps it was because they edited it down, or because my memory was of watching it over and over again in short little one minute hops, but it seemed to move way quicker. Even though it was still boring and nothing happened, it was much much easier to sit through than I remember.
The Q&A was actually pretty fun. Often they get somebody on, and I just switch off after a while because they’re really annoying or I just don’t care what they have to say, but Ken was quite entertaining, despite me having no idea who he was prior to the event. (Maybe he can put in a good word and they can get Doc Hammer or Jackson Publick in as a guest on a future experiment. They’d be great, especially on something extra goofy and spy-related like Terror Beneath the Sea.)
Hah! When The Mads did their live show here years ago, they asked the audience to call out the name of the worst movie MST3K had ever done and this was (and still is) my pick.
