News You Can Bruise for 2005 May 8

I saw the series finale of Enterprise on Sumana's pre-post-production press preview DVD, but Sumana has embargoed me from telling you about it, so instead I will talk about Uncle Morty's Dub Shack. This is the funniest MST3K-style TV show since MST3K. In fact I think it is the only MST3K-style TV show since MST3K, but I'm not trying any predicates-on-sets-with-only-one-member tricks on you; it actually is funny. The setup is very similar to MST3K, but its episodes are only a half-hour long so it moves a lot faster than MST3K. It's also significantly lowerbrow than MST3K, but not as lowbrow as I'd feared. It's like an Adult Swim realization of MST3K.

The conceit is way too complicated, like a movie version of Pee-Wee's Playhouse that spends forty-five minutes building up Pee-Wee Herman as an eccentric cyberneticist who after his wife leaves him decides to build a strange playhouse with sentient talking chairs, etc. There's a theme song that explains the idea, but before that you get a thirty second-intro to the theme song that puts it in context, and by the time it's all over you've lost a good chunk of the air time.

Basically, four slackers are compelled to dub English versions of old Bollywood and kung fu films, but they don't have any translated scripts, so they just make up whatever story seems to fit the action. The show is half dubbed film clips and half skits like the ones before the movie on MST3K. Sumana originally thought the skits were dumb and fast-forwarded through them, but they're actually pretty funny and often clever.

Uncle Morty's Dub Shack is on the poorly-named Imaginasian TV, the new basic-cable answer to local Chinese channels. They run an episode practically every day, and it's not the big watching-a-movie investment of an MST3K episode. You just get the ten minutes of the movie about which the show's creators could make up the funniest story.