News You Can Bruise for 2010 December 6

Permalink [Comments] (7) Mon Dec 06 2010 10:22 Can't Relax:

So if Joel hadn't built the 'bots, he would have control over "where the movies begin or end"? Really?

This has been bothering me for fifteen years.

television

Comments:

Posted by kirkjerk at Mon Dec 06 2010 12:14

1. http://www.mst3kinfo.com/mstfaq/lyrics.html -- Apparently the MST3K kind of agreed, 'cause after episode 512 the lyrics don't have that detail.2. I agree, it seems like making 3 or 4 robofriends would take a LOT of parts, more than would be required for some kind of localized control mechanism and/or DVR functionality.3. This whole thing probably falls under "other science facts (la-la-la)"

Posted by kirkjerk at Mon Dec 06 2010 12:15

Oh wait, hence the title of this post.

Posted by zztzed at Mon Dec 06 2010 13:45

They omit that detail from the lyrics after episode 512 because the Mike era begins at episode 513, and he is not the one who used those special parts to make his robot friends.

Posted by steve minutillo at Mon Dec 06 2010 13:50

The movies were meant to be uploaded and buffered for on-demand playback. Joel cannibalized the mass storage system for use in Gypsy and some of the video codec chips for Cambot so he is forced to watch the movies as they stream up in real-time.

I thought everybody already knew this.

Posted by Jason Scott at Mon Dec 06 2010 16:24

Yes, this is absolutely the case; if he hadn't built the friends, he could stop the movies. That's the irony - and a reflection of us in the audience, we'd probably stop the movies without the bots too.

Posted by kirkjerk at Mon Dec 06 2010 16:39

Man, I just can't hang with the MST3K trufans. :-(

Posted by Rothul at Wed Dec 08 2010 11:37

Of course, this, in some small part, represents a pyrrich victory for the Mads, if an unintentional one. Their imposed isolation, after all, succeeded in driving Joel to sacrifice the one aspect of control he had in the experiment, something I'm sure the Mads were quite gleeful about at the time. However, since the creation of his robot friends was a personal choice, it allowed Joel to gradually become happy with his situation, making for what I assume is some pretty staid mind data. This might be the reason for why Mike, who never had any choice in the matter, made for such a more rebellious test subject.

I know, I know. I should just relax, but having just watched the two Christmas episodes back to back, I thought it interesting how Mike was so melancholy at being trapped away from home during the holidays, whereas Joel seemed to feel the SOL was his holiday home.

Leave a comment