Bring Back MST3K Final Countdown Telethon (MST3K Special)

WELCOME TO THE FINAL COUNTDOWN!

Over the course of November into December 2015, Joel Hodgson crowdfunded the return of Mystery Science Theater 3000 for an eleventh season of new episodes.  The Kickstarter was a rousing success, fulfilling its $5.5 million goal the morning of its final day, though Joel threw a curveball at us when he claims they will be willing to create more episodes of the series than they've promised depending on how high the fundraising goes.  This all concluded on a four hour finale "telethon," which was really just a celebration of the fantastic month that they were finishing up, as we watched the money flow and rooted for the money to go higher and higher.

The telethon was a hot mess, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

For those who weren't there at the time the telethon was live streamed, here is some context for how it started.  They were actually live streaming most of the day, and leading up to the telethon they were playing the episodes Mitchell and The Final Sacrifice, which Joel has gone on record saying are his favorite episodes of the series.  After the episodes, this telethon was supposed to start, but they had a lot of technical difficulties getting the stream started.  They created funny little "Please Stand By" cards with Crow on them to indicate they were having technical difficulties, including a hilarious one that just said "Please Get Out and Push."  Things were not right from the get go.  Finally the stream gets up and running, and it starts with the Kickstarter bumper that opened the fundraising campaign, but we can hear audio from Joel and everyone else running the show along with it.  I can't tell that if this is deliberate or not, but considering how everything went that night, I'm leaning toward it not being so.

The disaster continued throughout the night as the feed dropped in and out constantly and MSTies across the globe had to switch back and forth between two different live streams based on which one was working and which one crapped out.  There were points where the feed looped for no reason, which lead to my favorite meme of the night, Joel saying the words "-segment with Crow?" on repeat, marking the beginning of another loop.  Even the guests who were streaming from different locations were having trouble getting their feeds through.  Jonah Ray, in particular, was supposed to have a sizable chunk of entertainment from a bar in Atlanta, but they had trouble receiving his feed.  From what I hear, even if Jonah couldn't get the feed working, he kept the bar entertained that night anyway.  Probably the most amusing and most grating thing to happen all night is a conversation between Jonah and Patton Oswalt, where Patton's mic is so faulty that all we can hear is loud static.

The show was such a trainwreck that when their intended content fucks up, Patton just busts out his phone and reads Twitter to the audence.

As for the show they're trying to put on, imagine a PBS telethon, only even more low rent and in a comic book store.  Occasionally we get guests who come on and perform, like Kate Micucci of Garfunkle & Oates and The Big Bang Theory, Dana Gould doing his Dr. Zaius routine, Game Grumps (they do a segment where they play the fan-made "Manos" The Hands of Fate game with Hampton Yaunt's Crow), and Robert Lopez, who co-wrote the songs in Frozen, meanwhile Patton and Felicia Day duck in and out and they occasionally play clips from the series (shorts or host segments).  The entertainment value is just kind of a limited, cheesy "thank you for not changing the channel" variety that gets a pass based on how invested fans are in the outcome of the fundraiser and secretly because we're just waiting to see what goes wrong next.  In a way, all the production woes are probably the best possible thing that could have happened.  With those problems this transcended being four hours of cheap, cringy fan pandering into something more memorable and lovably bad.

That being said, there are some undeniably fun moments in the fundraising goals.  You can hear folks cheer during the magic act when they hit $5.9 million, and it's charming that Joel doesn't learn of this until fifteen minutes later because he was busy watching said act and visits with his old friend on stage even as the numbers crank up while he's oblivious to them.  Also, the last minute fourteenth episode goal ends the telethon on a wild note of celebration that's worth seeing.  And in the end, everyone breaks into singing the MST3K theme, though some branch off into singing the Joel version and some branch off into singing the Mike version, reminding us of just how out of tune but enjoyable this whole mess was.

Is it worth watching after the fact?  That's a tough question, because revisiting this five years later gives me some mad nostalgia vibes.  I don't know how this would play without the context of the whole situation that was erupting around it, and how this little celebration kept going wrong, but we didn't care.  If you watch ten minutes of it and go "No," then maybe you shouldn't bother, but this is a very silly thing that happened once and I think it's earned a footnote in MST3K history.  What a ride!

And at the end, we took that "W."  And we felt like we earned it.