A Tribute to The Christmas That Almost Wasn't (MST3K Special)

The Christmas That Almost Wasn't (review here) is the only tribute event so far that doesn't feature a brand new short as a lead-in.  This could be for a couple reasons.  For starters, this was a part of the Holiday week of Gizmoplex events, and we've already had two shorts this week.  They also decided to debut two shorts during the Festival of Shorts event in January, which meant one of our live events didn't need one.  I do have suspicions that the Festival of Shorts was only meant to debut Mr. B Natural, as that short is the only one of our bonus shorts that doesn't feature an intro by Pearl and Cynthia, but that's just speculation on my part.

So far, this is the only tribute event from the modern seasons of the series, bringing in an episode from the Netflix era.  If nothing else, it's nice to appreciate the physical sets of this episode in comparison to the Flatimation aesthetic they've adopted.  The Netflix sets are gorgeous.  We are given some new segments with Emily and her Bots which show the difference, not entirely for the positive, but luckily the show still knows how to bring the funny, which is what's important.  These segments feature Emily getting a cantankerous billionaire name created by a name generator (she's "Steve Forbes"), discussing what a sheltered freak Santa is, and we also see her reading a Christmas story to the Bots with Joel.  Meanwhile, Synthia is obsessed with an Italian Christmas Donkey song...or something...I don't even know.

On this fourth night of Christmas fun, we get a lovely live Q&A from Phoenixville, with our guests Matt McGinnis, Jonah Ray, Emily Marsh, Baron Vaughn, Kelsey Ann Brady, Rebecca Hanson, Yvonne Freese, Tim Ryder, Deanna Rooney, and a special appearance from Devon Coleman.  It's some really great content, with my personal highlight going to Kelsey, who has a very colorful portion where she describes puppeteering Crow, with an epic comparison between puppetry and a floating duck.  They also get into a great discussion about fan opinion, of which Kelsey gets the laugh of the night with her epic waiving off the question (I think we all know what opinion she's been hearing ever since she picked up the Crow puppet and bless her for putting up with that nonsense).  I love Tim Ryder's response of "We're not trying to make them mad," which is something that can be said for a lot of media that I think a lot of people should try and keep in mind.

It's a pretty fun gab session, and these things tend to play better in front of an audience as opposed to on a Zoom screen, creating better reactions from our cast.  I've been very content with what has been offered from the Phoenixville presentation so far.  But we're not done, for there is one more left.

To Be Concluded...