I’ve been a fan of MST3K for 30 years. Unfortunately, that has recently changed. It isn’t that I didn’t try to like it but what they’re putting out now, it just doesn’t gel with me at all. In fact, it’s been going downhill for a long time now, this is just where I’m going to cut ties. This just isn’t the show that it used to be.

We started watching back at the end of the first season or early second on the Comedy Channel. I’ve seen every classic episode numerous times, all the way back to KTMA. We were members of the old-school MST3K Information Club and I still have the membership card. Those were great times.

Unfortunately, these are not.

The Netflix episodes were, at best, passable. I’m not especially fond of Jonah Ray and while I think Patton Oswalt and Felicia Day are good in some projects, this just isn’t one of them. They really have no chemistry together at all and that became painfully clear as we moved into Season 13.

See, there’s a lot wrong today, at least in my opinion. One of the things that always made MST3K charming was the feeling like it mattered to the creators. Not mattered in the “cash cow” sense, but as passionate creators who would have found a way to do it, even if they weren’t making money on it.

That’s not the impression that the show gives anymore. In fact, the entire Kickstarter nonsense makes it look like this is only about the money, not remotely about having a good time. I do like Joel, but this really comes off as an old creative trying to live on eternally through his past successes.

Still, I gave it a shot. I can be wrong and maybe he had it in him to produce a good show again. Unfortunately, it seems not to be. I’ve seen the three first-look episodes and, yes, I’m giving them a lot of latitude because the episodes aren’t really finished, but it’s the whole concept that really sucks now.

First off, the entire vibe. Back when it started, MST3K looked cheap because it was. It was made on a shoe-string budget and that became part of it’s charm. The sets were slapped together with whatever they could find and the robots were built from spare parts. Best Brains was doing the best they could with what they had at hand and that enthusiasm translated to the screen.

That’s just not what we’re seeing now. All of the host segments look like they’re bored and trying to get through it as fast as they can. The sets look cheap, but not cheap in a charming way, but in a “we just don’t care anymore” way. The opening is awful. When the Netflix series came back, there was still some spark in the opening sequence. There is none of that there anymore. It’s just terrible.

The cast doesn’t appeal to me one bit. I already talked about Oswalt and Day, both of whom look like they’re phoning in performances for a paycheck. They might show up once in a while to film their parts and then they’re gone. I don’t see any real investment in the project whatsoever. Jonah isn’t much better. At least there were a couple of times during the Netflix run that I found some of the jokes funny. I think his Kaiju Rap during Reptilicus was fantastic. It was like the old songs that just got stuck in your head and wouldn’t let go.

Absolutely nothing in the new season is remotely like that. It’s all flat, dull and pointless. Every instant feels like “can we just get this out of the way?” Take the invention exchanges. So far, it’s all been random things thrown on screen. At least back in the Joel era, he was a prop comic and he had a lot of inventive, imaginative props. Now, it’s just stupid. It really feels like “Hurry up, Patton and Felicia need to get through their lines or they cost us more money! Move! Move! Move!”

Let’s add to that the constant badly-produced ads. I know that some of that is Kickstarter rewards but it’s badly done, like they knew they had to do it so they threw something together in 15 minutes and that was the end of it. Can we just not? Thanks.

Then there’s one of the worst things, where they’ve given in to political correctness. The name is Gypsy. It isn’t GPC. It’s been Gypsy for 30 years. There is no legitimate reason to change. Just because some fanatical political assholes get pissed off at the name, that doesn’t mean you cave in. I’ve got two words for you.

Fuck off.

Of course, we finally get to Emily and her crew. Now I don’t mind Emily, although she isn’t all that funny either. I watched her first episode, Beyond Atlantis and it was a snooze-fest. I don’t think I did more than smile once during the entire episode and I figure it was a sympathy smile more than anything else. It was bad. The new voice they have for Crow is terrible. It sounds like a bad attempt at Bart Simpson. Of course, there was no chemistry whatsoever and by the end, my wife declared that any future episodes with Emily and the horrible Crow voice, we could just skip over those entirely.

It was then that I realized that I’m just not having any fun with this at all. The entire adventure looks pathetic. They have Q&A sessions that are little more than begging for money. “Please, don’t make us get jobs!” The jokes clearly aren’t made for the original fans. There’s no heart, there’s no soul and frankly, there’s no reason to continue.

As I said at the beginning, I watched all of the original 10 seasons repeatedly. I still do! I got through both Netflix seasons but I have never gone back and watched any of those episodes again. I’m wondering why I’m wasting my time on the Gizmoplex crap at all on the first run. This is not MST3K. It’s a pathetic undead zombie that they keep trotting out every time Joel wants to recapture his youth. As far as I’m concerned now, MST3K stopped existing in 1999. The world of riffing has moved on since then. Whatever this is, it’s just not worth sitting through.

I find that incredibly sad, don’t you?