news so big It's HUGE!

Best Brains Inc. is back in business! Jim Mallon has (essentially) resurrected his production company and will be producing new MST3K cartoon shorts starring Servo, Crow and Gypsy as well as old "behind-the-scenes" footage-type-stuff. The alleged fun will start on Nov. 5th at http://MST3K.com (NOTE: Until Nov. 5th, that url will just take you to the official MST fan page, the Satellite News. So, uh, bookmark it for now, I guess).

Why do I say "alleged?" Well, there will be no involvement from Kevin Murphy, Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett or most of the other old cast and writers. According to what little info has been released (you'll have to scroll down, Satellite News doesn't do permalinks, alas), only Jim and Paul Chaplin will be returning from the old show to write the new. Jim will also be performing Gypsy and Paul will be taking over Crow's voice. (Even if they wanted Trace back, they couldn't afford him at this point!) No word on Servo.

I do know that the split-up of the original BBI crew was not an entirely happy one--I remember some members of the cast/crew grousing that Jim was already selling off props, scripts, etc. when SciFi started threatening cancellation, even though it was possible that another channel could have been interested in picking MST up. I, obviously, have no idea of the truth of any of that, but it's not really a surprise that Mike, Kevin, Bill and Mary Jo don't appear to be involved in this project. (And no, I haven't seen any of the Film Crew DVDs yet. And yes, I'm not happy about that, but whaddaya gonna do? Hopefully soonish.)

Well, regardless, I will be tuning (er, clicking?) in on or around the 5th to see what the heck Jim and Paul have planned...and hopefully will be back each subsequent week. I don't kid myself that this will really be MST3K (and, really, neither should anyone else), but I do hope it'll be fun!

a big thank you to Mike S. for bringing this to my attention.

Spooky, Scary!

Why should you watch the sitcom "30 Rock?" Well, besides the fact it's amazingly funny, there's the true committment that the show gives to a joke. Last week, as a quick gag, they played a small clip from one of the character's (an insane black comedian) fictional novelty Halloween song, "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah."

Most shows would have been content with preparing the thirty seconds or so necessary for the clip. But not this show, no. They wrote and recorded a full version of the song.

Ladies and gentlemen, for your Halloween taynugim, I give you Werewolf Bar Mitzvah by Tracy Jordan! (They only actually shot enough footage for the ten second clip they showed, however. So it's basically an audio thing, for those who have issues with youtube video...)

"30 Rock" is on NBC, Thursdays at 8:30pm EST/PDT. except for this Thursday, for some reason.