145 UPDATE 12/14/2024: Rowsdower saves us and saves all the world! As you can see below, The Final Sacrifice is currently available to MST3K YouTube channel members. It will be available to the public on Sunday, December 15th.Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the United States, officially known to we fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (we call ourselves MSTies) as “Turkey Day.” The term carries a double meaning: the turkey served as part of Thanksgiving dinner, and the “turkeys” of films that we watch during the day-long “Turkey Day Marathon,” which was a tradition throughout the show’s original run on television, and has continued ever since the online-only revival.The event traces its origin all the way back to the show’s technically unofficial first season on independent broadcast station KTMA in Minneapolis (now WUCW) in 1988, when MST3K’s very first episode aired on Thanksgiving during a marathon run of the station’s sci-fi movie library. Not coincidentally, the premier was followed by back to back episodes of Elvira’s Movie Macabre, which firmly established a relationship, both between MST3K and the Elvira character, as well as between Cassandra Peterson and the MST3K cast and crew (for example, she and Frank Conniff later worked together on Attack of the Killer B Movies).Ever since then, the marathon has featured original-to-the-event “host segments” during some of the commercial breaks, helping to tie it all together.The host segments during the cable run (on Comedy Central, and later the Sci-Fi Channel) were usually done in character, with Joel Robinson (played by series creator Joel Hodgson) or Mike Nelson, the bots (Crow T. Robot, Tom Servo, Gypsy and Cambot, each played by different puppeteers over time), and “the Mads”: Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) with either Dr. Lawrence Erhardt (J. Elvis Weinstein), TV’s Frank (Frank Conniff), or Clayton’s mother Pearl Forrester (Mary Jo Pehl) in the early years; then Pearl Forrester with “Brain Guy” Observer (Bill Corbett) and Professor Bobo the Gorilla (Kevin Murphy) in the later years.Other popular characters would appear, as well. In fact, one Turkey Day in particular (1995) included Bridget Jones-Nelson as Mr. B Natural, Paul Chaplin as Pitch the Devil, Kevin Murphy as the Kitten With a Whip (which was not actually a character but a movie title), and Mike Nelson pulling double duty with impeccable impersonations of both Jack Perkins and Michael Feinstein. The online revival-era Turkey Day host segments have been more along the lines of cast and crew discussions and commentaries, which are equally enjoyable to most of us MSTies; because being the sick, twisted freaks that we are, we like to see how the sausage gets made. The one exception to the pattern was last year’s marathon (2023), which had two things going against it.One was the strike. No one could write, and no one could perform, unless the production companies agreed to the unions’ terms. Mystery Science Theater 3000 is, at this point, technically kinda-sorta independent of the whole major-studio structure, so they could have settled on terms and continued as usual, but they chose to stand in solidarity with the striking workers.The other factor was that they were fundraising for a proposed new season in a very short-notice campaign that was a bit too ambitious to actually work. It was announced late in the year, well after most people have their budget planned out and money set aside for such things, and while they raised quite a bit, it wasn’t enough by the deadline, so we didn’t get a new season this year as hoped. And while I don’t fault Turkey Day for that failure, it couldn’t have helped, because the host segments last year were basically a plain, uninventive, straightforward pledge drive. It was just a disappointing, badly-executed Turkey Day.I contend that they could have done better even without crossing the picket line. In fact, as long as nothing was actually written and everything had been improvised, they had the perfect setting for something brilliant right under their noses.The host segments of the episode featuring the public television made-for-TV movie “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” consisted of Pearl Forrester doing a pledge drive for “Public Pearl Television,” complete with “Incredibly Strange Creatures” character Ortega (played by Paul Chaplin) working the phone bank, snippets of fake public TV specials like “The Nature of Bobo” and “Mike Nelson’s Lord of the Dance,” and a brilliant send-up of the classic light pop concerts that PBS used to produce (my all-time favorite, by the way, was James Taylor): Now, again, they wouldn’t have been able to write anything for it, but consider this: Mary Jo Pehl, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett have all made appearances in the revival series (Pehl, in fact, has returned almost full-time in her Pearl Forrester role). Felicia Day’s Kinga Forrester and Patton Oswalt’s Max (TV’s Son of TV’s Frank) could easily be given their own parts to play in the fundraiser. Instead of Ortega manning the phone bank, maybe have Deanna Rooney’s Dr. Donna St. Phibes monitoring Kickstarter as donations come in. These are all original characters that these people and this show originated, so they wouldn’t be using anyone else’s work without permission. Put them back on the PPTV set, and have them do a real pledge drive! We MSTies would get one hell of a kick out of that!Honestly, if the late-night shows can come to agreements to continue production during strikes without writing new content, Mystery Science Theater 3000 can do it too. These people are weird, which results in creativity.This year, however, the producers knew they needed to make a bit of an effort toward redemption over that. And they’re not about to let us down! 2024’s Turkey Day Marathon is being subtitled “The Potluck of the Stars,” and will be featuring the favorite episodes of celebrity guests who will introduce them, including Bryan Fuller, Kumail Nanjiani, and Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill!But the biggest news about this year’s Turkey Day is that a fan-favorite film is finally making a comeback.See, in 1990, a Canadian film student by the name of Tjardus Greidanus (it’s pronounced “GREED-uh-nuss”) and some of his classmates used their school’s cameras and a budget of about $1,500 to produce a sorta-science-fictiony adventure movie called “The Final Sacrifice.”Now, if that was all the information you knew about this film, you’d think “oh, sure, that’d be perfect riffing fodder; it has to be bad!”But you’d be wrong! For what it is, it’s actually a pretty damn good movie!The plot is well thought out and cohesive; there really aren’t any holes you can poke in it. The cinematography is decent… nothing spectacular, but certainly not bad, and definitely not the worst we’ve ever seen (check out the terrible shots and color grading variations in “The Castle of Fu Manchu,” which will also be featured this year). The writing and dialog are good, and the characters are well-crafted and well-performed, all of which is a credit to both the actors’ talents and Greidanus’s writing and directorial skills. The editing, also done by Greidanus (under the name “The Flying Dutchman”), is good for par. In terms of tone, the movie doesn’t ever really go over the top or get silly at any point. It knows what it is, and it’s not trying to be anything else. That’s better than you can say for a lot of MST3K’s fare (*cough* COLEMAN FRANCIS *cough*).“The Final Sacrifice” had practically been unheard of until MST3K featured it in 1998, at which point it instantly gained cult-classic status… especially elevating to popularity the character Zap Rowsdower, a gruff, 40-something, smoking, bemulleted vagrant with a beat-up pickup truck, a drinking problem, and a sardonic wit that encapsulates his Southern Albertanness to a tee. Other highlights include the movie’s antagonist Satoris, who the MST3K crew refer to as “Canadian villain Garth Vader;” the picture of protagonist Troy’s father remarkably resembling Larry Csonka; and a stereotypical grizzled prospector Troy’s father’s former expeditionary partner Mike Pipper (wouldn’t you like to be a Pipper, too?).Zap Rowsdower watches the evening sky, pondering whether or not there’s beer on the sun.But despite everything the film has going for it, Greidanus has basically kept it locked away for decades. Copies of the film itself, as best as I can tell, have been off the market ever since the initial VHS and laserdisc run finished. The episode featuring it was released as part of a Shout! Factory DVD collection in 2010, but it went out of print in 2017. It was featured in the 2013 and 2016 Turkey Day Marathons, but if you go searching the archives for those live streams, you’ll come up empty (it’s not hard to find the others). Every time someone has posted a recorded broadcast version of the episode to YouTube, Vimeo, or even the Internet Archive, it has shortly after been taken down, either by copyright complaints or “voluntarily.” Efforts have been made to hide it in plain sight, but the same thing has happened. It almost seems as if Tjardus Greidanus is simply embarrassed to have this film out there in the public eye.Now, sure, it could just be a money thing. But here’s the problem with that: we MSTies have a long and storied culture of freely sharing copies of episodes with each other and, preferably, anyone who’s interested, as a way of getting word out about the show. Back in the early days, cable TV penetration wasn’t anywhere near as widespread as it was at the end of the show’s original run. Those who had access to it recorded episodes, then showed them to others who didn’t have cable (or whose cable companies didn’t carry Comedy Central). It became such a phenomenon and such a successful promotional tool that, for quite some time, the final line in the show’s credits roll was “keep circulating the tapes.” Joel Hodgson and the rest of the show’s staff encouraged it because it was bringing in new viewers.That practice carried on well into the Internet era. Although the encouraging credits line was changed for legal reasons later on, MSTies had been finding places to gather online even before the official launch of the World Wide Web, and as technology allowed, digitized copies of episodes would pop up here and there. Keep in mind: the show was cancelled by Sci-Fi in 1999, and despite fan campaigns to save it, everybody was under the impression — correctly so, at the time — that it wasn’t coming back. Circulating the files was the only way to continue watching. A great deal of credit in that era goes to the efforts of the MST3K Digital Archive Project. You can still find some lower-quality files with their watermark on them.I, myself, actually discovered MST3K through a Shoutcast Video stream that used those MST3KDAP copies when I was in college. Funny story, that…We didn’t have cable when I was growing up in South Florida, but one weekend afternoon, I was flipping through channels and, on one of the formerly-independent stations (it was either UPN affiliate WBFS or WB affiliate WBZL), I saw a scene with a blond woman, a pale figure in a white robe with a blue hood and sash, and an anthropomorphic ape, all imprisoned in a Roman dungeon. I had no clue what was going on, and I flipped away, but when nothing better was on, I flipped back to see what I had come across. Except it was gone; some other program was on. So I kept flipping around, but the puzzle never really left my mind.They took away Brain Guy’s brain, which sucks for him, and they’re totally torturing Bobo by waving mutton in front of him. Pearl promises that if you help her get out of this, she’ll let you and your little wind-up toys go, and you’ll never have to watch another crappy movie ever again… even though she’s lied about that before, which wasn’t her fault in a way that she hasn’t figured out yet. But this time, fer. real.A few years later, I found that Shoutcast stream when I was in college. I checked it out, and I found out that I loved the show! It took a while, but finally I saw the episode featuring the 1980’s South African-produced cheesefest “Space Mutiny” — widely considered to be a “gateway episode,” as so many of us latecomers were introduced to the show with it because it’s hilariously goofy. That episode contains a host segment featuring a blond woman, a pale figure in a white robe with a blue hood and sash, and an anthropomorphic ape, all imprisoned in a Roman dungeon. I HAD FOUND MY MYSTERY SHOW!There are a few problems, though. The cable episodes never ran on over-the-air television. There was a briefly syndicated series with a handful of shortened episodes called The Mystery Science Theater Hour, but those didn’t include the cable episodes’ host segments, they were hosted by Mike Nelson’s impersonation of Jack Perkins. “Space Mutiny” was never featured in that series, and based on the information I’ve been able to find, no TV station in Miami ever ran The Mystery Science Theater Hour to begin with. Additionally, the segment I remember seeing over the air is almost at the very beginning of the episode, so if the cable episode had somehow officially been run on broadcast TV, it should have still been there when I tuned back.And that provides me with my working theory: I believe that whoever was running master control at that Miami TV station that afternoon was a MSTie, and they were trying to watch the first-run airing of the “Space Mutiny” episode on a monitor feed in the control room (the time of year that I remember it being lines up accurately), but they accidentally put it up on the air, then quickly pulled it off either when they realized it themself or someone called and asked them what the hell was going on.I have no evidence to prove this other than what I experienced. So if I’m right, and you’re the bored op in question, please contact me to confirm it. I won’t share names if you don’t want me to, though it’s been 25 years at this point, so I highly doubt you’d get in trouble.Anyway, the point is, the VHS swapping and the online file sharing culture of MST3K fans has always been seen as a beneficial thing, and even the people behind the production of these films — and their estates, in the cases of those who have passed on — have pretty much been okay with that, because they realize they’re not losing any money on the deal that they would be making otherwise. Hell, it’s repeatedly been demonstrated that so-called “piracy” of music and movies actually coincides with increased legitimate sales of that content, because “pirated” copies are generally of lower quality, and people like paying artists for their work. They’ll download the stuff they want to check out, see if they like it, then buy the legitimate copy.So if it were a just a money issue, Tjardus Griedanus shouldn’t have anything to worry about. The more exposure his film gets, the more copies of it he should be able to sell. Which is what leads most of us MSTies to the conclusion that he’s simply embarrassed by it, even though he really has nothing to be embarrassed about. This year’s running of “The Final Sacrifice” in the Turkey Day Marathon — multiple times, even! — may signal that he’s coming around. And he should!Mister Greidanus, if you’re reading this, allow me to put it this way: we’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing with you! Your film is beloved. And it’s not even what one might consider “so bad it’s good,” it’s just good. It ranks right up there with other competently-produced, earnest, low-budget films that the show has taken on over the years, such as “Tormented,” “Gunslinger,” or “Time Chasers.” Hell, they riffed “Marooned,” and that movie won a friggin’ Oscar for visual effects! You’re in good company.Gene Hackman is good in anything.Additionally, Bill Corbett summed it up best when he addressed the cast and crew of “Birdemic: Shock and Terror” who were in attendance at the RiffTrax Live event featuring that film:“Finally, we’re aware that some of the actors in the movie are out there watching tonight. Hi guys! We know you are very nice people, and all I can say in advance is… man, we’re really sorry. But… you were in “Birdemic;” I dunno what else to tell ya. This is what we do.”Basically, this is good-natured ribbing. Or good-natured riffing, if you will (and I personally would.) It would be my hope and suggestion that you embrace our community, our love for your film, and allow us to share it with the world far and wide. After all, we could all use some positivity and at least a brief escape from the genuine horrors that are going on all around us right now. Rowsdower may not be able to actually “save us and save all the world,” as Tom Servo famously sang at the end of the episode. But he can certainly help.Or he might just take one look at the situation, scoff, and say, “So what?”Either way, we’d be happy and grateful.Canada’s greatest hero. 2023 Writers & Actors StrikeBill CorbettBirdemic: Shock and TerrorBridget Jones-NelsonBryan FullerCassandra PetersonCheesy MoviesColeman FrancisDeanna RooneyElvira Mistress of the DarkFelicia DayFrank ConniffGunslingerJ. Elvis WeinsteinJack PerkinsJoel HodgsonKevin MurphyKTMA / WUCWKumail NanjianiLarry CsonkaLaserdiscMark HamillMaroonedMary Jo PehlMedia PiracyMichael FeinsteinMichael J. NelsonMystery Science Theater 3000Nullsoft Streaming VideoPatton OswaltPaul ChaplinPublic TelevisionShoutcastSpace MutinyThanksgivingThe Castle of Fu ManchuThe Early InternetThe Final SacrificeThe Mystery Science Theater HourThe OscarsTime ChasersTjardus GriedanusTormentedTrace BeaulieuTurkey DayVHSWBFSWDZL / WBZL / WSFL 0 comments Josh Colletta When he was a kid, everything was a microphone. So they put him behind one, and he started in radio at the age of 8. Now, some 32 years later, Josh Colletta is doing what he's worked toward all his life: talking with you about things that matter, things that don't matter, and life in general. From politics to sports to Star Trek to civil engineering, and plenty of other geeky endeavors, let's have fun keeping the doctors confused! You may also like Congress Has Bought the Bullshit on AM Radio... 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