Cinematic Titans

This past weekend, Sunday to be exact, TinyDoom and I went to see Cinematic Titanic, who are on their final tour. 

For those of you not in the know, CT is comprised mostly of the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000, basically everyone who is not part of the RiffTrax group.  For those of you not in the know of MST3K...go crawl back under the rock you've been living beneath for the past 25 years.  GEEZE!

Yeah.  Let me let that sink in a bit.  It's been 25 years since MST3K first aired.  How crazy is that?

I think most people know that MST3K had the silhouette of Joel and his two robot friends, Tom Servo and Crow, at the bottom of the screen as they were forced by mad scientists to watch terrible movies.  In Cinematic Titanic, the group of riffers are forced to record bad movies to be preserved in the Time Tube.  I haven't seen all the dvd's in order, so I'm missing some of the background story, but it's all just cake icing for the main reason we're watching, which is the jokes.  Although they do get creative with silhouettes, which is fun.

Anyway, we have seen CT before, but the last few times they have been in the area it's usually out in western MA, which is a bit of a hike.  When I heard they were going to be in Boston AND it was going to be the last time, I immediately got tickets.

Joel Hodgson, J. Elvis Weinstein, Mary Jo Pehl, Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff.

So the Titans each come out at the beginning of the show and do some stand up or some skits.  The opening act/stage help/unsung cast member is usually Dave "Gruber" Allen, who I also remember fondly from the early days of the Comedy Channel. I still think of some of the Higgins Boys and Gruber bits to this day. 

When they are ready to begin they sit along the sides of the movie and proceed to riff live.  We watched a flick called The Doll Squad and it sure was ...something.  I imagine there was some kind of plot, but since the movie didn't seem to have hired a sound guy, you could barely hear anything the actors were saying, which provided a lot of material for the Titans.  I laughed to the point of tears on a few occasions.  

I'm going to miss seeing the live shows, but not touring doesn't mean not producing material.  There are a bunch of dvd's available on their website and on Amazon (some are free to watch on Prime!) and they have said they will get back to making more soon.  Since most of the cast lives in different parts of the country, getting together to tour is difficult, but I imagine getting together to make a few dvd's is less taxing.

One thing I have neglected is to check out RiffTrax, but I did add some episodes on Netflix recently, so I hope to remedy that soon.