Don’t forget that the programming for four star theater is decided by your votes – so when you see that ‘tag it & rate it’ notice, click it and rate the ‘cap’-ability of the material – anything that averages a rating of four or better gets a slot in four star theater, in addition to its usual slot in the rotation. And the stuff that comes in at two or lower will play less frequently in the regular rotation.

And don’t forget to tune in to Inventing Situations on Monday 4/28 @ 8PM for The Amazing Transparent Man, as featured in mst3k episode [623].

This Tuesday between noon and midnight (eastern), we’ve got Bela Lugosi in color, our first episode of the Richard Deacon Show (known in syndication as the Dick Van Dyke show), Bela Lugosi (in glorious color), Popeye, and some sword and sandal nonsense with a hero who is not Hercules. He might be Sinbad for all I know. (The Spartans be different from the Athenians). And the usual bunch of fresh grabs from old shorts.

Of course, as I expected when I started this, real life has crept in and I may not get 12 hours of new grabs a week – would folks rather I made it 2PM – Midnight, Noon – 10PM, or just include more filler?

[addendum]

Don’t forget, you can check the schedule to see what’s coming in advance, though Tuesdays will be usually only be a week or so ahead, since it’s basically whatever I manage to grab in a given week (plus new grabs for shorts, which don’t show up on the schedule.) Because Wednesdays is stuff that’s already been grabbed, riffed and rated, that’ll be listed farther into the future.

I think the frame shown on the tv in this link might be in the movie. It’s been confirmed that the frame is from the first release.

[Addendum]

Never mind, other msties have pitched in and answered the question.

I’ve added two more “new” movies, Ring of Terror and Gamera. It’s not exactly the same version of Gamera the Brains used, General Curly Joe’s not in there, but close enough by my standards. I’ve also got fresh grabs for Master Ninja I and First Spaceship to Venus.

I’ve got two more new movies that’ll be surprises during the marathon, they’re listed as “Mystery Box” on the schedule, and I’m going to try to add new grabs for a few more movies.

This is of course from episode 413′s Manhunt in Space, the first of two Rocky Jones telemovies the gang riffed. In addition to giving us both “Rockies” in our lineup, it also creates a run of 10 straight features from the middle of season 4. I hope to have a tentative schedule released in the next couple of days, but since Thanksgiving seems to have crept up on me this year, I’m still buy getting the screengrabs that determine the final timing of the whole festivities. But do tell your friends that it’ll be running from the Tuesday November 21st, 8 PM eastern until the 28th.

most of the additions this year will be in the form of new grabs for old favorites.

Meanwhile, former Brains continue to keep busy. In addition to the usual RiffTrax chicanery, The Giant of Marathon, the fourth (of four?) Film Crew movies by Mike, Kevin and Bill is out. (And like numbers two and three, you can request a free chance to caption it at IS. (Sure it’s more complicated and less instantaneous than other capping catalog systems, but I don’t think accidentally gotten stuck capping a request yet.)

And the Brains continue to make online videos! Huzzah.

Cartoon Dump, featuring a decidedly more melancholy Frank is already up to episode 5. On the plus side, The Dry Heaves number in this one may be the highlight of the series to date. On the minus side, The Dry Heaves number in this one may be the highlight of the series to date.

And the Film Crew trio wrote and voiced this animated short, which may or may not end up in a future generation’s cartoon dumpster. (link courtesy of PrezGAR.)

To explain the upgrade in more detail, a ramble is needed on how the images work at IS and the change in philosophy behind the recent changes. As you may know, I load up directories with images from various sources, ephemeral films in one, feature films and the like (the so called IS Playhouse section) in another, still photos in another, and depending on what part of the day it is, when somebody asks for a new image, they’re dealt one out from the appropriate directory, provided it’s been at least 30 seconds since the last image was dealt.

Most of the time, we’re running screengrabs from ephemeral films courtesy of the Prelinger Archive. When IS first started around five years ago, all of the images came from about 1250 of these films, and the grabs had been automatically generated by archive.org. Some time after that archive.org made a few hundred more prelingers (with lower quality grabs) and a few score from the A/V Geeks archive available. All those images have made up the core of the heavy rotation ever since.

Early on, my philosophy was to try and simulate a grade-Z TV station showing these films and grabbing images at an arbitrary interval much as Caption This! had from their grade-Z station. I had a stack of reasons for leaving the lousy images in: Not every grab could be a winner. This was the advanced class for people who’d graduated from CT! I didn’t want to stamp my editorial style on every last image. The tough images produce some ingenious responses. You can’t please all of the people all of the time. If you knew exactly what was happening in the image, that would defeat the purpose. If I took out the cruddy images, the good ones would just cycle through that much faster. Changing now would just be giving in to the whiners.

But, time has passed, and a lot of these arguments don’t seem as compelling as they used to. There’s no longer a CT! to go to instead. Those original images have been shown many many times. Truth be told, sometimes there were long stretches with no good image. For a long while I’ve been slowly upgrading the grabs film by film, downloading the movie and handpicking the best grabs. Here’s a little before and after from one such update:

Before: After:

This is maybe not the best example, because the old images were more monotonous than they are awful, but we’ve gone from 35 images of mixed cap-ability to 75 images of mostly reasonable cap-ability and reasonable variation. (Note, the images have been scaled down, so some of the text may not be as legible as it will on IS). But, the point is that by updating films in this way, I’ve been able to remove the chaff directly for about 20% of the original collection, all of the AV/Geeks films, and a healthy chunk of the second wave of Prelingers, and at the same time grow the number of images in rotation. But it was still going to take forever to remove all the junk. So I finally decided to go a spree and add enough new images that I could take out the bottom 15% of grabs for the remaining films without speeding up the rotation. In the process, I even found a few films that had somehow entirely escaped IS before, and have ended up removing around 2,000 lousy images and adding about the same number of not so lousy images.

As always, no applause, only money.

p.s. This article’s title is misleading, there’s still around the same number of grabs about food as before, but I had to go with the reference to the album that’s supplied a lot of little elements for my sites.