"Thunderbirds" or "Stingray"?
K01 Thunderbirds in Outer Space ("Thunderbirds Are Go") (1981, Color, Image Entertainment, UK) (11/24/88) Puppet movie about aquatic creatures who attempt to take over the planet. The first episode ever aired. No fan copy is known to exist.
This is inaccurate. The poster is clearly confusing Thunderbirds with Stingray.
- I changed K01 to reflect published information, which indicates it was Invaders from the Deep, a movie version of Stingray. I also filled in the descriptions and corrected some other info about K01 and K02. -- Jeff Q 04:36, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Punctuation in titles
Timvasquez, in a recent edit, said he made "a few title name tweaks so that Wiki links are captured". I'm not sure what he meant, but it looks like he felt it advisable to remove periods from titles like "Gamera vs. Barugon". However, Wiki links and article titles can include punctuation, and many do. Since the actual titles include such punctuation (as registered with IMDb, at least), I will restore these periods (plus add such punctuation to any titles that were missing it) in a week or so, unless someone makes a case not to do so. -- Jeff Q 04:04, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
- I finally got around to changing all "vs" instances to "vs.". Besides the above reasons, "vs" is not a word, but an abbreviation for "versus", and therefore requires a period to denote its abbreviated state. As far as the other punctuation issues, I expect to fix those as I update episode titles in general. Quite a few episodes have inaccurate titles. Some of these are simple errors. Others likely occurred because the official movie title doesn't always match up to the way Best Brains recorded the MST3K episode title. (I think there are even problems between the BBI and the Rhino titles for the VHS- and DVD-released episodes!) As I edit, I've been using Timvasquez's convention of quoting the episode title, followed by the movie title, where different, in parentheses, adding Wiki markup to italicize the latter per English style guidelines. There's still quite a lot of work to do on these entries. — Jeff Q 19:23, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)
condensing?
Since there's considerable overlap between KTMA and the later years, can/should we create anchors to the first appearance of a given movie and then make the later reference to the same movie a link back to the earlier anchor? This has the advantage that if the film description needs fixing it won't be necessary to do it two places (as I had to with Mighty Jack.) -- Antaeus Feldspar
- Your idea is certainly logical. I have a concern, though. Far more people have seen the repeated movies from KTMA in their Season 3 versions. Even The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide only lists the KTMA episode movies, while describing them in the Season 3 chapter. Therefore, even though it isn't typical practice, it might make more sense to have the links in the KTMA section, and the texts in the Season 3 section. (For what it's worth, this also accomodates Best Brains' general desire to focus on post-Season 1 episodes, when they felt they'd gotten the hang of the show.) It may not make much difference in the current show descriptions, but it just seems better (to me, at least). — Jeff Q 06:54, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- Well, I'm not stuck on a particular order; I agree it makes more sense to put the episode descriptions with their more refined and polished incarnations. I'll be honest, though, I haven't found a good way to do that sort of anchoring in wiki syntax. Do you know how? Antaeus Feldspar 18:41, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- No, nor have I found a way to use wiki-proof HTML markup yet. For now, I'd just suggest diligent monitoring of the 8 repeated episodes (5 Gameras, 2 Fugitive Aliens, and Time of the Apes), which were all originally featured in the KTMA season and repeated in Season 3. Whenever someone makes an edit to one, concerned individuals can synchronize them. (Would-be editors should note that this makes it more likely someone will tweak your editing unless you edit both entries yourselves!) — Jeff Q 19:31, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)
NPOV
Jeff, I appreciate all the work you're doing on this page but I have to point out that a lot of your changes are increasing the POV content of the descriptions, not decreasing it. Things like changing 'the U.S. Army' to 'America's most incompetent military personnel' would be a good change if Wikipedia was a fan site, where colorful descriptions are better than factual, NPOV descriptions. But it is not; factual, NPOV descriptions are what we are aiming for. -- Antaeus Feldspar 17:31, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- You have a good point. I suppose I took this approach for several reasons:
- The original article text had a number of somewhat humorous takes on the movie plots.
- Wiki policy encourages a somewhat lighter tone and occasional wryness in descriptive text, although that doesn't free one from factual accuracy or POV concerns.
- IMDb and even TV Guide often feature similar critical and even mocking descriptions of flawed movies in their plot summaries.
- The concept of MST3K, the subject of this article, is to poke fun at bad movies, making citation of the notable flaws in these films quite appropriate in describing a MST3K episode, as opposed to the original film.
- However, one can certainly carry a good thing too far. As for your specific citation, re-reading the text, I realize one could easily misinterpret my meaning. I did not mean to impune the U.S. Army or the U.S. military in general, which are obviously not incompetent, but rather the specific personnel displayed in this movie, who are supposed to be from both the Air Force and Army, as I recall. It's excrutiatingly embarrassing to watch the scenes with these Stooge-like and rather disgu
sting servicemen. I will try to revise this and other entries to avoid inadvertently expressing POVs while still describing what makes these films MST3K episodes. Does this sound reasonable? — Jeff Q 02:01, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- Fully reasonable. Sounds good to me. -- Antaeus Feldspar 03:49, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)