To be more accurate, there were actually two people from MST involved with it. Jim Mallon (who managed to steal the rights and profit for MST3k away from everyone involved, giving only basic royalties to Joel and Kevin whose names could not be legally removed from the show completely), and Paul Chaplin.

This cartoon was to be a re-launch of the MST3k brand fully under Mallon's control, but it failed miserably mostly due to it not only being terrible, but because he threatened to pull his licensing deals from Rhino Video if they gave any support to Mike, Kevin, and Bill's fledgling Film Crew project, news of which went out far and wide amongst MST fandom.

In short, Jim Mallon is a real piece of shit. And, just to re-iterate, no one sees a dime from MST anymore except Joel and Kevin.

No shit, when he was trying to move the 6 to the 7, I was eating shrimp lo mein! I LOL'd out loud!

I didn't know when I posted this that MST3K Animated Shorts has the same creators as MST3K, and I never really watched MST3K, and yet even I was able to spot the similarities. I love the approach: Let's take an established format that we're already good at, and trash it with a crazy animated science fiction concept. The premise is OUTRAGEOUS, but it's grounded in a well-crafted story that the writers understand. I really did watch this three times, and the dialogue is good enough that knowing what the characters are going to say only adds to the pleasure.

I love the way the most outrageous element, the moving of a card with mostly non-functional arms, is handled here. The arms themselves are less functional than they would be in real life, there's less blood, the cards are dealt out on a green table... but it's still our hero robot moving a 6 to a 7 on-camera. I feel like they've taken great care to find just the right level of macabre, and in my opinion, they nailed it. I can't wait for part 2.

This. Never. Happened.

Paul Chaplin was the only one who didn't piss Jim off, mostly because he had to take a hiatus from showbiz to take care of his dying wife and couldn't leave Minnesota with the rest of the crew. He did do some work at timmybighands and some voice work for Edward the Less, as well as some bits for NPR, but that's all stuff you can do from home. After this fiasco, tho, he seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth, and that was 2007 (He did show up at ComicCon a few years back, but I'm convinced it was some sort of cyborg).

All that said, this is shit, and Jim is a fuck.

It stinks!