Our forum member, partyinmymouth, posted on our boards about MST3K signing off with Rhino and moving over to Shout! Factory for their future releases. So the obvious question is what happens with the former Rhino releases. According to TVshowsonDVD.com, Shout! will have their full library at their disposal for releasing (save for the ones that they cannot release).

With their pending re-release of Collection Number 10 (under the official name of 10.2 which will be sans the Godzilla flick), this will be the last Rhino release, perhaps appropriately. But will this have limited availability as well? No word just yet, but we will keep you informed about it.

Rhino is ditributed by Ryko, a subsidiary of Warner, while Shout! Factory was distributed by Sony, but, according to Wikipedia, as of June 2007, is distributed by Vivendi, a French video game distributor as well as DIC Entertainment. How this will be handled exactly we will find out when it happens.

In my opinion, I am not sure why these articles are suddenly declaring Shout! Factory a "cult" studio. Their releases, as far as I can tell, are pretty much mainstream stuff. Unless you consider Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared and My So-Called Life cult shows, then you are missing out on a lot of stuff out there. Further, Shout! releases lots of officially licensed MLB, NFL and NBA programs, in addition to other general sports and exercise stuff. I still fail to see where this company is "cult". (I know, I know, its all propaganda in the papers so it seems like MST has found their real home in the world).

There is no word on the first release by Shout! and they are not certain whether they release single movies or Collections like Rhino has in the past. 

In other MST3K news, it is announced that a new edition of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie will have its re-release. An artcile at tvguide.com discusses the history of the Image DVD release and its collectible value since (stating that eBay prices are between 50 and 100). Accordingly, this will be a Universal release slated for May 6th of this year. 

Currently, Mystery Science Theater 3000: Collection 10.2 is set for release in a few weeks which will help those who were not able to get a copy of the original Collection 10. The new edition will feature The Giant Gila Monster (a public domain film), which will replace Godzilla Vs. Megalon in the collection. As you can see, there is little difference between the old and the new covers. How this will bode for confused buyers we will see. Hopefully they are astute enough to recognize the difference. The general population may not care enough which version they get and will be more satisfied with price for content, than collectability. Rhino has also offered a single disc version of The Giant Gila Monster for those who have the original Collection 10 so they wont have to double dip in the collection. This single disc version, accordingly, is only available for a limited time, so it may be something of interest to grab while you can.

Lastly, I do want to make a public awareness announcement. A seller on Amazon under the name of "collection_saver" is offering the original MST3K Volume 10 at around 31.95 and describing them as "back-ups". For those that do not know what a back-up is, they are basically ripped versions of the DVDs and then burned onto a DVD-R. It is legal to make yourself a back-up copy, but it is illegal to make them to resell (in effect become bootlegs and not back-ups). This seller has gone under previous names, each time Amazon has been pulling them off. But in an effort to maintain integrity of both Amazon marketplace (to prevent it from becoming an eBay) and those with legitimate copies for sale, please take a few seconds to report this seller to Amazon to have the listings removed. In addition, the seller is also selling MST3K Volume 9, another hard to find DVD set. You can make your reports using this link. Thank you.

For the complete press release, see mst3kinfo.com

Also HollywoodReporter.com reports the change from Rhino to Shout! Factory 

All comments are welcome to post in our forum here.