I used to have somewhere an audio file of Andy Richter (from Late Night with Conan O’Brien—and other projects, but this was during the Late Night era) saying, “Well, you’ve got mail, but it’s probably crap” that I used as my alert sound for mail. I kind of miss that.
I wonder how many recordings he did. I hope that more people come out of the woodwork and share the recordings they bought from him, like in this case, especially if there are some slightly silly ones (like "Use the source, Luke!").
Aside: I was so worried it was going to be an AI voice generator based on his voice. I sadly think it's inevitable but I can hope he didn't make enough recordings to be able to reliably synthesize his voice.
> Aside: I was so worried it was going to be an AI voice generator based on his voice. I sadly think it's inevitable but I can hope he didn't make enough recordings to be able to reliably synthesize his voice.
I have bad news about the state of voice cloning...
I was pretty sympathetic to the idea that this must be AOL taking care of customers continuously for decades until that quick mention that you start by downloading a .exe over plain http.
It’s probably the best episode. That and over drawn a the memory bank. Overdrawn is my favourite episode by far. I love Raul Julia is wonderful and the cast really makes it a movie worth watching without mst3k. It presents such a weird view of future life. It’s as if it’s made by an alien that doesn’t really understand human culture and experiences. Like how has being “Doppled” into animals actually become the de facto treatment for scrolling up cinemas at work? Why are movies banned? If a person did actually have some blank
Brain because of doppling why was that news to the woman whose job it is to dopple? Why is there an evil ceo of a mega corporation trying to control his mind? And are we really to believe that because Finkle can figure out how to scroll up cinemas he can hack the Gibson? The movie just generates questions after questions. Like why is the CEO mad about this? Did they just discover a way to put a persons mind in a computer and allow them to create any reality they want? Why is this a bad thing? It sounds like it would print money forever. Why does no one realise this and everyone conspire against Finkle? Which side is Apolonia on? She works for the mega corporations but her colleague who is getting fat on flavofibes is secretly reporting Apolonias decisions to the ceo.
Like tbh I think the movie is some kind of creative genius. Because it also has a crazy aesthetic. This weird vhs aesthetic that also has this kind of vision of the future where everyone is forced to wear grey suits in some sort of Orwellian capitalist nightmare. But everything is shot like it’s a two camera television studio setup. Interspersed with on location shots. So the studio has this weird soft lighting and the location shots all look like they are natural light.
The only thing I can compare it to is Twelve Monkeys. Yes I just equated Overdrawn at the Memory Bank to Twelve Monkeys. But I love this movie and I feel like everyone gives honest performances and it creates something totally unique. The world that exists inside of Overdrawn at the Memory Bank exists no place else.
Overdrawn was the first MST3K episode I saw. I was randomly flipping cable channels and saw this silhouette of some characters watching a movie with this fat guy barking orders and decided to watch. Within minutes I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. I was instantly hooked.
I downloaded a torrent long ago (missing the KTMA episodes) so I have nearly all of them. During the pandemic lock-down Joel/Mike, the bots and the mads kept me company. When a close friend was deployed in Iraq in the 00's I would burn episodes to DVD and send them to him in his mothers care packages and he had the whole platoon watching and laughing. There are so many good episodes but Time Chasers, Overdrawn, Space Mutiny, Death Stalker, Bride of the Monster, and Devil fish are my favorites.
I really like the episode time of the apes. I think it’s a sandy frank movie. Sandy Frank was a tv producer who, amongst other things, would buy distribution rights to Japanese television shows and recut them into feature length movies for American markets. Time of the apes is one of these where children get sent to the future and find that earth is now run by apes but there are also humans still and weird aliens. It’s all kind of nonsensical especially since it’s a 26 half hour long episode television show cut into 1.5 hours run time then again cut into the runtime of mst3k.
I really like time chasers because David giancola films are not what you want to see. I lived near where David giancola lives in Vermont during high school and he was considered a real movie maker. Like people would talk about him like he was mr Hollywood. It was wild. It’s true, he has made a lot of films. But for some reason he refuses to leave Vermont no matter what the subject of his films are. This is why futuristic cities look a lot like back alleys of Rutland or middlebury and big company offices look like the corner of a library in time chasers. I used to think this movie is the best episode of mst3k but actually I think the movie makes more sense if you watch the original and not the cut up one. Some of the scenes that are left out explain some of the plot more. David giancola definitely cornered the market on being a filmmaker in Vermont. Nobody else is making as many feature films there as a setting for anything but Vermont. But that may not be a recipe for a good movie. That’s always the problem with a David Giancola film. For some reason it wants to leave Vermont but David Giancola does not. So everything feels a bit Vermonty.
I think a lot of movies like space mutiny are really fun but end up being so lazy. It’s like they had access to some kind of facility to shoot in plus some cardboard sets and Cameron mitchell. Movies like that are campy and fun but at some point you ask yourself what was the vision here? Like their vision for space mutiny was literally battle star galactica but without the cylons. So they wanted it to be more boring?
That’s why I always return to Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. I continue to see a filmmaker’s vision even though I don’t understand it.
Amusingly this is true of an older discovery that now seems very commonplace: vibration, around the time that scientists understood the simple harmonic oscillator, and the fact that the same mathematics applies to lots of things from sounds to pendulums. So to make their nonsense sound sciencey, spiritualists started talking about vibrations as well.
Great analogy. They'd be using "Quantum" the same way one might've also used, say, "Turing Computer Services". THey want the legitimacy of sounding elite and beyond-the-cutting-edge while presumably being expert at merely replacing bad RAM and defragging harddisks.
Early 2000's version was simply putting ".com" or ".net" in your company name so you sounded enticing to investors, or when everyone added "crypto" and to their company names.
Of similar vein I expect current generation "Artificial Intelligence" will likely be renamed and thought of as quaint or audacious, like the renaming of "Modern" furniture aesthetic to "Mid-Century Modern".
>How does Deepak Chopra respond when confronted with an actual Theoretical Physicist? Why, he maxes out the nonsense generator and gibbers whatever random jargon pops into his head.
Professor Brian Cox Enraged Deepak Chopra | CONAN on TBS:
By "the same way one might've also used" I meant those Quantum guys would've been just as likely to have used Turing, but yes, "Turing" is close to hitting the "jumped the shark" / "hackneyed" level of usage.
They were a tape drive and hard drive manufacturer. I guess they still have the tape drive section, but they sold their HDD division to ... Maxtor, which then got bought out by Seagate, I think?
I used to have somewhere an audio file of Andy Richter (from Late Night with Conan O’Brien—and other projects, but this was during the Late Night era) saying, “Well, you’ve got mail, but it’s probably crap” that I used as my alert sound for mail. I kind of miss that.
Mine was the clip from Holy Grail where Eric Idle is hit by an arrow - "Message for you sir"
https://movie-sounds.org/comedy-movie-sounds/quotes-with-sou...
I wonder how many recordings he did. I hope that more people come out of the woodwork and share the recordings they bought from him, like in this case, especially if there are some slightly silly ones (like "Use the source, Luke!").
Aside: I was so worried it was going to be an AI voice generator based on his voice. I sadly think it's inevitable but I can hope he didn't make enough recordings to be able to reliably synthesize his voice.
> Aside: I was so worried it was going to be an AI voice generator based on his voice. I sadly think it's inevitable but I can hope he didn't make enough recordings to be able to reliably synthesize his voice.
I have bad news about the state of voice cloning...
There was an entire skit series, numerous videos and interviews... Just about the only confounder is that he used many voices and accents.
Maybe I missed it but the article doesn't seem to contain the original sound. Here's a YouTube upload of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzRC37grckk
AOL Desktop is still a thing in 2025 and was updated as recently as a few days ago.
Michael MJD just did a video on it. Still contains Elwood's classic soundbites, along with some snazzy images of current pop stars like Avril Lavigne.
https://youtu.be/jUsym8iAWHY?si=vU5I15-qWKaEZPwC
I was pretty sympathetic to the idea that this must be AOL taking care of customers continuously for decades until that quick mention that you start by downloading a .exe over plain http.
This always reminds me of the mst3k quip, "You've got male pattern baldness!"
Time Chasers is a classic. Mike's sarcastic "looks guys the count down on the com-pew-terrr" always cracks me up.
It’s probably the best episode. That and over drawn a the memory bank. Overdrawn is my favourite episode by far. I love Raul Julia is wonderful and the cast really makes it a movie worth watching without mst3k. It presents such a weird view of future life. It’s as if it’s made by an alien that doesn’t really understand human culture and experiences. Like how has being “Doppled” into animals actually become the de facto treatment for scrolling up cinemas at work? Why are movies banned? If a person did actually have some blank Brain because of doppling why was that news to the woman whose job it is to dopple? Why is there an evil ceo of a mega corporation trying to control his mind? And are we really to believe that because Finkle can figure out how to scroll up cinemas he can hack the Gibson? The movie just generates questions after questions. Like why is the CEO mad about this? Did they just discover a way to put a persons mind in a computer and allow them to create any reality they want? Why is this a bad thing? It sounds like it would print money forever. Why does no one realise this and everyone conspire against Finkle? Which side is Apolonia on? She works for the mega corporations but her colleague who is getting fat on flavofibes is secretly reporting Apolonias decisions to the ceo.
Like tbh I think the movie is some kind of creative genius. Because it also has a crazy aesthetic. This weird vhs aesthetic that also has this kind of vision of the future where everyone is forced to wear grey suits in some sort of Orwellian capitalist nightmare. But everything is shot like it’s a two camera television studio setup. Interspersed with on location shots. So the studio has this weird soft lighting and the location shots all look like they are natural light.
The only thing I can compare it to is Twelve Monkeys. Yes I just equated Overdrawn at the Memory Bank to Twelve Monkeys. But I love this movie and I feel like everyone gives honest performances and it creates something totally unique. The world that exists inside of Overdrawn at the Memory Bank exists no place else.
Overdrawn was the first MST3K episode I saw. I was randomly flipping cable channels and saw this silhouette of some characters watching a movie with this fat guy barking orders and decided to watch. Within minutes I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. I was instantly hooked.
I downloaded a torrent long ago (missing the KTMA episodes) so I have nearly all of them. During the pandemic lock-down Joel/Mike, the bots and the mads kept me company. When a close friend was deployed in Iraq in the 00's I would burn episodes to DVD and send them to him in his mothers care packages and he had the whole platoon watching and laughing. There are so many good episodes but Time Chasers, Overdrawn, Space Mutiny, Death Stalker, Bride of the Monster, and Devil fish are my favorites.
I really like the episode time of the apes. I think it’s a sandy frank movie. Sandy Frank was a tv producer who, amongst other things, would buy distribution rights to Japanese television shows and recut them into feature length movies for American markets. Time of the apes is one of these where children get sent to the future and find that earth is now run by apes but there are also humans still and weird aliens. It’s all kind of nonsensical especially since it’s a 26 half hour long episode television show cut into 1.5 hours run time then again cut into the runtime of mst3k.
I really like time chasers because David giancola films are not what you want to see. I lived near where David giancola lives in Vermont during high school and he was considered a real movie maker. Like people would talk about him like he was mr Hollywood. It was wild. It’s true, he has made a lot of films. But for some reason he refuses to leave Vermont no matter what the subject of his films are. This is why futuristic cities look a lot like back alleys of Rutland or middlebury and big company offices look like the corner of a library in time chasers. I used to think this movie is the best episode of mst3k but actually I think the movie makes more sense if you watch the original and not the cut up one. Some of the scenes that are left out explain some of the plot more. David giancola definitely cornered the market on being a filmmaker in Vermont. Nobody else is making as many feature films there as a setting for anything but Vermont. But that may not be a recipe for a good movie. That’s always the problem with a David Giancola film. For some reason it wants to leave Vermont but David Giancola does not. So everything feels a bit Vermonty.
I think a lot of movies like space mutiny are really fun but end up being so lazy. It’s like they had access to some kind of facility to shoot in plus some cardboard sets and Cameron mitchell. Movies like that are campy and fun but at some point you ask yourself what was the vision here? Like their vision for space mutiny was literally battle star galactica but without the cylons. So they wanted it to be more boring?
That’s why I always return to Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. I continue to see a filmmaker’s vision even though I don’t understand it.
Recent and related:
Elwood Edwards, voice of AOL's 'you've got mail' alert, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42087087 - Nov 2024 (41 comments)
with additional comments by jgrahamc, starting here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42087330
Thanks, dang! It was that HN post and comments that got me to make the effort to find the old emails and recordings and post this.
Wait a minute, 22 years ago his wife worked for what? "Quantum Computer Services"???
Quantum was one of those words that sounded really cool (back then). Just look at TV shows like Quantum Leap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Leap_(2022_TV_series)) or Sinclair's QL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL)
Amusingly this is true of an older discovery that now seems very commonplace: vibration, around the time that scientists understood the simple harmonic oscillator, and the fact that the same mathematics applies to lots of things from sounds to pendulums. So to make their nonsense sound sciencey, spiritualists started talking about vibrations as well.
Not sure if there are any older examples.
Great analogy. They'd be using "Quantum" the same way one might've also used, say, "Turing Computer Services". THey want the legitimacy of sounding elite and beyond-the-cutting-edge while presumably being expert at merely replacing bad RAM and defragging harddisks.
Early 2000's version was simply putting ".com" or ".net" in your company name so you sounded enticing to investors, or when everyone added "crypto" and to their company names.
Of similar vein I expect current generation "Artificial Intelligence" will likely be renamed and thought of as quaint or audacious, like the renaming of "Modern" furniture aesthetic to "Mid-Century Modern".
Quantum was cool until Deepak Chopra ruined it for everybody.
Quantum Mysticism is Stupid (Deepak Chopra, Spirit Science, Actualized.org):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQTWor_2nu4
Deepak Chopra Faces a Real Theoretical Physicist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qFGs-SIWB4
>How does Deepak Chopra respond when confronted with an actual Theoretical Physicist? Why, he maxes out the nonsense generator and gibbers whatever random jargon pops into his head.
Professor Brian Cox Enraged Deepak Chopra | CONAN on TBS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajO5MvL9pVE
>"I'm going to shove my cosmic consciousness up your ass!" -Enraged Deepak Chopra
might've also used, say, "Turing Computer Services"
Might have? The number of things with Turing slapped on them recently is out of hand.
By "the same way one might've also used" I meant those Quantum guys would've been just as likely to have used Turing, but yes, "Turing" is close to hitting the "jumped the shark" / "hackneyed" level of usage.
Or HD, AI, etc.
Or Cloud. Oops.
> Not sure if there are any older examples.
Humorous story about that…
Do tell...
Tabulate. Love it.
Not the same company, but similar: I have some old T-shirts advertising tape drives from Quantum when my dad worked for them in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Corporation
They were a tape drive and hard drive manufacturer. I guess they still have the tape drive section, but they sold their HDD division to ... Maxtor, which then got bought out by Seagate, I think?
Very enterprising on his part, and a nice reminder of the culture of the early-ish web.
Somehow he wasn't acquired by private equity and given a legal department to negotiate annual payments for licenses to use the .wav files
That's cool, Cameo before it existed.
Those are the things I like about John GC: still having fun with the small things in life.
Life is far to short to take it seriously all the time.
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