All of this makes Shout! TV one of the very best streaming values since it doesn’t cost you a single cent — just the time you’ll spend watching ads. Here are a few recommendations:
Mystery Science Theater 3000: “The Skydivers”: Shout has been in business for quite some time with the various iterations of “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” the uproariously funny cult TV show where an average Joe, marooned in space, watches bad movies with his robot companions while cracking wise. In addition to the original episodes, Shout also streams their “riffed” short films and episodes from “MST” alumni shows “Cinematic Titanic,” “The Film Crew” and “Rifftrax.” But if you’re looking for an entry point, I’d recommend this sixth season episode, in which our boys first watch the educational short “Why Study Industrial Arts?” (the titular question is not satisfactorily answered, frankly) and the technically incompetent and narratively incoherent 1963 film “The Skydivers,” from the writer-director Coleman Francis, a filmmaker so inept, he makes Ed Wood look like Martin Scorsese.
The Dick Cavett Show: “Hollywood Greats — Alfred Hitchcock”: Carson may be the big name and the shining star for viewers looking to stream a throwback talk show; then as now, however, Dick Cavett is the connoisseur’s choice, offering up brainy, far-reaching interviews with some of the wittiest folks in show business. Shout has a wonderful cross-section of full episodes, featuring candid conversations with music icons like John Lennon, Ray Charles, David Bowie and Janis Joplin; comic legends like Groucho Marx, Robin Williams and Lucille Ball; and Hollywood greats like Orson Welles, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and the Master of Suspense, who walks Cavett through his philosophies of terror, his methodology with actors and how he built some of his most signature sequences.
“The Decline of Western Civilization” (parts I-III): Before she directed “Wayne’s World” and made a mint, Penelope Spheeris was vibrantly documenting the various squalid corners of the Los Angeles youth and music scenes. The first “Decline,” released in 1981, captured the turn-of-the-decade punk and hardcore scene, warts and all; “Part II: The Metal Years,” showcases the scene seven years later but a world away, in the midst of its takeover by style-over-substance heavy metal. “Part III” hit screens a decade later, after Spheeris’s Hollywood success, focusing on wayward youths and gutter punks. All three films play now like cultural anthropology, deeply immersed and empathetic (and, occasionally, wryly funny).
