From: jenkins@mhd1.moorhead.msus.edu (jenkins lisa)

Date: Fri, 22 May 92 11:04:47 CDT

Subject: those darn articles, again!

From: Minneapolis (Minnesota) Star and Tribune

Date: December 19, 1988

Headline: TV Supplies Witty Companions to Help Watch Bad Old Movies

Author: Matheny, Dave

Page(s): [unknown]

Not all great cultural innovations begin on the East or West Coast. Sometimes they start in the land that the typical New York or Hollywood impresario sees only from 30,000 feet up.

On Thanksgiving Day a small local TV station, KTMA (Ch. 23), began airing a breakthrough in entertainment forms called "Mystery Science Theater 3000", in which a human and as many as three robot friends watch a bad old science-fiction movie *with* the viewer, creating a whole new comic form.

The man and the robots are visible from behind, in silhouette, as if you were in a theater and they were seated a few rows in front of you. They make the kinds of comments you wish you had said yourself, as when one of the robots remarked about a Godzilla-like monster crashing through Tokyo, "That creature just does not know the meaning of the word *around*."

The human, and creator of "Mystery Science Theater 3000", is Joel Hodgson, a 30-year-old local comedian who in the early '80s had a skyrocketing career in the national limelight, with appearances on "The David Letterman Show" and "Saturday Night Live", and who had NBC president Brandon Tartikoff after him to participate in a proposed new situation comedy.

But Hodgson, whose shy demeanor and gentle, goofy-science humor are genuine and not just put on for a camera, dropped it all and returned to the Twin Cities in 1984, saying he just didn't care for the show-biz life style and wanted to live here.

As he said in a recent interview, "You go on Letterman so you can get booking in clubs in places like Columbus, Ohio, for two weeks. I hate having to be in some place like Columbus when I want to be here." In anycase, he said, he had heard it takes 10 years to make a good comedian, and after only two years he had been approaching the upper reaches of the profession. It was somehow too soon.

But after a year or two of making and selling robot sculptures and repairing Gobot costumes used in Tonka trade shows, he co-wrote a comedy special for cable TV and returned to the stage, and he now appears Monday nights at Scott Hansen's Comedy Gallery, in the Brown Ryan Livery Stable adjacent to Riverplace.

Probably no other comedian who has appeared often on network and cable TV lives in a small stucco bungalow in the Twin Cities. Few, if any, haunt the salvage shops around town looking for material. Hodgson rounds up *things* from places like Salvation Army stores and Ax-Man Surplus and Bank's, and hauls them home to his basement workshop. (In fact, part of what bothered him about living in Los Angeles was the terrible traffic jam every day just when he needed to go out and scrounge up some PVC tubing.)

His workshop, outfitted with big power tools, looks as if it once was used by a serious home-improvement type but then taken over by a 13-year-old boy who never met a squeeze bottle, plastic sword, or half a bedspring he didn't like.

When those things come out of his basement, they have been transformed: "Oh, this one is neat, if I can get it to work," he said, unscrewing the cap of a plastic soap-bubble bottle. He slowly drew out a white wand five times the length of the bottle, with a long loop of some kind of dressmaker's material attached to the far end. Slippery liquid spilled on the basement floor as he squeezed the loop closed, then spread it apart and waved the arrangement to produce the biggest soap bubble in the Western hemisphere, which sank sedately to the floor, bursting with an almost audible sound.

Gadgets are his trademark, but the essence of his comedy is in his view of things. There is nothing inherently funny about a leaf blower, but Hodgson uses one as wind source for bagpipes and sings "Amazing Grace." Or he uses it to shoot drink-straw wrappers by the thousands at an audience.

So in his current endeavor, rather than just hosting a cheesy old sci-fi movie from a crypt or whatever, Hodgson has done to the cheesy-old-movie genre what he does with other surplus and scrap: He has turned it into something else. He and the two local comics who operate the robots (Josh Weinstein as Gypsy and Servo; Trace Beaulieu as Crow) seat themselves before the screen and make their comments live-on-tape, with no preparation, not even previewing the movie. When a monster approaches a lighthouse, they may wonder out loud whether it will treat the lighthouse the way a dog treats a fire hydrant.

The effect is not like being forced to listen to some nitwit talking near you in a movie theater. It's like watching a movie with several irrepressibly funny guys who almost seem to be trying to keep their voices down. Hodgson said he would never do it to a good movie, such as "When Worlds Collide". For the time being, the movies singled out for this treatment come from an obscure 1960s Japanese series from a turtle-monster called Gamera. As Weinstein remarked on the set, "One or two Gamera movies are boring. Three validates the concept." Hodgson and Weinstein then churned that around until they came up with a line for Hodgson to use on camera to refute a caller's complaint about too many Gamera movies: "More than three Gamera movies is a Gamera festival."

Jim Mallon, the show's producer and KTMA's production manager, arranged a 13-week run for the show (which appears Sunday nights at 6, plus a special after-midnight show on New Year's Eve).

Mallon, who has a hard time not laughing out loud during the taping of the movie, also loves the host segments in between the movie reels. "Every shot comes from the disciplined reality he has engineered. He has a strong sense of what each robot's personality is; Gypsy's character is gentler and Joel is more protective of her.... Crow is trying to be more human-like, and Joel's stroking those needs, too."

Hodgson is the only young comic in the universe who would forget to tell a reporter that he had just been invited to play a part in an NBC sitcom to air next fall, starring former Twin Cities comic Louis Anderson.

Production is scheduled to begin in Los Angeles in April. Hodgson said he will go back to L.A. if he need to. "But it could only be one show," he pointed out. If so, he'll happily do another 13 weeks of cheesy old sci-fi movies.