From: jsnell@sdcc13.UCSD.EDU (Jason Snell)

Date: Tue, 4 Feb 92 19:05:00 PST

Subject: MST Article [From The UCSD Guardian newspaper, Feb. 6, 1992]

(C) 1992 The UCSD Guardian

By Jason Snell

Senior Staff Writer

The first time you see it, up in the high end of the cable television channels, you might think it's a kids show -- a grown man in a jumpsuit and two cheap-looking robots seemingly made from household items, standing in front of a set that looks something like a spaceship.

But this show, Comedy Central's Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Fridays at 10 a.m., Saturdays at 1:30 a.m., 10 a.m. and 7 p.m.), is perhaps the smartest and most inventive comedy show on television today. Tens of thousands of people nationwide, ranging from schoolchildren to the middle-aged, are members of the show's fan and information club.

Mystery Science Theater 3000, or MST, has been praised as "ingenious and often inspired television" by The New York Times, and as an "instant cult classic" by The Wall Street Journal, was given rave reviews by TV Guide and USA Today, and was most recently nominated for the ACE award for best cable comedy series.

The show's premise is silly and simple: A human (played by series creator and co-executive producer Joel Hodgson) and two robots are forced to watch some of the worst movies ever made. Sitting in theater chairs at the bottom of the movie screen, the trio responds by making fun of the movie -- with side-splitting comments and hilariously obscure references.

"We shock a lot of people about just how bad movies can get," Hodgson explains. "I mean, we're dealing in films that the general public would never, ever watch or see."

While the movies that appear on the show seem to be the worst anyone has ever seen, the show's creators say that movies like "Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster," the biker epic "Wild Rebels" and the recycled-from-TV "Master Ninja" are actually among the best of the films they receive. In a package of 20 films sent to the MST team by Comedy Central, perhaps one or two films are actually usable.

"It's hard to keep people interested if the movie has absolutely nothing going on in it, if it doesn't make sense," Hodgson says.

MST first appeared in late 1988 at a small independent television station in Minnesota. Series co-producer Jim Mallon approached Hodgson, a local product who made a name for himself in comedy by making several appearances on Saturday Night Live, to do a comedy show.

"We just started doing it, and it was very successful," Hodgson says. "It was incredibly low-budget, but people really responded to it, and we had [a fan club] of over 1,000 back then. It really helped us feel like we had hit a nerve."

About a year later, cable TV's Comedy Channel (which later merged with the HA! channel to form Comedy Central) approached Hodgson and Mallon about producing the program for a national audience.

"When we were approached to do it on cable, we were in a great position--we had done 22 shows already, and knew how the thing worked,"Hodgson says.

The production team at Hodgson and Mallon's company, Best Brains, works almost year-round producing the show, which is now beginning its fourth season. Each episode takes eight days to produce, and the staff takes a week-long vacation after every five episodes.

The writing process begins with the team of four staff writers and various contributing writers sitting in a room, watching the movie and rattling off humorous comments, which are entered into a word processor.

"We go and rip on the movie-- just like you would in a home," Hodgson says.

"We spend the first writing day going through the movie and throwing out lines," says writer Trace Beaulieu, who also plays both the robotic Crow and evil scientist Clayton Forrester. "Everything works that day. Everything's funny then."

The next day, the writers work on between-movie sketches for Hodgson and the robots, as well as the evil scientists.

"Hopefully, we've generated ideas out of the film that we can use and extrapolate into sketch ideas," Beaulieu says.

The fictional premise for the show is that the scientists, played by Beaulieu and writer Frank Conniff, have trapped Hodgson's character in space, and force him to watch bad movies as part of an experiment.

Sound ridiculous? Of course, and even the show's creators admit it: the show's theme song reminds viewers to relax, because "it's just a show." But calling it "just a show" sells MST short -- one-minute stretches of the show can contain references that range from classical literature to modern television and movie trivia. It seems unlikely that anyone alive can understand all the references, and almost as unlikely that a small group of writers in Eden Prairie, Minnesota could come up with them.

"Each writer has their own expertise as far as obscure knowledge," Beaulieu says. "Frank Conniff has a vast knowledge of show business, Kevin Murphy [the voice of robot Tom Servo] has an enormous brain with just about everything else in the world. We all kind of watched too much television."

"We didn't design it this way," Hodgson explains. "When I had the idea, it was not that we'd be real eclectic. It was only after we had done it many times that we found that people would accept very eclectic references, and then we started to enjoy that and have fun with it."

Though the references are obscure, the writers don't spend all their time unearthing arcane facts to put in the next MST installment.

"I don't want you to think we're video watchdog people who worship obscure French sadomasochistic movies or anything," Hodgson says. "It's just that we use our memory and try to be inventive. We don't have atraining table of stuff we watch. It's just who we are."

A large number of the letters the show's receives are from children, who most likely won't understand very many of the show's obscure references.

"I think [children] like the robots," Beaulieu says. "We get a lot of drawings from little kids who really like to take the robots apart and draw them, figure out what they're made of."

"I remember, when I was a little kid, it always felt good to be around my dad and to watch him make fun of stuff," Hodgson says. "And even though I didn't understand what he was making fun of, it just felt good to be there, to see it happen. Kids like the fact that we're making fun of the screen.

"When I was a little kid, I used to think that God made TV," Hodgson says. "Even though kids don't understand the references, they understand that we're making fun of the people on the screen, and they like that."

The show also seems to have struck a chord with people who have made a habit of ridiculing the worst in television and movie entertainment.

"It wasn't by design," Hodgson says. "I guess it just hit on this kind of unconsciousness -- you can draw an analogy with what's going on on the screen. By making a reference, you can complete a picture for the viewer, and that's one of the strongest and probably the most inventive thing that we do."

As a result, the show's fans are young and old, and every viewer seems to appreciate a different aspect of the program.

"There's no target audience," Hodgson says. "We just make the show, and people find it. If we had a target audience, we'd be dead in the water."

More than anything else, Hodgson and the rest of the MST team seem to feel lucky that their show has become as popular as it had.

"It was kind of a lucky shot," Hodgson says. "It's just about chemistry, and working hard, and getting along with each other. I'd like to think that because I designed the show, it works really great. But if people don't have a good time doing it, then the audience can tell.

"That's what's so bewildering," he says. "By rights, The Simpsons shouldn't be that good. It's a cartoon. But it is. Who knows? I guess it would sound stupid if I tried to figure it out."