From: Twin Cities Reader#

Date: July 8, 1992

Headline: Comedy

Subline: "Mystery Science Theater 3000": Goofs in the Machine

Cover: TV FOR THE CULTURAL ELITE: "Mystery Science Theater 3000" Comes of Age

Photo(s): Joel Hodgson and friends [Crow, right; Servo, left with their RAM chips] aboard the newly debugged "Satellite of Love."

Author: Miller, Mark

Page(s): 24-25

Note: IT'S ALIVE! preview

"WE DIDN'T KNOW IF PEOPLE WOULD LIKE IT," says Joel Hodgson, creator of cable TV's "Mystery Science Theater 3000". "We thought people would be upset that we'd talk over their movies."

Hodgson, it's now clear, was horribly wrong. MST 3000, which debuted in a bizarre time slot on Thanksgiving evening in 1988 on tiny local TV23, has since gone on to bona fide success on the national Comedy Channel (now Comedy Central), which reaches 23 million households. The show runs twice on Saturdays, with old episodes rerun on Friday nights (though Hodgson still can't get the channel in St. Paul).

The show returns to its humble beginnings this weekend, when the folks of MST 3000 perform "MST Alive", two special live shows at the Uptown Theater.

The premise of MST 3000 is simple. To paraphrase the opening song, Joel is a janitor at Gizmonics Institute, sometime in the not-too-distant future. His bosses don't like him, so they shoot him into space, where they show him bad movies and monitor his reactions. For companionship, Joel creates robots out of lacrosse masks, baby seats, and gumball machines, endows them with personalities, and wacky hijinks ensue. Forced to watch cheesy movies, the occupants of the "Satellite of Love" hurl wisecracks at the viewing screen in response to bad acting or a covoluted plot, both of which occur continually. The results of these "experiments," as they're called, are sold to television. This is where the story meets reality: The home viewer then watches Joel and the 'bots watching the movie--their sihouettes apear with empty movie seats at the bottom of the screen.

In its current form, MST 3000 can best be described as carfully planned spontaneity, created by extremely literate people with diverse backgrounds; they are the "cultrual elite" Dan Quayle has been warning us about. The humor can be sophisticated or downright dopey. Nearly every action or quip is a reference to another medium--film, literature, music, television--and all sorts of names are dropped, from John Coltrane to Morrissey, Ingmar Bergman to Jerry Lewis. Repeated viewing always reveals previously missed jokes. It's entertainment that appeals to the highest common denominator, though it's equally funny to children.

Although MST 3000's premise is unchanged, many aspects of the show's preparation are more sophisticated than in the early days. Then, nearly all the dialogue, including the host segment in which characters interact and talk about films outside the theater, was improvised. Passing notes from the control room and using headsets were early--and unsuccessful--attempts at primitive scripting.

Trace Beaulieu, who is the voice behind the robot crew [sic] and also plays mad scientist Dr. Clayton Forrester, says of the early shows, "It's hard to go back and look at those."

Hodgson agrees: "It's astounding to me that people liked it back then, compared to the skill level we have now."

Due to time and financial constraints, each episode was originally taped in one day.

"We had to get out before the wrestling show came in," says Beaulieu. Now, each show is shot over the course of eight days. The script is created through repeated viewings by the actors and writers, allowing them to pay more attention to the subtler--relatively speaking--aspects of the films. The large pool of material from these sessions is edited to produce the final script. More time than before is devoted to the host segments, arguably the funniest part of the show. Despite the more elaborate process, the new format still has a spontaneous feel to it.

Now in its fourth season on cable TV, MST 3000 has gone through other changes. At the outset of its second cable season, it endured a six-month period without a contract, despite being the channel's most popular show. Hodgson's comic partner, Josh Weinstein, who was the voice of Tom Servo the robot, left during this time and was replaced by former camera and technical person Kevin Murphy; stand-up comic Frank Conniff came on as a new mad scientist, Frank.

By the third season on Comedy Central--last year--says Murphy, "Things were comfortable. We had developed a good cadence--we were definitely getting better at it." Season four, currently in its second month, is going very smoothly.

The movies used in MST 3000's "experiments" span a wide range of mediocrity and outright awfulness: '50s B-movies such as "Untamed Youth" (about aprison farm) and "Ring of Terror" (about a medical school fraternity's initiation gone awray, featuring the world's oldest college students); '60s exploitation gems such as "Catalina Caper" (an incredibly white beach mystery) and "Sidehackers" (about a failed sport involving motorcycles with sidecars); and even repackaged old TV shows such as "Master Ninja" (featuring a ninja, a Van Patten, and a gerbil roaming the country in a van). But the real backbone of the show's repertoire is the monster/science fiction genre, particularly the series about a Godzilla-like turtle named Gamera.

"Those films really solidified something early with the viewers--they really fit what we thought of as "Mystery Science Theater 3000"," says Hodgson.

"We've even tried to get a lot of those movies again." Some of them have been skewered on both the old TV23 episodes and on Comedy Central, since, says Hodgson, "We really don't look at those [TV23] episodes as part of our catalog. [They're] kind of the garage band days."

Selecting the movies used in the show is an experiment in itself, since the MST 3000 folks are limited to the movies they can obtain legal license to use. HBO, the channel's part owner, provides them with a list of available titles from which to choose. "People think you can go to the video store and get a movie and use it," says Hodgson. "They forget that's what the F.B.I. warning is. It's for people like us.

With a fan club of more than 14,000 members, rave reviews in "The New York Times" and "Washington Post", features on "Entertainment Tonight" and Minnesota Public Radio, and a movie deal in the works, the future couldn't be brighter for MST 3000. Season four, already off to a very funny start, will include more Roger Corman movies and a first crack at Steve Reeves "Hercules" movie dubbed from Italian.

Conniff deadpans that after enjoying the cult-like success of MST 3000, he'll have "a pathetic career like those guys from "Star Trek"--full of pity, maybe some "Match Game" appearances," and jokes that the show is "a stepping stone to sci-fi conventions."

This weekend's live performances should provide the best of both the old and the new "Mystery Science Theater 3000", with lots of local jokes, good-natured ribbing, and the new twist of an audience of thousands.

Remembering the early impromptu shows, Hodgson says, "It was hard--Trace was the only one who had improv experience. That's totally what it was--improv for thousands of people--and I was really freaked out. That was really an education for me. Just because I could never do *anything* spontaneous."

Editor's note: "Mystery Science Theater Alive" is performed twice this weekend at the Uptown Theater: a late show on Friday at midnight and a family matinee on Saturday at 11:30 a.m. Tickets $15, $5 for children at Saturday's matinee; call 989-5151 (Ticketmaster).