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

Subject: MST3K -- Mademoiselle article

From: Mademoiselle

Date: February 1992

Headline: Movies from Outer Space

Subline: Think bad movies are hell on Earth? You're not alone

Photo: Joel Hodgson and [robot] friends [l-r Gypsy, Crow and Servo]

Author: Rosenbaum, Ron

Pages: 54-55, 60

Well, I've finally joined a movie cult. Or maybe it's an antimovie cult. But it's definitely a cult. Because it offers those of us who are initiates both the secret of happiness and a profound truth about the human condition.

It's call "Mystery Science Theater 3000". Laugh if you will; I did at first--before I discovered the profound truth beneath the laughter. On the surface, MST3K, as it's referred to by initiates, is a two-hour TV show devoted to the absolute worst, cheesiest, sleaziest, stupidest, shlockiest [sic] movies ever made by man. Ranging from sub-sub-sub-"Godzilla" Japanese horror films (like the infamous "Gamera" series, which features a gigantic rocket-powered box turtle with really bad teeth, and jet engines situated in his butt) to incredibly lame U.S. products like "Teenage Caveman", "The Slime People" and "It Conquered the World". These are films that make the notorious Golden Turkey Award--winner "Plan 9 From Outer Space" seem as nuanced and sophisticated as Ingmar Bergman's "Persona".

But MST3K doesn't merely show these films; it doesn't merely deconstruct them (although it certainly does that); it has generated an entirely new comic-art form based upon the disintegrating corpus of the world's worst horror films.

I have to admit, I didn't quite get it at first. One day while I was channel-surfing, I landed on Comedy Central and found myself transfixed by what seemed to be the cheapest, stupidest science-fiction film I'd ever seen: "Rocketship X-M".

I came upon it in midpassage at the point where the rocket men (and women) from Earth first encounter the Martians on the Red Planet--primitive-looking bald dwarfs with bad skin, who make confusing signals to the Earthmen.

Suddenly, from offscreen, a voice called out, "Cheese it! It's an entire race of *mimes*. We've got to get back and *warn Earth*!" There followed a nonstop stream of sarcastic, ridiculing remarks directed at the movie emanating from three small figures silhouetted at the bottom of the screen, sitting in what looked like movie-theater seats, as if they were in a screening room and we were watching them watching the movie.

What was this? Why did two of the figures at the bottom of the screen look like Toys "R" Us robots, yet still seem to possess a vast repertoire of incredibly hip, sophisticated pop-culture and literary references at the tips of their tongues?

I had to leave before I could figure it out. But what I'd seen was so fresh, funny and inventive, I kept searching the Comedy Central schedule, dodging the stand-up bores, before I found MST's fairly irregular schedule (Friday and Saturday mornings at 10 A.M. and Saturday evenings at 7 P.M.).

Still, I hadn't figured the whole premise of the thing out until I happened to bring it up at dinner with a group of writers. One of them, a poet and novelist, told me about the rapidly growing cult surrounding "Mystery Science Theater". She'd been introduced to it by a group of "splatter punk" science-fiction writers who avidly traded tapes of MST3K, and she finally explained the premise of the show.

"See," she said, "this guy Joel is being punished for some obscure crime on Earth, and his punishment is he's shot into space on this rickety satellite and forced to watch the worst horror films ever made on the planet while these evil scientists from Earth monitor his reactions. And he's so miserable up there, he creates these two robot friends, Crow and Tom Servo, to watch with him and ridicule the films.

You know how everybody loves to sit around and make fun of old movies, but this is like doing it with three friends who just happened to be the hippest, smartest, funniest people you'd ever meet, like having these droll post-modern Marx Brothers in your living room." That alone would be enough to make MST3K the object of cult worship, sure. That and the fact that its creators have succeeded in devising what cultural historians will ultimately come to regard as the emblematic new comic-art form of the era, a hybrid form that brilliantly reverses the power relationship between spectator and spectacle in the cinema experience. After years of victimization by bad art, it's pay-back time, and MST3K, or "The Revenge ofthe Million-Eyed Audience", becomes the movie to end all horror movies.

But in fact, there's more to it than that. The appeal of MST3K, the reason it's attracted a growing cult of viewers, goes deeper than that. The real source of its appeal, I'm convinced, is that the conceptual framework of the show is a profound metaphor for the human condition. Poor Joel's predicament--marooned on a disintegrating satellite, condemned to watch dreadful horror movies--mirrors our existential predicament as humans: trapped on a decaying satellite (Earth), condemned for an obscure crime(Original Sin? Our corrupt hearts of darkness?) to be helpless spectators to the unending series of bad horror movies that is our reality, our bloody history. A tragic predicament to which the only sane response is derisive humor directed at whomever scripted it. The only consolation is the kind of communal solace we gain from the mockery we make together of the ludicrously bad scripts of fate in which we're all entrapped. That's my opinion, anyway.

In a way, it's akin to what we all went through watching the Clarence Thomas hearings--watching them alone was too awful, but if you had friends to watch with, whether in person or on the phone, to kibitz and share the feeling of outrage and absurdity, to talk back to John Doggett, it made the badly scripted reality of the hearing more bearable.

Who are the people behind the MST3K phenomenon? The creator and the guy who plays the character Joel trapped on the Satellite of Love (as he derisively refers to it) is Joel Hodgson. He's a young guy who started out as a stand-up comic in L.A., was discovered by former NBC programming guru Brandon Tartikoff, thrown into a lot of network specials (he even was creative consultant for a Superbowl halftime show) and then suddenly fled Hollywood for Minnesota where, in the tiny town of Eden Prairie, he and a gifted crew of writers and actors (among them Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff) spend their lives sorting through the world's worst movies in order to turn them into MST3K episodes.

When I reached them one morning recently by phone out there in Eden Prairie studio of Best Brains, Inc., they were just putting the finishing touches on their version of "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians".

After a few preliminary questions, I plunged right into my theory about why MST3K was a P.M.F.H.C. (profound metaphor for the human condition), the whole bit about the reality of our history being like a bad horror film, etc. Their response was, predictably, sarcastic:

"Oh, wow!" said one.

"That's really *heavy*," said another.

"I think I'm *crying*," said a third.

Nonetheless, on a less metaphysical plane, Hodgson did acknowledge that there was an underlying, serious, satiric vision behind MST3K. He said it was addressed to the mentality behind these films--"to the white-male reality from the fifties," the peculiar kind of smug dumbness that infuses "Jungle Goddess", "Women of the Prehistoric Planet" and "Viking Women and the Sea Serpent".

In fact, lately the MST3K crew has taken to going beyond the horror genre for vehicles to ridicule, and has been doing schlocky '50s and '60s youth-movie classics like "Daddy-O" and "Side Hackers" (the latter truly one of the clumsiest, most half-baked things ever to be filmed by anyone) And they've also taken on some creaky antiquated "educational" short subjects as curtain raisers for the main attraction. One recent one--a '40s-era film promoting Home Economics majors for college students--was, inadvertently, a kind of horror film even more chilling than the blatant beast-monster movies. The horror here was in the smug, condescending, unbearably circumscribed vision of what the limits of women's lives were not so long ago.

Anyway, after the initial rocky start, we got into an animated discussion of the aesthetics of badness.

"You sit there watching this awful, stilted, pretentious stuff and yet you realize this is someone's *crystalline vision*."

"That's the true horror?" I ask, "the sincerity of belief in something so bad?"

"That's 'The horror! The horror!'" another responds, quoting, apparently, from the climax of "Heart of Darkness".

They start to cite some of their favorite auteurs of badness, including Bert I. Gordon, director of "King Dinosaur" and the classic "The Amazing Colossal Man". ("*Very* sincere," says Joel.) They cite Robert Lipper, producer of the astonishing bad "Rocketship X-M". They recall lamest monster (the "killer shrews" from "The Killer Shrews"--"basically dogs with papier-mache heads").

Talking with them, you begin to get the feeling that the amazing baroque diversity of the badness they've been witness to is a perverse tribute to the human spirit, the continued *inventiveness* of the badness being brought forth, a kind of inspiring marvel in itself.

"There's just no bottom for bad movies," Joel says happily.

More than anything, I was impressed by the MST crew's ability-after so many, many thousands of hours of badness--to summon fresh reserves of outrage and wonder at the hideous spectacles they subvert on our behalf. That's what makes them great--that combination of outrage, wonder and wit. I have a feeling I'm going to be laughing at my MST tapes for the rest of my life.