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

Subject: those darn articles, again!

From: Satellite TV

Week Date: March 22-28, 1992

Headline: 'MST 3000's' Spacey (unsure about headline -TMF)

This is an unauthorized reprint.

 

"People of Earth. My name is Joel and I'm marooned. I'm the subject of a bizarre movie-watching experiment and now I guess you are too. An evil scientist shot me into space for no good reason at all." Welcome to "Mystery Science Theater 3000", Comedy Central's Minnesota import that grows on you like a Midwestern-accented fine whine.

The whine in this case belongs to deadpan comedian Joel Hodgson, the front man for an eclectic group of TV-makers who produce their successful weekly show from the suburbs of Minneapolis. This eclectic, very funny, do-it-yourself TV show is on Comedy Central Fridays at 10 a.m. and again at 12:30 a.m. Saturday and on Saturdays at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. (E).

In the nearly two years of its existence, this low-budget, off-beat show has toted up some surprising critical acclaim. It's on many Top 10 lists and has a fan club that's 11,000 strong. "Yeah. We're just really happy that people like it," says Hodgson in his characteristic monotone. The show's premise has Hodgson as a hapless technician of the Gizmonics Institute dressed in the orange coveralls of a neighborhood auto mechanic. He's drifting through space with his robot friends and as an experiment, an evil scientist is forcing him to watch really bad movies and in monitoring the effect on the human species; namely, Joel (and us). Every week, there's also an invention exchange between Joel and the evil ones: goofball inventions that specialize in bizarre one-upmanships.

"As you can see, just trying to describe this show to somebody would make it very hard to sell," Hodgson says. "This is one of those things where you never know. You think you have a good idea but it might be a horrible idea and you take a risk and bring it to life and then start to show it to other people and they start to like it too. But you never know if people will hate it or love it."

Kevin Murphy, the technical director, the voice of Crow, one of the robots, and one of the original gang of nine who brought "Mystery Science Theater 3000" to life, says, "I think everybody kind of clicked on this because we all have had the experience of sitting in front of the TV at one time or another and have had more fun by lampooning a movie than we could have had otherwise. It makes what could have been a terrible viewing experience a lot of fun."

"Mystery Science Theater 3000"'s targets have included "The Crawling Hand", "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians", "Side Hackers", "Slime People" and, the choice for all-time worst, "Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy". Hodgson explains, "That was a Mexican TV show re-edited in Coral Gables, Fla., into a kind of movie with a lot of voice-overs." Murphy adds, "Ooooh. You could actually see the tape splices in the film." Generally, each week's movie airs unedited. Joel and his robot buddies can be seen watching in the right-hand corner, interjecting comments to crack them (and us) up.

As for how they came up with these cinematic wonders, Murphy says, "We get a list of titles that might be available from the distributor and then we pick the title that we'd like to preview. Then we just sit in a prayer circle, get the lodge fire going and watch the movies. We pass on the ones that really aren't suited for us ("Citizen Kane"?) and see if we can make a deal for the ones that are."

When "Mystery Science Theater 3000" first began, Hodgson called it "Hippie TV, where everybody participates." His Best Brains production company is now more streamlined, more efficient, but producing it in Minnesota is a major part of the show's success. "We can't really break up the band," he says. "We live in an age where you can have Federal Express mail, use the fax machine and we've got multimedia computers. Why not stay in Minneapolis?" Murphy concurs: "You can live where you want to and do what you want to do." Hodgson says his philosophy is, "This is what people always thought could happen and our company is an example that you can do it."

Originally, Hodgson did travel on the traditional comedy circuit. He says, "I was 22, just out of college and within two months I had gotten on the "Letterman Show", then the HBO comedians special and then "Saturday Night Live". I wasn't ready for it emotionally. I did 12 network comedy shots in 18 months. I found it hard to keep producing material. I only had been performing for two years. I didn't have very much stamina. I really missed home." So Hodgson returned to Minneapolis and took four years off before "Mystery Science Theater 3000" began. He used those four years to work on his passion: inventions. "I started to build robots," he says, and those robots became a kind of evolutionary Cro-Magnon prototype for Tom Servo and Crow, the robot buddies on the show.

"How did I get so goofy? Well, in second grade I invented a thing called Cracker/Cracker. Hi Karate cologne had a big impact on me for some reason and I created a device called Cracker/Cracker that had a hand. You'd lay the crackers on it and it would break the crackers. That's how I got into this business."

Hodgson got back into comedy by working on Jerry Seinfeld's HBO comedy special and using Seinfeld as a role model. "He's a very healthy individual," Hodgson says of Seinfeld. "He showed me that you can participate and still be okay and have a good time all at the same time." The four-year hiatus also worked as a good gestation period for "Mystery Science Theater 3000". Hodgson says,

"I remembered that I got my best ideas when I was really bored, so I went to work in a T-shirt factory but the guy discovered that I was a comic and put me in the front office to write T-shirts and that spoiled everything. I had a braille T-shirt that said, 'If you can read this, you're too close.'"

These days, the only contact"Mystery Science Theater 3000" has with Hollywood (apart from the celebrities who are fanmembers) is responses from the actors in the films they dissect. Murphy says, "Miles O'Keefe called us up when we did a movie he was in. He said he really enjoyed it and invited us to his groovy pad in California if we ever got out there." But Hodgson says, "A lot of people are dead now so we don't get a lot of calls." "Mystery Science Theater 3000", gets its own space in Minneapolis: no interface and total control over the finished product. "One thing that's nice about the show is that it's a bit of a closed universe," Hodgson says. "We're going to keep making it as long as people like it and that's kind of where we're at."