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

Subject: Various articles from print media about MST3K

From: Pulse!

Date: March 1992

Headline: The Art of Heckling: "Bad print, bad sound, bad for you."

Subline: The "Mystery Science Theater 3000" TV series takes revenge on

killer b-movies

Photo(s): Our hosts: Crow, Joel and Tom Servo

Author: Weidenbaum, Marc

Note: Pulse! associate editor Marc Weidenbaum looks forward to "Citizen Kane: The MST3K Edition".

Page(s): 128

Ever notice how there aren't many late-night movies on late-night television? Like smoke-filled pool halls, white Xmases and the Gulf War, the regular scheduling of black-and-white b-movies on late-night TV is a fiction--something we believe primarily because we've seen it in movies and*on TV*.

The screen image is familiar: loners drinking, lovers loving, writers writing--all basking in the corpse-blue glow of old sci-fi/horror flicks on the tube. But flip on *your* TV come 2 a.m. and it's all syndicated game shows, program-length ads for exercise equipment and "Star Trek" reruns. (Hey--no complaint with the last one).

So it's all the more fitting that the best late-night viewing these days is on Saturday mornings--and Friday mornings and (for purists) Fridays after midnight. We're talking about "Mystery Science Theater 3000", available from the cable-only Comedy Central channel. Essentially, the show consists of three figures (one many and a pair of robots, named Tom Servo and Crow) silhouetted along the bottom of the TV screen, behind which runs the evening's (or morning's) b-movie ("Santa Claus Conquers the Martians","Rocket Ship X-M"). As the film rolls along, the three make fun of it, filling in lapses in dialogue or plot, mocking poor special effects ("I can see the string!") or shadow-boxing with whatever images come close enough to their seats. Have you ever shelled out $6.50 for a lousy film and gotten your only enjoyment from the audience's heckling? Ever *missed* those hecklers the next time you found yourself faced with a piece of miserable trash? MST3K assures you're never alone.

The show's framing plot conceit is as far-fetched as that of any of its b-grade film-stock victims: In the somewhat-distant future, our hero Joel (played by the show's creator, comedian Joel Hodgson) is booted into outer space by his employers. (Why? They just don't like him. How does he survive with limited food, oxygen, etc? *Hey,* as the series' appropriately Devo-ish theme song reminds us, this *is* just a TV show.) Adding insult to isolation, Joel is subjected to watching this endless feed of bad movies and newsreels, beamed from his bosses back on Earth. Titles like "Jungle Goddess" (with future serial-Superman George Reeves), "The Phantom Creeps" (with Bela Lugosi) and Roger Corman's "It Conquered the Earth" (with "Mission: Impossible"'s Peter Graves--more recently of the A&E network's "Biography", as Servo and Crow are happy to remind us, repeatedly). Joel's only company aboard his self-styled "Satellite of Love"? This small crew of smirking android pals he's constructed, like MST3K's set, out of loose parts (catcher's mit, gumball machine, vacuum-cleaner hoses).

Sure, some of the jokes are of the stunted caliber generally associated with brainless FM morning DJs--through whose highly refined Freudian technique the innate sexual connotation of all human utterances and actions can be revealed with a single, nasal-edged *Hmmmm.* As well, and regrettably, there's an inordinate number of gay and cross-dressing jokes anytime two men are left on the TV screen together ("Oh, it's my boyfriend," "I now pronounce you man and man," "Is that your hand?"). But hey, the show has no political agenda. In fact, Joel, Servo and Crow have nothing particularly nice to say about any of the movies they watch, and our couch-potato hours (lives?) are all the richer for it.

On-the-cheap between scene humor segments fill out the two-hour shows. Shorts have included: Joel's trusty pal Cambot demonstrating various film techniques; a song rattling off spuriously related celebrities with the same last names (Morris and Doris Day, etc.); and a similarly ludicrous list of alternate Winter Olympics events (snapping frozen cat limbs; frozen-ski-pole French kissing). These skits are OK, but the screenings are the show's true joy.

MST3K's cultural precedents are readily apparent: "Kentucky Fried Movie" and "Airplane" (both Hollywood forgeries of b-movies), "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" (a musical parody of horror movies, complete with compulsory heckling) and "What's Up, Tiger Lily" (a Japanese spy flick which Woody Allen dubbed to comic effect).

Likewise giddy self-referential to TV and movies, much of MST3K's humor consists essentially of a list: A routine transcript reveals a stacatto run of riffs spun from puns, pop-culture references. Nastassja Kinski, the Donner Party, Gene Krupa. Ayn Rand, karaoke bars, "The 700 Club". John Coltrane, Gomer Pyle, the Venus de Milo ("You know: no arms, nice rack"). Crow's telling motto during one particularly anarchic viewing: "Shoot the picture and let God sort it out."

With little more than a nudge-nudge and a wink-wink to cohere its cornball litany, MST3K's sense of humor--like Joel's "Satellite of Love" itself--enjoys a free-floating orbit way on up in the pop-cultural atmosphere.