From: Montgomery [Alabama] Adverstiser*
Date: [unknown]
Headline: 'Science Theater' Scores with Bombs
Subline: Review
Photo(s): SPACE COMEDIAN: Joel Hodgson has appeared on 'Late Night' [Joel with hands on hips in spacey background.]
Author: Harmon, Rick
Page(s): [unknown] to D4
NOTE: "Mystery Science Theater 3000", appears on The Comedy Channel, which is already available on Selma cable. A spokesman for The Comedy Channel says he is currently negotiating with Montgomery cable companies to carry the channel in the fall.
"Mystery Science Theater 3000" is like the airplane the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, N.C. It's not a new idea. It's just the first time the idea has worked the way it should.
The idea here is recycling bad entertainment--to take terrible movies and include additives, usually a voice-over sound track--that can transform awful drama into amusing comedy.
"Mystery Science Theater 3000" doesn't succeed in creating amusing comedy. It succeeds in creating hilarious comedy.
It wasn't hard to find the problem with the early failures to transform these movies into good comedy.
They weren't funny.
They were gimmicks.
As you watched the films, they became less and less funny as the gimmick wore off until the movie parodies were more tedious than the movies they parodied.
As you watch "Mystery Science Theater 3000", you laugh harder and harder because the only gimmick here is humor.
Joel Hodgson, a stand-up comedian who has performed on "Late Night with David Letterman" and "Saturday Night Live", has a deft hand on the controls of this comic vehicle.
He plays a laboratory technician whose bosses have marooned him in outer space. As if this weren't bad enough, his hateful employers continue to torture him by bombarding him with a terrifying variety of different cheesy science-fiction or monster films that would never be approved under the Geneva Convention.
In this season's premiere, his employers send him "Rocketship X-M," a 1950 film in which Lloyd Bridges, Hugh O'Brian and that spectacular actress Osa Massen try to land on the moon, but somehow miss it and land on Mars instead.
It is perhaps better described by Joel's despicable boss as a film that "will assault your pop and folk sensibilities...a chillingly uninteresting assault of mind-numbing, gut-wrenching, brain-bloating non-action."
In an attempt to cope with this horror, Joel has built robots to keep him company and he and the robots heckle the film mercilessly and hilariously as it is shown.
The heckling is fast, furious and funny.
The result is a sarcastic, inventive invective that makes "Mystery Science Theater 3000" one of the funniest programs on cable TV.