Morgan - The comic galaxy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 : twelve classic episodes and the movies they lampoon

Chris Morgan

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-1883-8

2015 Chris Morgan. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

On the cover: Photograph from the television series Mystery Science Theater 3000 with Michael J. Nelson (middle) and the robots Crow (left) and Tom Servo (Comedy Central/Photofest)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

To Koko B. Ware. You are the wind beneath my wings.

In the course of human events, when one writes a book, there comes a time to administer the acknowledgments. For what is a greater honor than to merely have your existence acknowledged? First and foremost, I want to thank everybody who worked on Mystery Science Theater 3000 for the show. Without it, much joy would have been stripped from my life, and also this book would not make any sense. I also want to acknowledge the people who run Satellite News, the official MST3K fansite, and also the Annotated MST3K, because they have cataloged the show so well it made finding information much easier. Thanks to Conor Lastowka, one of the founders of National High Five Day and RiffTrax writer, for trying to help me find information I needed. He failed, and failed horribly, but it was a noble failure. Hold your chin up high, Conor! Id also like to shout out to my parents, because that is what one does in this kind of situation. Lastly, Id like to acknowledge many of the folks who worked on the films that ended up on MST3K. They say nobody sets out to make a bad movie, and thats probably true, even if some of these films test that hypothesis. Many of these people were dreamers or novices or folks just looking for a paycheck, because this was their profession, and sometimes you take work for the work. Mistakes were made, but there was still merit in their attempts. Let us never presume that they are, in fact, total idiots.

The not too distant future is forever in the past. One of the most cultishly beloved, televisual programs of all time, Mystery Science Theater 3000, went off the air in 1999. Yes, most of the creative folks who worked on the show have continued to find success, often within the same realm that MST3K, as it is conveniently known to writers (particularly those who intend to refer to the show repeatedly over the course of a book), turned into a cottage industry, but it cant be the same. Fortunately Mystery Science Theater 3000 lives on. Its devoted fan base would never let it die. So it exists in DVD releases and, frequently, in old VHS recordings that have been uploaded onto YouTube, a charmingly lo-fi, possibly not-legal way to make sure that, if somebody wants to see the Gorgo episode with guest star Leonard Maltin, damn it, they can.

Maybe you, the reader, are not entirely certain what this Mystery Science Theater 3000 we speak of is. Perhaps you enjoy reading books about subjects which of you have no knowledge. Maybe you find yourself waiting in a bookstore, and grabbed the nearest thing to you, desperate to kill a few minutes. This early in the book, that certainly seems possible. Whatever the case may be, for those of you who are in need of a primer on MST3K and what it was all about, heres some rudimentary background.

Like most things worthwhile, MST3K began as a desperate attempt to fill time on a lowly local UHF station. The year was 1988. A gentleman named Jim Mallon was working at KTMA, an independent station in Minneapolis, Minnesota. One day, his bosses asked him to figure out a way to fill two hours of air time on Sunday nights. Mallon enlisted a fella by the name of Joel Hodgson, and the two of them put together a team of names that are familiar to any fan of the show, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 was born. In a sense.

The premise was similar to what it would remain throughout its run. Namely, a man and his two robot chums, modeled in part off of the film Logans Run, were in outer space, watching cheesy movies and commenting on them. The pilot, wherein they watched a portion of the 1968 sci-fi monster movie The Green Slime, was rough. This is true both in the sense that the details of the show we came to know and love were not quite all there and in the sense that this was a pilot for a local channel in Minnesota. After all, in the Green Slime episode there is no Tom Servo, only a weird little puppet named Beeper who only spoke in beeps that Crow T. Robot could understand. Fortunately, Mallon, Hodgson, and company did some fined tuning, and the show was given the chance to blossom.

After a few tweaks, the general premise of Mystery Science Theater 3000 was locked down. Hodgson played the similarly named Joel Robinson. He had worked at Gizmonic Institute, when two mad scientists shot him into space to be the subject of an experiment. Robinson would have to sit through bad movies to evaluate the impact they were having on Joels psyche. World domination was the ultimate goal, as is always the case for your run-of-the-mill mad scientist. However, Joel took some of the materials around, including those that let him control when the movies began and ended, and used them to build a few robots. The robots were crudely put-together puppets, two of which, Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot, joined Joel in the theater. There they would riff on the movies, a phrase that is now commonly used to describe what MST3K did not invent, but all but perfected.

That, in a nutshell, is what the show was. The show changed channels too, moving from their little Minneapolis studio to a major network and then moving again to what was then known as the Sci-Fi Channel, where MST3Ks run ended after 197 episodes plus a movie. Yes, there was a movie wherein a man and two puppet robots watched a different movie. The world is full of surprises. There is a longer, fuller story here, a rich one that will be fleshed out throughout the chapters of this book, as we move from season to season. All shall be revealed in the end.

Obviously, Hodgson and crew did not invent the concept of people cracking wise while watching a movie. This was something that had been done in homes and in theaters for years. The show also was never terribly glamorous. The sets were cheap. The puppets cheaper. Tom Servo was merely a gumball machine with spindly little arms. Yet it worked. The show had a fan club that predated the prominence of the Internet. They encouraged letter writing, and would, on occasion, read those letters on air. Most episodes ended with the show itself asking the fans to keep circulating the tapes, which is to say to trade tapes of recorded episodes. It was a simpler time. The fan base was devoted and large enough to earn itself a moniker, MSTies. Naturally, when online fandom and message boards became a regular part of life, MST3K had fans with true fervor behind it. Not enough to save the show, at least a second time, but a show where a man and puppets make fun of bad movies just never really computes as a success in a vacuum.