Tag: Mystery Science Theater 3000

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We’ve Got Movie Sign! Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour Comes to The Orpheum.

The 1990s were a time of peak irony, but the three comedies that defined the sarcastic tone of the decade all started inauspiciously in the late 1980s: The Simpsons began as an animated segment on The Tracy Ullman Show in 1987. Daniel Waters’ caustic teen comedy, Heathers, was a box office disappointment in the spring of 1989, only to gain a cult following on home video. And on Thanksgiving 1988, KTMA, a small cable channel in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area premiered a homegrown show called Mystery Science Theater 3000.

TV stations frequently licensed old movies to squeeze a few extra ad dollars out of their (frequently stoned) late-night viewers. Occasionally, these films were great, such as It’s a Wonderful Life, which became a Christmas staple because it was a box-office flop that was cheap to license. But they were usually terrible.

Hiring a regular local host to introduce low-budget horror and sci-fi films was a frequent local TV gimmick, such as Memphis’ favorite ghoul, Sivad, who ruled the WHBQ airwaves in the 1960s. Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s innovation was that the host stayed on the screen and pointed out exactly how bad the movie was.

The creator and original host of MST3K was Joel Hodgson. The Minnesota comedian spent much of the 1980s trying to get his aggressively eccentric prop comedy noticed in Hollywood, with some success. But after an NBC deal fell through, he returned to Minneapolis and got a job at a T-shirt shop, hoping to revamp his act. He pitched the concept of a movie host who spiced up the questionable films by doing comedy riffs over them to Jim Mallon of KTMA, and he built the props — two sarcastic androids named Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo — himself. The show was an instant local hit, seemingly springing from the id of the blunted late-night audience who were already hate-watching the movies. By Thanksgiving 1989, the show was airing on the startup cable outfit The Comedy Channel; when the network merged with rival Ha! in 1990, MST3K became the flagship production of Comedy Central.

With the laconic Hodgson as the show’s low-key guide and a cast that included ace comedy writers J. Elvis Weinstein, Trace Beaulieu, Mary Jo Pehl, Frank Conniff, and Michael J. Nelson, the show introduced America to the works of anti-auteur Ed Wood, the low-rent Japanese turtle monster Gamera (“Gamera is really neat/Gamera is filled with meat/We are eating Gamera” went the lyrics the crew wrote to go with the films’ ear-bleeding theme song), and the near-mythical worst movie of all time, Manos! Hands of Fate.

Gary Glover

Joel Hodgson (above), Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo take on No Retreat, No Surrender.

After a falling out with Mallon, Hodgson left the show in the middle of the fifth season, but not before epically pissing off Joe Don Baker by pissing on his tough-guy cop disaster, Mitchell.

The show continued with Nelson as host for the rest of the decade, moving to the Sci Fi Network for its final two seasons. But it never really went away. The extremely geeky fan clubbers were early adopters of the internet, and the VHS tape-trading culture the show inspired transitioned seamlessly onto YouTube. Hodgson and the rest of the cast hit the road with live shows like Cinematic Titanic and RiffTrax. Then, in 2015, Hodgson launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring the show back, on Netflix. For four years, the $5.7 million he raised was the biggest success on the crowd-funding platform. With an all new cast that included Jonah Ray, Felicia Day, and Patton Oswalt, the show has run for two seasons on Netflix.

“I know I’m lucky to have it last so long, but I never really thought about it like ‘How long is this going to last?'” says Hodgson. “I feel like it’s just so much a part of my life I can’t really get outside of that.”

Hodgson will bring his blockbuster live show, The Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour, to The Orpheum Theatre on Saturday, November 23rd. “It’s a live version of the TV show with 1,000 people in the room,” he says.

The film that will provide the backbone of the evening’s festivities is No Retreat, No Surrender, a notoriously awful martial arts movie from 1986 starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. The audience can also expect lots of songs and skits from Hodgson — who says this is his final tour — and his talented cast. “I found a lot of good people to help me,” Hodgson says. “That’s the secret — it’s just finding people who care about it like I do.”

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Film Features Film/TV

Ten Years Of YouTube

Most nights I like to drift off to sleep with Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K). Watching bad movies along with Joel and the bots takes me back to the 1990s, when MST3K was a late-night comedy staple. For most of the 21st century, it was abandoned by both Comedy Central, a network it helped legitimize, and the SyFy Channel, the network whose cluelessness ultimately allowed it to wither. Getting DVD rights to so many movies was an impossible task, so unless you were one of the hardcore fans who traded VHS tapes by mail, it was pretty much impossible to see old episodes. But tonight, I can watch Tom Servo heckle Manos: Hands of Fate, Gorgo, Fugitive Alien II, or any of MST3K‘s 197 titles on YouTube.

It was 10 years ago this month that Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim registered youtube.com. At the risk of sounding old, it’s difficult to remember what the web — and the world — was like back then. Bandwidth was at a premium, so that meant downloading a video could take quite awhile. A funny kid video passed around via email could, and frequently did, bring an entire company’s IT infrastructure crashing down.

There was such an assortment of different video codecs floating around that you might not even be able to play the video it had taken all night to download. The bigger media companies were experimenting with something like streaming video, but it was usually buggy as a dumpster. Remember RealPlayer? I wish I didn’t.

The first video uploaded to YouTube was of one of its founders, Karim, at the zoo. Its title was “Me at the zoo,” and it set the tone for the site’s early content. YouTube was originally marketed as “Flickr for videos,” after the popular photo sharing site that doubled as one of the web’s first social media experiments. For that was YouTube’s biggest innovation: It allowed videos made by a normal person to be seen by anyone, anywhere.

For the first century of its existence, film and video production had been highly technical pursuits that required lots of training and infrastructure. Theatrical distribution and broadcast to a mass audience was the realm of only a select few. But digital video technology, which first started to trickle down to the hobbyists in the mid-’90s, changed that. If you had asked me as a filmmaker in 2005 if I wanted to shoot an actual film on film, I would say, “No, for the same reason I don’t want to paint a fresco.” But back in 2005, we were still dependent on the old film-era distribution infrastructure. Now, anyone with a smartphone can make a video and have it seen by the world in a matter of minutes.

YouTube sensation Psy

The social change YouTube’s democratizing of video distribution has wrought was unfathomable in 2005. As the saying goes, the generational dividing line is now whether you have spent more time listening to U2 or watching YouTube. Entirely novel genres have sprung up. Not even the most drug-addled science fiction writers predicted that famous cats would be making their owners millions of dollars, or that the most popular song of the century would be from a Korean pop singer named Psy who got famous by doing a horsey dance with obscure celebrities few outside Seoul could name.

And then there’s the baffling phenomenon of the unboxing video. There are thousands of videos whose content consists solely of a pair of hands opening the box of a new toy or a “surprise egg,” and they all have more views than anything you’ve ever uploaded.

Which brings us back to MST3K. The fan club that traded VHS tapes back in the ’90s also happened to populate some of the earliest internet message boards. When YouTube started, they were among the first to digitize their aging VHS tapes and upload them to share. This caused all sorts of copyright issues and for a while led to YouTube limiting uploads to less than 10 minutes.

But these days, most of the old videos stay up, preceded by a commercial whose proceeds usually go back to the rightsholders instead of the uploader. Shout! Factory has started an official YouTube channel populated by HD transfers of the shows, but I’ll probably keep watching the old ones in all their grainy glory. They remind me of the bad old days, when video sharing meant you had to, as the MST3K closing credits extolled, “keep circulating those tapes.”

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Film Features Film/TV

Thanksgiving Pix

Two things are certain about Thanksgiving: We’ll all eat too much, and at some point we’ll all find ourselves in front of a TV for an extended period of time. But what happens when you just can’t take another second of millionaires giving each other concussions on national television, as exciting as that is? Here are some things you can watch when you finally give up on football and switch over to the Roku.

MST3K Turkey Day

A television tradition from the 1990s returns online as Shout! Factory is streaming classic episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) all day on YouTube. Joining Joel, Mike, Cambot, Gypsy, Tom Servo, and Crow on the Satellite of Love is like watching crappy movies with the witty old friends you never had, but in a good way. If it’s been a while since you visited the world of Torgo, Manos, Side Hackers, and Gamera, you’ll be surprised at how well the humor holds up. And with a Joel Hodgson-helmed revival on the way, it’s a good time to get back into the groove. Rowsdower save us!

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Halloween and Christmas get all of the movie love because of their flashy acoutrements, but there are a few films set during Thanksgiving. John Hughes ventured outside the high-school setting and into the hellish world of Thanksgiving travel with the fifth movie he directed in the 1980s. Steve Martin stars as a neurotic executive trying to make his way home to his family in Chicago while being beset by cancellations, overbooking, bad weather, and the attention of a shower curtain ring salesman played by John Candy. In a textbook case of slow escalation, the frustration builds as the two are forced to work together to get home. Martin and Candy are both at their best here, and you’ll wish they had worked together more often as you dread the drive back home from grandma’s.

Los Angeles Plays Itself

If you’re completely sick of all things Thanksgiving and looking for something completely different, this legendary documentary by Thom Andersen will take you away to the West Coast. A film professor and Los Angelino, Andersen put together this retrospective of how his city has been portrayed (and, he would say, betrayed) by the film industry that put it on the map. Since it used clips from more than 200 movies, the 2003 film was long thought to be unreleasable, even though it was a huge hit when it debuted at the Toronto Film Festival and has enjoyed a cult following from sold-out holiday screenings in L.A. But after 10 years of legal wrangling and a recent digital remastering, Los Angeles Plays Itself has finally found its way onto Netflix. It’s a fascinating journey connecting images you know by heart to their real-life counterparts, revealing vanished landscapes, and making strange observations along the way, such as the way directors tend to give their villains architecturally interesting Mid-Century Modern homes. If any almost-three-hour personal essay about the filmmakers’ hometown can be called an editing tour de force, this is it.