Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever by Frank Conniff

This isn't really a memoir, though it does have some memories in it. It's not a single thing either, as the title implies: it's twenty-five basically discreet essays, each starting from one bad movie but mostly talking about other things.

Frank Conniff was one of the writers and performers on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show - what I've seen some of the creators call, in a happily joking way, a "basic-cable comedy puppet show" - for about a half-decade in the mid-90s. The show started before he joined it, continued for a few years afterwards, and had a weird reborn life two decades later without him. But he also was part of multiple successor movie-riffing projects - Cinematic Titanic, The Mads Are Back - and was part of the general migration of MST3K staff into the halls of Hollywood to write (and sometimes perform) in other projects over the subsequent decades.

Conniff was also, for most of the years he was on the show, the one who picked the movies - watched them first, made recommendations to the rest of the writing team. So who better to write about a bunch of those movies?

Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever was a 2016 book - so the timing was around the Kickstarter and revival, whether that was deliberate or accidental.

It contains twenty-five essays titled after twenty-five movies that MST3K riffed, including a lot of the big signposts of the era Conniff was part of - Pod People, Manos, Mitchell!, Catalina Caper, Red Zone Cuba, and so on. The essays tend to mention that movie, but are pretty rambly, about movies and pop culture in general, Conniff's life and time on the show, and related topics. That might disappoint some readers, but I found it fun and entertaining - Conniff is a quippy, engaging writer, as you might expect from the fact that he's been writing TV comedy for about thirty years.

So this book will not tell you how Conniff's life changed, and it will not change your life. It also will not give you detailed behind-the-scenes insights into MST3K in the Comedy Central era, or deep cinematic analysis of the admittedly horrible movies it covers. It will wander around and through those movies, touch lightly on some MST3K aspects, and comment on a lot of the media stew that made up the random references on the show. If that sounds appealing, go read it - it's pretty short, too.