Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History by Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson

For whatever reason, I've been reading books about the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show this past year - Frank Conniff's movie-essays-cum-memoirs, the great '90s Amazing Colossal Episode Guide by the team, and, most relevantly for today, Dale Sherman's history of the show, The Worst We Can Find.

Today's book is in the same vein as Sherman's - luckily, they have very different focuses and audiences. Sherman's book was a show-biz history, for a show-biz publisher - heavy on the personalities and the work they did, and on connections to similar projects before and after. It also was a pretty general-reader-friendly history of the show itself, the careers of the major players since (they were all fairly young, and didn't have much of a career to speak of before, except for Joel Hodgson), and where "riffing" came from in popular culture and what has happened in that space since the show was first cancelled in 1999.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History is a more academic book, by two professors, Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson. It seems to be a bit shorter than Sherman, but substantially denser, and vastly more interested in what riffing means - the stance of the audience to a creative work, the interplay between an existing work and commentary on it, and things like that. (Sample sentence: "The series also operates as a form of culture jamming, a type of protest used to disrupt media culture and its attendant cultural institutions such as corporate advertising" on p.46.)

It does also include the history of the show, with plenty of quotes from the major players from articles and publicity material of the time. It's just as well-researched as Sherman, maybe more so, with a nine-page bibliography and fifteen pages of notes in the backmatter. But it is vastly less concerned about what these people did and vastly more interested in the why of it and particularly what it all means.

Academics gonna academic, of course. And the subtitle is "A Cultural History" - this is part of a larger series from its publisher about what specific TV shows mean in popular culture, what they stand for or represent or indicate.

I generally agree with Foy and Olson's connections and find them interesting, while still thinking this book is a tad dry and much less general-reader-friendly than the others I mentioned above. If you want a general history of the show and its main players, Sherman is probably better for you.

But if you want to think about what it means for an audience to add their own jokes to an artistic work - or to seek out kinds of art that embed commentary on top of an existing work - this book will give you a lot of mull over. And if you are an academic, or have that background, it will be more familiar and accessible to you.

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide by the MST3K writers & performers

I was a fan of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show back in the '90s - my town didn't have Comedy Central when it was on that channel, but I saw it a couple of times at my in-laws house (only people who know my family will see how very, very odd it was that I watched MST3K only at my in-laws in Haledon) and then got more obsessive for the last three years when it ran on the (then) Sci-Fi Channel.

I had this book at the time - I might even have bugged a publishing contact to send me a copy for free, and possibly (I hope not) even pretended that I was interested in it professionally for the SFBC. (It could have been vaguely plausible, since I think we did at least one of the Nitpicker's Guide books by Phil Farrand, which I could probably spin a line of bullshit as being similar to the gestalt of MST3K.)

There's been a lot of water under the bridge since then - the show was revived almost twenty years later for two Netflix seasons (which I've seen most of) and then one Kickstarted pandemic-era season (which I own but haven't watched any of), and the final cast of the show has regrouped as Rifftrax and done about a thousand movies, including a series of annual live events (which I've taken my two kids to pretty consistently for a decade). There were quirkier offshoots, too, in The Film Crew and Cinematic Titanic, which I've seen less of.

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide is a 1996 production, coming right as the team was creating the shortened Season 7 - their last for Comedy Central - and prepping their one and only theatrical movie for release. It is deeply out of print: I got this copy for slightly more than I wanted to pay, and it came with a noticeably rolled spine (which I've been attempting to coax back into shape by leaving it under one of those gigantic bug-crushing DC Comics omnibuses).

I read this again because I've been watching random old MST3K episodes with my kids: we do a "Movie Night" on Wednesdays, and I'm mostly alternating MST3K and "real" movies (like Beverly Hills Cop and The Big Lebowski and the like - originally, all three of us were going to suggest movies and go in a rotation, but it's all fallen to me as The Dad, so, by gum!, I am going to indulge myself). So I'm thinking about the series, and when I think about things, I want to read books - it's just how I'm wired.

This book was written by the main cast/writers - the two were basically the same - of the time: Trace Beaulieu, Paul Chaplin, Jim Mallon, Kevin Murphy, Michael J. Nelson, and Mary Jo Pehl. It has thumbnail descriptions of the plot of each episode's movie (and short, where applicable), descriptions of that episode's host segments, and reflections by an initial-credited member of the team listed above. There's also some front matter - a jokey/silly/odd intro piece by each of the above and a quick history of how the show came to be, plus a list of "characters" as of Season 7. Back matter includes explanations of what are credited as the 50 most obscure jokes on the show, slightly jokey bios of the writers, a FAQ, and a description of the first (of two) conventions the show put on during its life.

This was a basically comprehensive view of MST3K, from the creators, as of when it was created. It's less comprehensive now, obviously, due to the passage of time, but it's still fairly definitive as far as it goes. If you like the show, you'll have to seek out a copy of this, and probably pay more than you want for it, but it's a quintessential big-fan thing, and does not disappoint on that level.

The Worst We Can Find by Dale Sherman

Hey! I have a tag for things having to do with TV! I'd almost forgotten that, and haven't used it much in recent years. But it is appropriate here, so I dragged it out of the vault.

The Worst We Can Find  - subtitled "MST3K, RiffTrax, and the History of Heckling at the Movies" - is mostly a history of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show, but it starts before that show begins, with details of other people doing similar things in the years before, and other influences on what everyone abbreviates as MST3K, and runs on after the show's 1999 cancelation to cover what the major forces behind the show did afterward, much of which (spoiler alert!) also involved making commentary over bad movies.

It was written by Dale Sherman, who has a long career in mostly media-related non-fiction: Amazon tells me this was his sixteenth book. And it was published by Applause, which - back in the dim misty days when I worked in publishing - focused more strictly in works on stages rather than screens, but has always been a respectable and solid outlet for material about the performing arts.

I found Sherman a bit of a meat-and-potatoes writer, gathering all of the obvious material in a solid, readable manner but without putting a lot of spin or new details in. There's an extensive list of sources at the end; it looks like Sherman ran down basically every interview or media mention of the show, and also did an impressive job of teasing out the multiple strands of influences. I don't think he did any original research or interviews; I doubt an Applause budget runs to such things.

This is a 2023 book, so it's still current, covering through the three seasons of the resurrected show on Netflix and via crowdfunding on their self-created Gizmoplex. There are other books about MST3K, but this one looks to be as definitive as you can get.

Not to retell his story, but Sherman starts off with a long chapter about other people who heckled movies professionally, or made commentary on movies and similar media properties, mostly through the '70s and '80s. Then he details how the small, struggling TV station KTMA in Minneapolis needed programming in the late '80s, and staffers Jim Mallon and Kevin Murphy turned to local comedian Joel Hodgson. Hodgson, with some input from the others and from his eventual fellow cast-member/puppeteers Trace Beaulieu and Josh (later J. Elvis for TV credit purposes) Weinstein, came up with the concept: a guy was stuck in space with two robots, forced to watch bad movies by mad scientists back on earth as part of a vaguely explained experiment.

KTMA broadcast one season of the show in 1988-89, and almost immediately - not because of the show - fell apart. But the cable industry was booming, so MST3K went national on first the Comedy Channel, and, several years later, found a second home on what was then the normally-spelled Sci-Fi Channel for its last three seasons. All in all, it ran for just over a decade and made nearly two hundred episodes, which, as the creators tended to say, isn't bad for a puppet show from the midwest.

I'm a fan of the show, obviously, which is why I got this book to begin with. I don't know it if told me a whole lot I didn't know or couldn't find elsewhere, but it put everything together in one nice package, covered the show from before the beginning to after the end, and had a very Minnesota-appropriate even-handed, let's-everybody-work-together tone throughout. And that's darn-tootin' good.

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.

MST3K 30-Day Challenge

Yes, it's a meme, and I'm going to do it wrong -- I don't have the patience to stick each answer into a separate post and dole them out over a month (even though that would do nice things for my post count).

"MST3K," of course, is the 1990s puppet cable show Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which a guy (well, two guys in succession) and his robots made fun of bad (and often SFFnal) movies. It's solidly in my fandom, which I'm coming to think more often is congruent with comedy than it is with "science fiction" or other genre terms. But that could easily shift tomorrow. (For instance, I might have to start watching Doctor Who for the first time in twenty-plus years just to see if they let Capaldi swear the way he's so good at.)

Anyway: the meme.


Day 1: First episode?
Season 5, Episode 15 -- Alien from L.A. The cable system where The Wife and I lived in the '90s didn't have Comedy Central, but my in-laws home (just a town over) did. So I watched this on one of the very many Sunday afternoons we spent there, because I'd heard good things about it. (And felt guilty because I didn't get as much manuscript-reading done that day.)


Day 2: Joel or Mike? Why?
Mike.

My take on the great divide is that Joel is cooler and Mike is funnier. Some people like one, some the other.

Also: I saw Mike episodes first (and, still, more or them), and the style of the show got more dense as time went on: the Mike episodes just have more jokes, more references, and more complicated joke-references. (E.g.: "Peter Fonda is Richard Petty in the Marcel Marceau story!" from Riding With Death.) I love that kind of joke-on-a-joke structure.


Day 3: How did you get into the show?
I watched it religiously (maybe obsessively) once it moved to the Sci-Fi Channel in 1997 -- taped pretty much all of the episodes on seasons 8-10, and watched them every week.

I did get some of the episodes available on video then, but didn't go whole-hog into collecting them all, which is unusual for my obsessions -- I'm a real completest.


Day 4: Favorite episode?
Tough to narrow that down, but I'd say 820: Space Mutiny. It's a bad movie that's often funny inadvertently, populated with mediocre actors who struggle to overcome less-than-mediocre material, and the jokes are sharp and specific, with some good running gags.

Ask me tomorrow, though, and I might say Riding With Death or Werewolf or Overdrawn at the Memory Bank or Time Chasers or Pod People or Mitchell or Master Ninja I.


Day 5: How many episodes would you say you’ve seen?
At least 80 -- possibly 90 or 100, since some of the titles are bland in that old-horror-movie way, and I'm not sure exactly which crawling thing or what terrors I did see. I'm still watching episodes new to me -- mostly Joel episodes.

I've also seen all of the shorts, since I could watch them on my iPad on the train. I may end up watching all of the episodes the same way, but each one takes more than one leg of my commute. 

Day 6: Least favorite episode? Why?
I have Red Zone Cuba on VHS and I think I watched it once -- as I recall, it was just a dull movie that they couldn't bring any life to.

Day 7: Do you own any merchandise?
I've got nearly all of the DVD box sets (missing the really rare ones and the one that just came out), and a "Greetings from the Satellite of Love" T-Shirt.

(Mildly amusing story: a guy asked me in a supermarket the other week if that shirt had something to do with the Velvet Underground -- the source of the SoL's name -- and I had to tell him it was for an obscure TV show.)

Day 8: Cinematic Titanic or RiffTrax?
I've seen a few RiffTrax -- Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny is a particularly amazing piece of work. (And I use those words precisely.) I like their shorts, and might end up buying more of them to watch on trains (see above).

I haven't yet gotten any Cinematic Titanic pieces, purely because I've already got enough to keep me busy for a long time.

I do miss the silhouettes and the inter-movie skits; MST3K had a larger gestalt than just "watching movies with commentary." 

Day 9: Fave fan site?
I get my regular MST3K fix from Fuck Yeah, MST3K! (There are a lot of video posts there, which I tend to save for a binge once a week or so.)


Day 10: Have a favorite season/station it was on?
I only watched it "live" for the last three seasons, so I can only choose from the Sci-Fi era. And there's great episodes each of those three years, but I'd lean towards Season 8, because it was the longest and there was a lot of energy from the new channel.

Day 11: Have you gotten any friends into the show?
Friends, no. My twelve-year-old son (whom I call Thing 2 here), yes. We've watched a lot of episodes together, and it was the five Gamera movies, Werewolf, and the two Master Ninjas that made him a fan.


Day 12: Follow any of the Brains on Facebook/Twitter? Who makes you laugh the hardest?
I follow and have retweeted Bill Corbett. (Possibly others, but I remember him, because the thing I RT'd was the excellent "The frenemy of my frenemy is my frfrend.")


Day 13: Quick! Without cheating, list as many cast members as you can!
Joe Hodgson as Joel Robinson
Mike Nelson as himself, more or less
Trace Beaulieu (Dr. Forrester and Crow I)
Frank Conniff (TV's Frank)
Mary Jo Pehl (Mrs. Forrester)
Bill Corbett (Crow II and Brain Guy)
Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo II and Professor Bobo)
J. Elvis Weinstein (Tom Servo I)
and whats-his-name the producer who did Gypsy most of the time
didn't Patrick Brantseg do Gypsy for a while?

Day 14: Any riffs that struck a chord with you?
"Every male of any species has the biological urge to panty raid." from Horror of Party Beach

(Subject to variation by day.) 

Day 15: Favorite quote?
Isn't that the same as the last question?

OK, how about the long and very funny "and he wakes up" sequence at the end of Space Mutiny?

Day 16: Have you met any of the Brains?
Nope. I hate meeting people, especially famous ones. They'd have no reason to want to meet me, and what can I say to them they haven't heard a million times?


Day 17: Have you been to any live shows?
Nope.

Day 18: Favorite SOL character?
I guess Tom Servo edges out Crow, since he has more of an edge in the inter-movie sequences. (Cf. "Tom, I don't get you." "Nobody does -- I'm the wind, baby!")

Day 19: Favorite Mad?
Oddly (given that I like the Mike-era best), it has to be TV's Frank. He's one of the great comedy second bananas, up there with Marty Feldman's Igor and Hey, Abbott.

Day 20: Least favorite character?
Professor Bobo usually just led to poop-flinging and butt-showing (and some general bad-hygiene) jokes; I don't dislike the character, but he wasn't as strong a character as Pearl or "Brain Guy". 

Day 21: Last episode you watched?
I think it actually was Alien from L.A., which I watched with Thing 2 a couple of weeks ago. So this is very circular right at this moment.

Day 22: Manos: Bad or the Worst?
I haven't watched that one in a while, but I remember it as a really horrible movie that was well-riffed.

Day 23: One-word opinion on Joel?
Big-brotherly.

Day 24: One-word opinion on Mike?
Planet-destroyer.

Day 25: One-word opinion on J. Elvis’s Servo?
Can't do it in one: Nipple Nipple Tweak Tweak Fly Fly Fly!

Day 26: One-word opinion on Kevin’s Servo?
Time-twisting.

Day 27: One-word opinion on Trace’s Crow?
Befuddled.

Day 28: One-word opinion on Bill’s Crow?
Intellectual.

Day 29: Something you can’t look at without thinking of MST3K?
Um, a shelf of my DVD collection? There's nothing in the real world that consistently makes me think of MST3K.

(However, a lot of things in the real world make me think of LEGO City Undercover, mostly because I spent 6 months or so playing that game.)

Day 30: Why do you love MST3K?
It's not just funny, but it's funny commentary on something else, in a way that seems live. I like that connection, and the difficulty of fitting jokes into something that already exists in a way that adds to the original without just drowning out the original story.

A Perfectly Cromulent New Name

So while I was away yesterday -- I was off Sunday and yesterday at Great Wolf Lodge, a hotel/indoor water-park, to celebrate Thing 1's birthday -- the media entity once known as the Sci-Fi Channel decided to open itself to the ridicule of the blogeratti by proving that stupid and highly paid consultants are still America's strongest asset.

The new name: Syfy. (Pronounced precisely the same way as the old name, at least in intent.)

The new tagline: Imagine Greater.

The new stupidity: sweet, with an undertone of Internet bitterness.

Yes, it's a very dumb name, chosen almost entirely because it can be trademarked. And, yes, their new motto is both dumb and ungrammatical. But when did we ever expect anything more from the pointy heads at the Skiffy Channel? This is what they do.

I don't watch anything on their silly little network, so I really don't care what they call it. I do enjoy pointing and laughing, but I'll refrain for the moment. Why? Well, I've heard tell that a noble spirit embiggens the smallest man, and I hope to imagine greater.

{snicker}

If I Do It, That Means It's Normal

I've been struck recently by two animated TV shows that my sons have been watching a lot. I'm probably reading too much into this -- I always do -- but let me sketch it out.

Phineas and Ferb is a show about two boys, who are scientifically-oriented and who get into various odd troubles. They have a nagging, unpleasant older sister who doesn't like them and their science-y stuff.

Johnny Test (which has been around for longer, but which my kids started watching more recently) is about a boy who gets into various odd troubles, usually because of things created by his two scientifically-oriented older sisters (who don't much like him).

(And, yes, they're both the bastard stepchildren of Dexter's Laboratory, with a small genetic contribution from Jimmy Neutron.)

They seem like the same premise turned backwards, except for one thing: in both cases, it's the boys that are the audience-identification characters. One's message is that science is fun, and one's is that science is boring junk that girls do -- and both have the usual kids-show message that everything will come out fine in the end, no matter what stupid stunts you try -- but both shows know that what really matters is what boys do. What boys do is cool; what girls do isn't.

Even as a father of only boys, I'm uncomfortable with that.