Life is strange.
And so it was that I found myself, a few months ago, face to face with Joel Hodgson, creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I’ve been a rabid fan of the show since I was a kid; MST3k had, in all truth, an inordinate amount of influence on my general sense of humor during my formative years. And here I am in a Los Angeles club, standing next to the guy who started it all, fresh off of having seen the first new episode of the program in nearly twenty years, and – almost inconceivably – he’s talking to me.
“So,” he says, “what did you think?”
Life, at times, is exceedingly strange.
MST3k and I go back a long way. I’m not sure when I saw my first episode – it was sometime in the show’s second or third season – but I was obsessed immediately. The small town in which I grew up only got around 30 channels on the cable system and none of them was The Comedy Channel/Comedy Central, so my first exposure to the show came from visiting relatives.
I had a cousin who lived in the mountains and they had one of those gigantic satellite dishes you used to see. It was my introduction to the exotic wilds of the premium cable world, and the shenanigans of the Satellite of Love. Once I was hooked, I thankfully had an aunt who lived in a larger media market nearby who would tape episodes for me. It was my first experience “circulating the tapes”.
Until my family moved to a city with a fancier cable system, I fed my MST3k habit via the slow drip of VHS, watching the same episodes over and over again until they were completely ingrained into my psyche. (They remain favorites, especially an obscure episode called Ring of Terror which I don’t think gets nearly enough love.)
Time passed, life happened, and MST3k was always there. It was there when I went away to school, when a group of guys on my hall would watch the new episode every week until eventually our entire band of nerds communicated in a strange language composed greatly of references to Mitchell. It was there in college, when I had an apartment without cable and relied on my stack of VHS tapes as an always-reliable source of company as episodes ran in the background of my daily routine.
When bittorrent became a thing, there were devoted groups online who digitized their old tapes and made it possible to obtain episodes which hadn’t aired in years, enabling one to – at last! – have every episode at their disposal. A giant binder full of DVDs meant there was always MST3k action to be had, a convenient ward against creeping despair. I’d keep episodes running in the background as I worked, or goofed around the house. In subsequent years, YouTube and Netflix appeared and make it even easier to access the show. MST3k was simply ever present, despite having gone off the air officially in 1999.
Then, in 2013, something remarkable happened. Thanks to the good graces of Shout! Factory, which distributes MST3k on home video, Joel revived the once-traditional MST3k Thanksgiving marathon, Turkey Day, which had last occurred in 1997. The online marathon of six episodes could not have come at a more perfect time for me personally, as I had moved to Los Angeles and was 3,000 miles from almost literally everyone I knew.
At the time I was living in a squalid studio apartment suffused with an air of despair the likes of which only broke aspiring writers can achieve, and having Joel come into my room with a fresh batch of MST3k cheer was like a Thanksgiving miracle. I commented that day to the cast members who are on Twitter that, as corny as it sounded, they really were like family, and reviving the Turkey Day tradition was like a fantastic reunion. Thankfully, they’ve continued the marathon every year since.
Over the next couple of years I (as I’m sure did many, many others) commented to Joel and Shout! Factory that, hey, wouldn’t it be neat if maybe the success of the new Turkey Day festivities were followed up by actual new episodes of the show? And as Kickstarter rose as a platform, funding the revival of many things I once held dear, I thought, hey, wouldn’t it be neat…?
In 2015, what seemed too incredible to even conceive actually happened, and Joel began a Kickstarter to fund a new season of MST3k episodes. It was an enormous success, and what has happened since has been well documented. The new episodes debuted last month on Netflix and, after this long preamble, that’s what I’m here to talk about.
By this point most viewers have seen for themselves what the fans in L.A. were so relieved to discover on that night earlier this year – that the show is MST3k. It feels like the show should feel, and it’s funny. Very funny. There’s so much to discuss with regards to the new series; how it achieves the truly difficult task of matching the vibe of its ancestor, and where there is still room for improvement.
The Cast
These episodes find themselves in an odd place, continuing a show that ended nearly two decades prior and with an entirely new cast. While the first iteration of the show saw many changes during its run, not since the inaugural season of the original program were viewers confronted with an all new host, new ‘bot voices, and new mad scientists. Whenever a member of the cast changed in the original show, viewers were already familiar with the rest of the crew and that gave the new performer time to find their footing.
With these new episodes, everyone is having to find their characters at once, which means a steep learning curve. After all, when you go back and watch those first-season episodes, the characters are hardly as rounded as they would become seven years later. With any long-running program, the characters are going to develop over time and what you get at the start are only rough sketches of what is to come. That’s why I’m not too harsh on the new episodes in the rare moments when they fail to meet the mark; these episodes were done quickly with a new crew and I’m sure that if (when!) a 12th season rolls around they’ll settle even more into a comfortable groove.
Of course any episode of MST3k hinges on the performance of its host, and with only two bejumpsuited meatsacks having occupied the Satellite of Love in the show’s history, finding a new host was a high-stakes endeavor. I was initially concerned about the selection of comedian Jonah Ray as host due to his connections with the Nerdist-industrial complex, but I’m so glad to admit I was completely wrong. Ray absolutely kills it. His riffing and skitwork is spot-on, he doesn’t bring an ounce of irony to the way he plays the part, and his performance feels distinct from previous hosts Joel and Mike. He’s great.
One of the few disappointments with Jonah’s character is that the skits don’t really do a good job of characterizing his relationship with the bots in a unique way. Previous hosts had very specific relations to their robotic cohosts; Joel was a parental figure, while Mike was the oft-tormented “new meat”. The skits in this new series seem much shorter than those of the original program, and so there’s not a lot of worldbuilding with regards to how the characters interact with each other. When the skits are just brief gags there’s not time for that, and it’s something I hope we see more of in the future.
The bots themselves can be hit and miss at times, which is less a criticism than an acknowledgement of the difficulty of filling such well-defined roles with new actors. Hampton Yount, who portrays Crow, acquits himself well, with a performance that is recognizably Crow-ian. Baron Vaughn’s Servo is farther from the mark, which could only be a result of Kevin Murphy having left such an indelible and defining impression on the character over the course of nine seasons. Vaughn is good, don’t get me wrong – he just doesn’t feel quite like Servo; of course, having more time in the role will smooth out these seams.
Even more removed from MST3k past is Rebecca Hanson’s portrayal of Gypsy as a sharp-tongued Midwestern gal. This is an interesting change, and not unwelcome, but it feels like the writers have yet to get a grasp on who this new Gypsy is. The previous iteration, busy as she was running the higher functions of the ship, was a daffy, sassy mother figure and unexpected feminist icon (Gypsy Rose Me!). It’s hard yet to see how Gypsy now fits in, but I’m interested to see where they go with it. (Hanson, incidentally, has a funny double role as “Synthia”, a less-than-successful clone of Pearl Forrester.)
Also new to the MSTieverse are two new mad scientists who ensnare Jonah in their unsavory experiments; genre heartthrob Felicia Day steps in as Kinga, heir to the Forrester legacy of madness, and alongside her is perennial comedic MVP Patton Oswalt as Max, TV’s Son of TV’s Frank. They’re both great, contributing a new-but-somehow-familiar vibe to the proceedings. Kinga’s scheme to build a profitable IP to sell off to Disney is a fun new excuse for the show’s titular experiment, and it’s always great to hear her bust out a song. Her character comes into even better focus as the season proceeds, as her interactions with guest stars reveal some of those trademark Forrester insecurities, something I hope we see more of in the future.
Oswalt is, of course, great as always as the evil second banana; it’s a pleasure to have him along and, mercifully, having a “known” actor as part of the regular cast doesn’t prove a distraction. His character’s crush on his abusive boss is a fun twist and will obviously provide the fodder for endless shenanigans to come. What I – and probably countless others – really want to see, however, is TV’s Son of TV’s Frank interacting with TV’s Frank himself.
And that’s an intriguing aspect to this new version of the show – the ability to embrace its past and bring back former stars for guest appearances. MST3k has never been a show burdened by continuity; it toyed with story arcs in its Sci-Fi Channel days (a mandate from the network), but otherwise rarely mentioned its own past and only ever brought back former cast members when it celebrated its 10th season.
Joel has often said that he wanted this new version of the show not to be a “reunion show”, but to feature a new cast that could make MST3k a thriving and ongoing concern for generations to come. Now that he’s quite successfully achieved that, I hope he can feel comfortable folding in more guest appearances throughout future seasons. We get some great cameos during these new episodes, and they fit in quite nicely, but let’s face it – we’re never going to be satisfied until we get us some Trace and Frank!
And, for that matter, it would be great to see the show continue its tradition of the cast portraying bizarre characters inspired by the movies themselves. Bringing back Torgo, or Ortega, or Mr. B Natural, or Pitch would provide a lot of laughs as well as connective tissue with past antics, and going forward the show could expand that roster of secondary characters – who wouldn’t want to see Peterson from Reptilicus interact with Torgo?
The good news is that the format of the show should lend itself well to any number of permutations of past cast members appearing. Kinga makes a joke during one of the new episodes about how hard it is connecting the new show with the old, and that they should have just rebooted. It’s a funny gag, but with a show so devoted to the pastiche of sci-fi tropes it shouldn’t be difficult to imagine any number of ways to build bridges to the show’s past. Time warps, regeneration, alternate universes – Crisis on Infinite Satellites of Love! The possibilities are endless and I hope they play with them.
The Movies
As many wannabe riffers have no doubt discovered over the years, picking an MST3k-worthy movie is kind of an art form. The show has always thrived on movies that are bad, but interestingly so. Some bad movies are just boring. Some are fascinating. And, as the plague of “ironic” wannabe cult movies that have followed in the wake of Sharknado and its paralyzingly uninteresting spawn reveal, a lot of people don’t understand what makes a great “bad” movie. You can’t make a movie like Manos on purpose. It has to happen organically through some bizarre alchemy of ambition and ineptitude.
Joel and the gang picked out a pretty interesting lot of cinematic refuse for this new season, with a lineup that evokes multiple past eras of MST3k and which, on the whole, contains a number of much higher-budget stinkers than is the show’s norm. Some episodes, like the kaiju pictures Reptilicus and Yongary, and the sword-and-sandals Hercules stinker, are straight out of the Joel era. Others, like Wizards of the Lost Kingdom and its sequel, or The Time Travelers, feel taken from the Sci-Fi Channel years. Cry Wilderness is a hybrid of Pod People and The Final Sacrifice; Avalanche reminded me of past 1970s disasters like San Francisco International.
The only episode that comes close to the “where the hell did you find this?” feel of some of MST3k’s greatest hits, however, is the bizarre Carnival Magic. As someone who is a fan of the “last known photo” genre of past episodes – films like Manos, or the Coleman Francis atrocities, or previously unreleased obscurities like The Dead Talk Back – I really miss having the films that feel like someone dug them up in their backyard and no one knows where they came from.
It’s odd to have MST3k presented in HD widescreen – a first for the series aside from 1996’s Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie – and I hope that we’re not limited to widescreen pictures in the future. We’d miss a lot of the best obscurities that way, along with favorite MST3k genres such as 1950s juvenile delinquent pics, anything of the Ed Wood oeuvre, and those truly odd finds that Frank Conniff used to make, like The Starfighers. Maybe have one episode a season be a “Frank’s Pick”?
And one more request – we need shorts! Short films have always been a MST3k highlight and it’s a shame we didn’t get any with this new season. Of course, with the old show they were used to pad out a timeslot, something that isn’t needed on Netflix (although, unfortunately, some of the films seem to be edited anyway?). But shorts are an integral part of the MST3k experience and I hope they make a swift return. I need the mental hygiene!
The Riffing
A lot of what makes the new episodes feel like proper MST3k comes down to the riffing. People wondered what a modern episode of MST3k would be like, and while I was never worried it would wind up being a bunch of hyper-contemporary millennial references it’s good to know for sure that the old magic is still there. There are obscure riffs taken from any number of pop culture fields; there are references to TV shows that aired before I was born; there are references to past episodes and films. There’s singing and goofy voices and obscure upper Midwesternisms – all the hallmarks of good MST3k.
Sure there are modern references too – that’s always been a staple of the show – but that the program still feels comfortable getting in a solid Lawrence Welk joke warms the cockles of my heart more than I can adequately express. It’s something the show itself acknowledges as the bots occasionally zing each other on the “relevance” of their riffs.
Kids like me who grew up on MST3k first heard about a lot of past pop culture touchstones (Mannix! McCloud! Rat Patrol [in color!]) through the shows riffs, so it’s good the ‘60s and ‘70s childhoods of the show’s original creators continues to be an influence. While it’s fun to have my own childhood enter the pop cultural purview of the show (love those Nintendo jokes), it would be a shame to lose that connection to previous eras. How else would a child of the ’80s know not to touch “Touch” Connors?
Aside from the general high quality of the riffs, the greatest target of fan discussion has probably been the speed of the riffing itself. Watching the pilot, it was clear that the pace of the jokes was much higher than it had ever been in the past, almost to the point where the riff preceded the thing they were riffing on. And while the riffs can indeed come fast and furious, it seems that the cast settles into a much more comfortable pace as the season goes on.
But besides the speed of the riffs, I think what is really at play is that the riffs were not recorded live “in theater” but instead were pre-recorded separately. This can give things, at times, a scripted feeling that makes the jokes feel more rote than spontaneous. This has actually been my major criticism of post-MST3k projects such as Rifftrax; that the way they’re recorded makes it feel that the participants are less sitting in the theater joking around than reading off of a script.
The new season doesn’t feel that bad by any means – for the vast majority of the episodes this is not an issue – but I do think that the occasional moments that feel “off” are due to that factor. Hopefully future seasons will get a longer production schedule, allowing for the leads to record simultaneously, playing off of each other and giving the riffing a more organic, spontaneous feeling. Getting better spacing between riffs would also hopefully allay another frequent comment: that the voices of the actors, especially Jonah and Baron, can meld together on occasion.
But these are minor complaints; the vast majority of jokes land exactly as they should, and there are so many of those delightfully obscure references that make the viewer feel like the show has been made specifically for them (I cite here a reference to The Wizard of Speed and Time in episode ten, for starters).
One aspect of the in-theater experience that doesn’t quite work throughout the season is Gypsy’s appearances in the Mystery Science Theater. Twice per episode, Gypsy appears to deposit and retrieve… something? … from the theater. Along the way she fires off a riff or two of her own, but unfortunately these very rarely land. I love the idea of incorporating Gypsy with the theater somehow, but having these staged riffs set up for her feel really scripted and detached from Jonah and the bots’ riffing. It’s not an organic moment.
Gypsy’s appearances are part of another element which sets these episodes apart from their predecessors – the extensive use of Shadowrama for visual gags inside the Mystery Science Theater. This continues a trend of Joel’s experimentation with the technique that began with his Cinematic Titanic films. They even incorporate a gag – using flying drones to cover up on-screen nudity – from those CT projects. In the new episodes these gags mostly involve Servo, who can now fly around the theater and interact with the onscreen image.
While expanding the use of Shadowrama for gags is a cool idea, the visual jokes so far are hit and miss. The success of these jokes seems to depend on how they’re structured; they’re much funnier when the bots are reacting to something that has happened onscreen than when the bots set up for a gag ahead of time. The show has historically tried to stay away from setting up a gag, as if the riffers know what’s coming; it’s only really happened a couple of times over the course of the show.
It’s a minor nitpick, I know, but a gag like the nudity drones would be funnier if Gypsy sent them in to the theater (no doubt to the bots’ protestations) than if the bots themselves set up the joke beforehand. That being said, a lot of the visual gags work perfectly well – there’s a Servo joke based on Fantasia that’s fantastic.
The Skits
It’s a compliment to the skits that I can say my greatest criticism of them is that they often seem too short. I don’t know what the actual length of the new show’s skit segments are in comparison to past episodes, but they often seem based on short gags rather than long-form jokes. It’s a shame, because the jokes are usually top-notch and could be even better with space to breathe.
One welcome element is the return of the Invention Exchange, a Joel-era staple which disappeared from the show when he left. There are plenty of other Easter eggs for the long-time viewer – even a reference to crispity crunchy ramchips! And when the show gives the skits a chance to spread out there are some all-time classic moments.
Much has already been said online about the fantastic musical number featured in Reptilicus – a bit that could have gone horribly wrong, but is instead a showstopper – and the new songs throughout the episodes are all pretty great. There’s also the return of a very specific type of skit that was very common in the Joel era, and which is a particular favorite of mine – think of bits like the “color commentary” gag in Sidehackers, when the cast rattles off an insanely fast list of made-up sidehacking vernacular. That kind of joke makes a return here with a truly fantastic spoofing of Sharknado-esque hybrid b-movies, with an epic rapid-fire list of possible films including Triceraquake, Pugslide, Ptarmageddon, and Cari-BOO. It’s spectacular and good clean classic MSTie fun.
One notable new aspect of these episodes is the appearance of celebrity guests, with a number of notables dropping in as zany intergalactic characters. While this is a new type of bit for MST3k, most of the appearances work nicely. The show would benefit in the future, however, from having guests film at the same time as the cast when possible, as with no onscreen interaction these guest spots can sometimes feel like they take place in a vacuum. The solution, of course, is the return of the Hexfield Viewscreen, which I hope to see. Incidentally, the “random stranger appears and baffles our cast, often with a song” occasionally feels less like MST3k than it does another of my favorites, Sifl and Olly. Now there’s a crossover I’d like to see…
Skits on the ship and in the moonbase occasionally suffer from odd pacing here and there, especially in the cold opens early on. Additionally, a “liquid video” effect is used, presumably to cover up edits from multiple takes. It’s a bit distracting, and hopefully all these drawbacks will be remedied by a longer production schedule in the future.
Speaking of production techniques, there’s something odd about the way the Moon 13 segments are staged that is different from past incarnations of the show. Maybe it’s because we’re viewing in widescreen now; maybe it’s because Deep 13 was often shot with a canted angle and the new show films straight-on; maybe it’s the “floaty” handheld technique. But as a result Moon 13 doesn’t have quite the same sense of place and visual depth that Deep 13 had, despite the fact that these new Mads occupy an expanded universe with lots of fun new elements such as the skeleton crew and other assorted minions. (Shades of Gerry and Sylvia the mole people!)
And In Conclusion…
TLDR: I waited nearly 20 years for new MST3k, and now I have it, and it’s great.
I’ve spent nearly 4,000 words talking about new MST3k when, in fact, it’s just a show and I should really just relax. It’s simply so amazing to see our beloved cowtown puppet show back on the air, and remarkable that a mostly new creative team managed to thread a rather difficult needle to nail the distinctive feel of this much-beloved program. Is there room for improvement? Sure, and I have no doubt that a more forgiving production schedule and a season’s worth of experience will take care of the rough edges. The show’s heart is in the right place, and that’s what matters.
There’s a skit in an old episode of the show where Joel and the bots are sitting around watching a thunderstorm out the window (“must be about two miles… right over Centerville”), and so I’ve often thought of the atmosphere of Joel’s era as kind of a lazy, rainy Saturday afternoon at home. It knocked me for a loop when, in the cold open of one of the new episodes, Jonah and the bots are sitting around while it rains outside as well. It’s an ineffable feeling that one imagines would be hard to reproduce, and yet they do.
MST3k lives. (As does my dream of one day writing for MST3k – I can dream, can’t I?) So here’s to many more happy seasons to come. What do I want to see next time?
- A PO Box in Hopkins, Minnesota!
- M. Waverly!
- CAPSULE!
Well done guys, and thanks.
What do you think, sirs?