From the New York Times---- Also, if you haven't already, check out Cinematic Titanic.......FOR THE KICKS, MAN!
The Show That Turned the Mockery Into the Message
By DAVE ITZKOFF
“ALL along,” Joel Hodgson said, “I had a real healthy disrespect for Hollywood.”
It was more than two decades ago that Mr. Hodgson walked away from a thriving stand-up comedy career, retreating to Minnesota to build sculptures of robots. There Mr. Hodgson, now 48, discovered that his eccentric hobby of building automatons, and especially his aptitude for finding the flaws in mass media, could be combined into something greater.
“There was kind of an invitation there,” he said, “that if you can see the seams in this, you can figure out how to make a TV show.” The show Mr. Hodgson and a cadre of like-minded Midwesterners came up with in 1988 was “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (“MST3K” for short), surely the only comedy series about an outer-space castaway and his robots, who provide a steady stream of quips and comebacks while watching low-budget films.
“MST3K” may have been the first television show in which the commentary was more important than what was being commented on. You tuned in not to watch schlocky features like “Fire Maidens of Outer Space” or “Manos: The Hands of Fate” but to see how Mr. Hodgson and his crew would tear them apart. (You couldn’t hear the dismal opening score of “The Unearthly” in the same way after one of Mr. Hodgson’s robots shouted out, “Music by the Edgar Allan Poe marching band!”)
Twenty years after the debut of “MST3K” (with a new DVD boxed set from Shout! Factory to celebrate the occasion), the show’s creators talk about the show as if it were a mad scientist’s experiment, one that could have been produced only under a precise set of conditions that are practically irreproducible today.
“We could never have pitched the show on paper,” said Trace Beaulieu, who portrayed Mr. Hodgson’s robot companion Crow as well as his nemesis, the evil Dr. Clayton Forrester. “You had to show people what we were doing. And even then, they go, ‘What?’ ”
Before it was broadcast nationally on Comedy Central (and later on the Sci Fi Channel), “MST3K” was first broadcast on KTMA, a UHF station covering the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. While no one was looking, Mr. Hodgson and his colleagues used KTMA’s equipment and its library of rainy-day monster movies to produce the earliest episodes of “MST3K.”
“There were no camcorders or iMovie, so if you wanted to make TV, you needed at least a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of production gear,” said Jim Mallon, a KTMA production manager of who became an “MST3K” producer.
One year later, Mr. Hodgson and Mr. Mallon were able to sell the series to a fledgling cable network called the Comedy Channel, which offered them a meager budget of $35,000 an episode but allowed them to retain ownership of the show, and to continue producing it from Minnesota, without much interference from programming executives on the coasts. In its mid-’90s heyday “MST3K” was watched by fewer viewers than Comedy Central’s reruns of “Saturday Night Live,” but its cult following prevented scheduling changes and early efforts at cancellation.
Eventually efforts to translate “MST3K” into a movie led to the show’s demise. Mr. Hodgson quit in 1993 over his dissatisfaction with the film’s lack of ambition and was replaced on air by the show’s head writer, Michael J. Nelson. When “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie” — a feature-length riff, directed by Mr. Mallon, on “This Island Earth” — was finally released in 1996, it was a short-lived flop, and the show itself was canceled three years later.
“It’s really hard to make a movie,” Mr. Beaulieu said. “My hat is off to anybody who picks up a camera. Well, not everybody, but it’s a difficult thing to do.”
Today many of the “MST3K” players are still making fun of movies for a living. Mr. Nelson runs a Web site, RiffTrax.com, which provides satirical commentaries for blockbusters like “Iron Man” and “Transformers.” And Mr. Hodgson and Mr. Beaulieu are among the members of a new team called Cinematic Titanic, who mock B-movies in direct-to-DVD releases and live performances.
Like many of his “MST3K” colleagues, Mr. Hodgson says he’s still riffing on bad movies, partly to keep the tradition of the show alive and partly to show that, really, anybody can do it.
“We’re just capitalizing on what people normally do,” he said. “When you’re presented with something insane or silly, the human reflex is to speak out.”
By DAVE ITZKOFF
“ALL along,” Joel Hodgson said, “I had a real healthy disrespect for Hollywood.”
It was more than two decades ago that Mr. Hodgson walked away from a thriving stand-up comedy career, retreating to Minnesota to build sculptures of robots. There Mr. Hodgson, now 48, discovered that his eccentric hobby of building automatons, and especially his aptitude for finding the flaws in mass media, could be combined into something greater.
“There was kind of an invitation there,” he said, “that if you can see the seams in this, you can figure out how to make a TV show.” The show Mr. Hodgson and a cadre of like-minded Midwesterners came up with in 1988 was “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (“MST3K” for short), surely the only comedy series about an outer-space castaway and his robots, who provide a steady stream of quips and comebacks while watching low-budget films.
“MST3K” may have been the first television show in which the commentary was more important than what was being commented on. You tuned in not to watch schlocky features like “Fire Maidens of Outer Space” or “Manos: The Hands of Fate” but to see how Mr. Hodgson and his crew would tear them apart. (You couldn’t hear the dismal opening score of “The Unearthly” in the same way after one of Mr. Hodgson’s robots shouted out, “Music by the Edgar Allan Poe marching band!”)
Twenty years after the debut of “MST3K” (with a new DVD boxed set from Shout! Factory to celebrate the occasion), the show’s creators talk about the show as if it were a mad scientist’s experiment, one that could have been produced only under a precise set of conditions that are practically irreproducible today.
“We could never have pitched the show on paper,” said Trace Beaulieu, who portrayed Mr. Hodgson’s robot companion Crow as well as his nemesis, the evil Dr. Clayton Forrester. “You had to show people what we were doing. And even then, they go, ‘What?’ ”
Before it was broadcast nationally on Comedy Central (and later on the Sci Fi Channel), “MST3K” was first broadcast on KTMA, a UHF station covering the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. While no one was looking, Mr. Hodgson and his colleagues used KTMA’s equipment and its library of rainy-day monster movies to produce the earliest episodes of “MST3K.”
“There were no camcorders or iMovie, so if you wanted to make TV, you needed at least a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of production gear,” said Jim Mallon, a KTMA production manager of who became an “MST3K” producer.
One year later, Mr. Hodgson and Mr. Mallon were able to sell the series to a fledgling cable network called the Comedy Channel, which offered them a meager budget of $35,000 an episode but allowed them to retain ownership of the show, and to continue producing it from Minnesota, without much interference from programming executives on the coasts. In its mid-’90s heyday “MST3K” was watched by fewer viewers than Comedy Central’s reruns of “Saturday Night Live,” but its cult following prevented scheduling changes and early efforts at cancellation.
Eventually efforts to translate “MST3K” into a movie led to the show’s demise. Mr. Hodgson quit in 1993 over his dissatisfaction with the film’s lack of ambition and was replaced on air by the show’s head writer, Michael J. Nelson. When “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie” — a feature-length riff, directed by Mr. Mallon, on “This Island Earth” — was finally released in 1996, it was a short-lived flop, and the show itself was canceled three years later.
“It’s really hard to make a movie,” Mr. Beaulieu said. “My hat is off to anybody who picks up a camera. Well, not everybody, but it’s a difficult thing to do.”
Today many of the “MST3K” players are still making fun of movies for a living. Mr. Nelson runs a Web site, RiffTrax.com, which provides satirical commentaries for blockbusters like “Iron Man” and “Transformers.” And Mr. Hodgson and Mr. Beaulieu are among the members of a new team called Cinematic Titanic, who mock B-movies in direct-to-DVD releases and live performances.
Like many of his “MST3K” colleagues, Mr. Hodgson says he’s still riffing on bad movies, partly to keep the tradition of the show alive and partly to show that, really, anybody can do it.
“We’re just capitalizing on what people normally do,” he said. “When you’re presented with something insane or silly, the human reflex is to speak out.”
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