Mystery Science Theater 3000 is coming back!
Right now, they’ve got the funding to make three new episodes, which will probably feature Jonah Ray from the Nerdist as “Jonah Heston”, the guy who gets shot up into space and forced to watch cheesy movies by Felicia Day’s Kinga Forrester, daughter of Clayton Forrester and grand-daughter of Pearl. (People have asked who the mother was; in my headcanon, she’s the Resusci-Annie from ‘Teenagers From Outer Space’.) Baron Vaughn and Hampton Yount will be Tom and Crow, respectively, and there’s still at least one casting announcement to come (for the henchperson role). They’re about $125K from funding episodes 4-6, and with twelve days to go that’s pretty much guaranteed, and we may see as many as six more beyond that although I would be surprised if they fund the full $5.5 million.
But I don’t care. The point is, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is coming back!
I have immensely fond memories of this show. I remember channel surfing one Sunday afternoon in junior high and coming across a science-fiction movie on one of the UHF stations. I stopped, because in those pre-Netflix years living in a household where cable simply wasn’t an option (my father remains philosophically opposed to it to this day) you took any sci-fi you could get. And I remember thinking, “What’s that across the bottom of the screen? Are those supposed to be theater seats? Who are those people in the corner of the screen? What’s going on here?”
And then they made a joke. And I instantly thought to myself, “This is the most brilliant idea ever.”
Because we all make fun of bad movies. It’s a natural human instinct, like breathing or sleeping or finding Donald Trump repugnant. So to see it done by actual comedians, really funny guys who also did sketches with these weird and goofy puppets, well…it was instantly charming. I’ve gone back and watched those early episodes, and they are definitely rough drafts for the concept, but I can’t tell you how impressive they were at the time. I was instantly hooked.
Then they went to cable, and I couldn’t watch them. Luckily, a few years later my dad came home with some videotapes that one of his students gave him, saying he thought they would be right up my dad’s alley. It was an off-air copy of one of the Turkey Day marathons, with ‘Viking Women vs the Sea Serpent’ and ‘Teenagers From Outer Space’, and I fell in love all over again. For several years afterward, I would beg my way into the home of a friend or family member for Thanksgiving with a stack of blank tapes, recording as much as I could stay awake for and watching those episodes over and over again in between Thanksgivings. (I practically have ‘Manos’ memorized.) I eventually moved out and got my own cable subscription, in time for the Sci-Fi Channel years, and I never missed recording an episode until the show’s eventual cancellation. (I was also finally able to settle a long-running debate between my mom and my aunt over which was worse: ‘The Day the Earth Froze’ or ‘Plan Nine From Outer Space’. The obvious answer was, of course, ‘Manos’.)
Ever since, I’ve greeted every spin-off effort with the greatest of joy, from ‘The Film Crew’ to ‘Rifftrax’ to ‘Cinematic Titanic’. There’s just a simple, uncomplicated happiness to this kind of comedy; they take a movie that you probably wouldn’t watch on your own, and walk you through it with entertaining comedic comments. You get a chance to see something that’s not always a classic, but frequently has its own unique charms–and where the movie fails, the riffing is entertaining. It’s fun at the expense of those old movies, but there’s also a little bit of love to it; I sometimes describe it as a celebrity roast for people who would otherwise be forgotten.
And it’s coming back. It’s a different cast, but ‘Diabolik’ featured absolutely none of the same people in front of the camera as ‘The Crawling Eye’. It’s a new writing crowd, but that’s only to be expected; one of the great things about the old show is that the people who worked on it went on to have long comedy careers of their own. It may not last beyond this run of 3-12 episodes, but that’s how the future works. You can never tell what it’s going to be like until it happens. The only thing we know right now is this: Mystery Science Theater 3000 is coming back. I have no snark, no reservations, nothing but uncomplicated happiness for this effort, and I don’t care who knows it.
UPDATE: OMG THEY ANNOUNCED THE HENCHMAN AND IT’S PATTON OSWALT HOW COULD THIS BE ANY BETTER?!?!?!
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In terms of MST3K canon I’d say Hobgoblins is worse than Manos. Manos has the charming backstory of complete incompetence – its a murky, nigh-unwatachble garbage, but its also so incoherent that’s its often hard to follow anything that happens on screen. Hobgoblins, by contrast, is very clear in its depiction of the most loathsome, unpleasant, need-to-take-a-shower-after-watching humans in all of cinema. Manos’ worst crime is that for long stretches its inert – Hobgoblins makes me angry.
In full riffing canon, though, The Doomsday Machine for Cinematic Titanic may be the worst film, what with its ‘let’s weld an unrelated Finnish movie on to this sucker and run a fifteen minute scene of helmeted astronauts sitting in chairs SAYING NOTHING.’ It’s not just boring, it’s aggressively, venomously boring. At least the opening of Manos had visual stimuli.
Oh, there are definitely some other candidates I’ve seen since then that are punishingly bad. You’re dead-on right about ‘Hobgoblins’ being terrible, and I’d say that any of ‘The Beast of Yucca Flats’, ‘Monster a-Go-Go’ and ‘The Creeping Terror’ are just about unwatchable without the riffing and all for the same reason. They’re just gray, mushy pantomimes with narrators employed in lieu of actual dialogue, and it hurts.
But in the full riffing canon, it’s tough to beat ‘To Catch a Yeti’ and ‘Rollergator’ (Rifftrax). They’re not even so much films as home movies shot with a camcorder that someone decided to see if they could make a buck by releasing professionally. I don’t think anything could be worse. Even ‘Doomsday Machine’ has some life until that last fifteen minutes. (They ran out of money and had to shoot that scene months later, well after all the original actors had departed the production.)
But back in the mid-90s, ‘Manos’ was my A-1 go-to for “WTF?” so that was what I told my mom and my aunt. They did not argue, especially when my sister backed me up.
Bad movies, good memories. 🙂
When picking the worst episode, I differentiate between the most incompetently made movie (The Creeping Terror, for my money. Manos at least has dialogue.) and the most difficult episode to make it all the way through; the movies so boring even the riffing can’t save them (the top of that particular heap of horror is The Starfighters.)
@Alex: If only they’d introduced the poopie suit earlier in the movie. As soon as you hear the words, “poopie suit”, it’s like the riffers’ eyes light up and suddenly it’s a whole different movie.
(That said, I always crack up at the refueling scenes. They go to some very filthy riffs there, and some of them are amazing.)
Am I the only person on the internet who does not enjoy Felicia Day at all? Also “Mitchell” was the best and that is all there is to it.
I’ve always said that if I ever got clout in Hollywood – like, Peter-Jackson-remaking-King-Kong-because-he-felt-like-it clout – I would do a shot for shot remake of ‘Mitchell’ with as much of the ad-libbed dialogue actually in the movie as I could squeeze. (“I specifically came here for dinner!” “Word on the street is, you’re a jerk.” etc.)
@Cookie McCool: I’m not a part of the Cult of Felicia Day (I’ve never seen ‘The Guild’, for example) but I liked the way she portrayed the character in the Kickstarter video and I’m intrigued to see what will happen next. There are certainly plenty of people who went, “Aw, no, not Felicia Day!” when she was announced, but my attitude right now is “Repeat to yourself, it’s just a show…” until we have some episodes to like or dislike.
If we’re talking the best, rather than the worst, ‘Mitchell’ is a strong contender. I feel like the absolute best pound-for-pound back-to-back-to-back set, though, is ‘Space Mutiny’, followed by ‘Time Chasers’, followed by ‘Overdrawn at the Memory Bank’. That’s three of my top ten, one right after another.
@Voodoo Ben: I like the way you think. You’d have to see if Harlan Ellison would do a cameo, though. 🙂
For best and worst, I’d have to go with “Invasion of the Neptune Men” for worst and “Merlin’s Mystical Shop of Wonders” for best. “Invasion” devolves into World War II stock footage for long stretches, so you get the joy of being bored by actual people dying real deaths. “Merlin” is hilarious on its own, just the background of turning a horror anthology into a kid’s movie provides so many great gags.
*Every* spinoff effort? Even the Crow and Tom Servo cartoons that featured no riffing (and no recognizable humor)?
@Funkula: I _greeted_ it with the greatest of joy. It just didn’t take long for the joy to wear off. 🙂