Page: G1 Section: Arts & Entertainment Edition: Final Day: Sunday Subject: television; Mystery Science Theater 3000 Type: ; LEAD=20 Headline: Point and laugh ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Summary: Call it juvenile. Call it postmodern. In the wake of its cancellation, 'MST3K' fans call its style distinctly American - and funny.Byline: Scott Huler
You've probably done it once in your life, maybe twice. Like, say you're watching "The Amazing Colossal Man." As he grows, he stirs in his sleep. Suddenly you shout, "I'm growing so fast I'm giving myself a wedgie!" Or when he wakes up, giant and terrified, you say, "Oh my God, I'm being held in Barbie's Malibu Dream House!"
Even better, when the camera angle makes the huge, bald Colossal Man look a little like Marlon Brando, you murmur, "The horror! The horror!" simultaneously referring to "Apocalypse Now" and, through it, to "Heart of Darkness."
You're hilarious. You're a wiseguy. You're a postmodern genius of the ironic second reference.
Only darn it, it's not you. It's Joel Hodgson (or his replacement, Mike Nelson) and two robot sidekicks, Tom Servo and Crow.
You may have been that funny once or twice - but these guys are funny all the time. Which is why you're mad that Comedy Central is killing "Mystery Science Theater 3000," the show that silhouettes Mike, Crow and Tom Servo at the bottom of the screen as they point and laugh at a cavalcade of second-rate movies.
You're not alone. "MST3K" has plenty of fans - MiSTies - and they're bright, creative and responsive people. They send 500 letters a week to their heroes. They produce newsletters and short films of their own, setting up Web sites filled with their own material responding to what they see on TV, cataloging references and suggesting movies for the "MST" treatment. They may not be as funny as Crow and Tom Servo, but they're trying.
Many of them will gather in September for the second "MST3K" ConventioCon ExpoFest-A-Rama in Minneapolis. They'll buy the book and see the movie that will be released this spring.
So now you have two choices. You can read about the irony of the cancellation after seven seasons and what you might do to stop it (see story, page 3G). Or you can keep reading here and reflect on"MST3K's" place in the cosmos, or at least the comic universe.
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Sophomore classic:
Ed Hughes, a MiSTie from Raleigh, describes the humor this
way. "It's very sophomoric," says Hughes, 36, who works at SAS.
"But it's sophomoric on a much higher level."
The premise of "MST3K" is that mad scientists sent Joel Hodgson (and later Mike Nelson) into space and forced him to watch bad movies while they gauge his reactions. He took apart the spaceship to make Crow and Tom Servo as companions, and he can no longer control when the movies stop and start.
Mike is a genial guy who seems perplexed at how bad the movies are. Crow, who looks kind of like a juggling club, has a nasty streak and is given to saying, "Bite me." Tom Servo can't let a pun go by and chuckles at his own jokes.
"It's just a bunch of smartasses making cracks about bad movies," says Hughes. "That kind of speaks to me."
Hecklers have a long tradition. In fact, pointing and jeering represents an entire subgenre of American entertainment. Tom Servo and Crow are in many ways just the next generation of Statler and Waldorf, the guys who sat in the balcony of "The Muppet Show" and made fun of everything Kermit and Fozzie did.
Hans Conreid in 1963 added his own jokes and dialogue to old movies in "Fractured Flickers." Milton Berle had a designated off-camera heckler on "The Milton Berle Show" in 1966. Horror movie hosts in the late '60s added skits and viewer mail to their shows - not to mention sound effects and personal comments.
"MST," in this tradition, is sort of like reading the Mad Magazine parody of a movie at the same time you're watching it.
"They're saying the same things you would say, but they're saying it funnier," says Jim Resko, a technical writer from Zebulon. "It's something I would do even if they weren't there. I can watch a film and tear it apart as I watch it."
Sort of like Beavis and Butt-head, only better (and for the record, "MST" debuted in 1988, five years before "Beavis and Butt-head" hit MTV).
"They're not actually making fun of it," NCSU student Mary Pat Campbell says about the videos and the culture Beavis and Butt-head point to and jeer at. "They're making fun of it by being what they're making fun of. 'MST' is coming right out and saying, 'This is stupid,' but in a funny way."
Right. And Mike, Crow and Tom Servo never let viewers forget that they are smarter than everybody else.
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Theater of the obscure:
People really like to be smarter than everybody else.
In one of the skits the robots and the host put on during movie breaks, Joel introduced his concept of "cereal novels" - books connected to cereal boxes. One example was "Gravity's Rainbow," which came on a box of Lucky Charms.
"Mmmm!" Tom Servo said. "It's magically obscure!" Combining a reference to a cereal commercial with one of the most complex novels of the century takes postmodern to a magically obscure level that defines "MST" for its fans. Those throwaway references are a sort of "Where's Waldo?" of American culture. In their wiseacre comments, the characters refer to movies, TV shows, books, commercials and educational films in a nonstop barrage of postmodern self-reference.
"The more esoteric it is, and you feel like you're one of maybe 200 people who got the joke, that makes it even funnier," says Campbell. She has plucked references to mathematicians and Bergman films out of "MST."
Jim Mallon, the show's producer, is delighted that fans like those allusions.
"There's got to be some sort of joy in the common database of crap that we all have stuffed into our heads from the earliest TV shows on," he says. "Particularly when it's obscure information that somehow you associate with a charming point in your life. There's quite a reward when there's a commonality. And the more obscure the better."
Kevin Murphy, who writes for the show and provides the voice for Tom Servo, offers an example.
During the MSTing of the movie "Marooned," he got to thinking about all the things he had been told, growing up, were made possible by the space program. "I remember learning how the back of an Ovation guitar was made by a space-age advancement," he says. "You know, like Velcro. That's important."
The result was a skit in which Tom Servo notes that one cannot swing one's dead cat without hitting a product affected by the space race. He, Crow and Joel then begin listing space-age improvements.
They start with the vitamin pill but before long have included the bendy straw, swirled yogurt, and Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo, raising the list of ironic postmodern references to a level it is not likely to surpass.
According to fan Tom Restivo, a programmer who spoke via electronic mail from Maryland: "The show forces viewers to have a cultural awareness in order to get the quips. It won't dumb down the humor. One minute there is a comment about the bad acting, the next about Baby Jessica, the next about Ayn Rand, and the next references a character in the back to Boo Radley."
Still, the "MST" crew is hardly a bunch of intellectuals entertaining one another with bons mots. During a Hercules movie, Joel reaches his silhouetted hand up to the well-oiled pectorals of Hercules on screen and rubs, making squeegee noises. In another scene, when a movie character stoically points into the distance, Joel says, "Pull my finger!" Crow and Tom Servo make kissing noises when an actor's lips are close to their spot at the bottom of the screen.
"No joke too small" might be the show's motto - or just "all the jokes that fit, we make."
According to Mallon, the show's six writers watch the chosen movie countless times over days of constant rewinding. They whittle about 2,100 comments to about 700 per movie.
Mallon thinks the pop culture references are key to the show's success. "There's that touchstone moment of electricity when the common piece of information is shared," he says. "I would think it would be some sort of very personal moment through your television set. That's rare, because most shows have to write to such a wide audience."
But it takes the right characters to sell the lines.
"We stumbled onto some likable characters," Murphy says. "If they were annoying guys, I'm not sure people would enjoy it."
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Angry young men:
It's probably not stretching too much to turn Joel's (and
later Mike's) situation into a metaphor for our own. A guy stuck
in a tiny room out in a cultural vacuum, with only electronic
toys for companions, forced to endure an overwhelming tide of
crappy movies.
Which brings up another reason for the "MST" appeal: It's a safe way to strike back in anger at the volume of junk culture that comes roiling out of television and movie screens, radios and CD players, bookstores and magazines, 24 hours a day. This barrage is more than just boring - it's painful.
"You can't communicate with it, so you yell at it," says Jim Resko. "You can't talk to the creators and say what you were thinking, so you do it in your own home."
Kim Willis, a Durham technical writer, agrees. "I think that 50 percent of the movies I see I pan. The plot's been done, the dialogue was poor, it was just trite. I'm the same way about TV. For the most part, what comes out of Hollywood is just crap."
That's what first delighted her about "MST," she says. "It's actually talking back."
So "MST's" popularity is partly based on our collective disgust with the quality of TV and movies?
That's what Kevin Murphy thinks.
"There is an element of revenge in here," he says. "It's born out of anger. Your creativity opens up. You want to hurt this film. If the film is hurting you you want to hurt it back. We want to unleash, in a creative and eloquent way, our pain back at the film."
Still, you can talk something like this to death. Whatever the history of American jeering, the postmodern references, the outlet for cultural anger, what really makes "MST" fly is how funny it is.
Another example. In "The Day the Earth Froze," the characters in the movie spend a lot of time talking about a substance called "Sampo," and the "MST" crew begins wondering what that might be. A really good can opener? That dent between your nose and upper lip? Something not tangible that's found in the laughter of children, the roar of the tide, or the capacity to love and be loved?
That's unquantifiable, indescribable. The show is irreverent and smart and postmodern and witty and challenging, but all that would be pointless if it weren't funny. If sitting around in front of the TV has replaced the gentle art of conversation - and can anyone argue that it hasn't? - then Mike, Crow and Tom Servo are the closest thing left to an Algonquin Round Table. They're cutting and intelligent, and they value a snappy comeback above all else.
No wonder the show got canceled.
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Air times:
Comedy Central:
Sunday-Friday, 2-4 a.m.; Saturday, 5-7 p.m.; Sunday, 7-9 a.m.
On WRAY, Channel 30, Wilson:
Friday, 11 p.m.; Saturday midnight; Sunday, 8 p.m.
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This all copyright 1996 Raleigh News and Observer. So don't mess with it.