Besides director David Lynch’s 1990-91 series Twin Peaks, my favorite television show is Mystery Science Theater 3000. Although the series was canceled in 1999, fans and newcomers can still enjoy the show thanks to periodic DVD releases, and WRL has several sets as well as individual episodes in its collection.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (often abbreviated as MST3K) ran from 1988-1999, first on the Minnesota-based station KTMA, then on Comedy Central and the Sci Fi Channel. Two mad scientists, Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) and Dr. Laurence Erhardt (Josh Weinstein), aspire to take over the world by means of bad movies. They launch an unassuming man named Joel Robinson (Joel Hodgson) into space and force him to watch B-movies so they can determine which B-movie to use in their scheme for world domination. Joel builds four robots (Gypsy, Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot, and Cambot) to help him on the ship and to assist him in watching the movies. Each episode begins with an intro that sets the theme of the episode, then Joel and two of the robots watch and comment on the episode’s featured B-movie. Each episode is roughly two hours, and one movie is featured per episode, although occasionally short films are included as well.
When I first heard about MST3K and its premise, I didn’t think I’d like it, but once I gave it a chance, I was hooked. The writing is clever and inventive. Everything about the movies featured on the show– the opening/closing credits, the music, the acting– is fair game for jokes. The comments are incisive and extremely funny. There are breaks throughout each episode in which the host and the mad scientists comment further on the movie or perform skits related to the film
There were several cast changes throughout the course of the show, most notably new villains, including TV’s Frank (Frank Conniff) and Pearl Forrester (Mary Jo Pehl), and a new host when Joel Hodgson left halfway through the series’s run and was replaced with Michael J. Nelson (playing a character named Mike Nelson).
Because the opening credits of MST3K establish both the premise of the show and the central characters in each episode, newcomers to the show don’t need to start watching from any specific episode. While I’d recommend any of the DVDs in the WRL collection, I am partial to the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection, Volume 4, which features the following movies: Space Mutiny, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, Girl in Gold Boots, and Hamlet (a badly dubbed version made for German television in the early ‘60s). I happen to like this collection because it offers a good overview of the different types of movies featured over the course of the show’s run.
I think anyone who enjoys B-movies or making fun of B-movies would enjoy the humor of this long-running show.
Check the WRL catalog for Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection 4
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