Mystery Science Theatre 3000: The Return

Gypsy, Crow, Joel Robinson and Tom Servo

It's got to be twenty years since my University pal James 'Gonzo History' Holloway first introduced me to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, a ramshackle series in which a captive held aboard the 'Satellite of Love' – first Joel Robinson, played by series creator Joel Hodgson, then Mike Nelson, played by head writer Mike Nelson – was forced to watch terrible movies by a pair of mad scientists in the bowels of Gizmonic Institute – first Drs Clayton Forrester(1) and Larry Erhardt, then the latter was replaced by hapless goon TV's Frank, who in turn was replaced by Dr Forrester's mother Pearl, who went on to become the lead Mad in the later seasons, assisted by allegedly intelligent gorilla Professor Bobo and the allegedly non-corporeal Observer – for reasons which were nebulous at best. The test subject would watch the movie in the company of two robots, Crow and Tom Servo, and make fun of it while visible in silhouette. The show began its life on local TV before graduating to Comedy Central, a theatrical movie and a final run on the old Sci-Fi Channel(2), oft known as the channel where good series went to die, eventually closing down at around about the same time I first saw it.

 

Crow, Mike Nelson and Tom Servo

 After a couple of decades in the wilderness, with various cast members creating the Rifftrax website – essentially stripping the concept to its bare bones and providing just the riffs to be listened to alongside the movie – and a Flash series centred around the bots, as well as doing non-MST3K stuff like writing a novel about fictitious killer rats(3), Hodgson launched a Kickstarter campaign which eventually funded the creation of fourteen new episodes of the series, featuring a new test subject – Jonah Heston, played by comedian Jonah Ray – and new Mads – Dr Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day), daughter of Clayton and self-described 'third generation supervillain', aided by Max, aka TV's Son of TV's Frank (Patton Oswalt), and a crew of skeleton themed mechanicals and musicians – who trap him on the dark side of the moon in order to drive him mad and perfect Kinga's 'liquid media' technology so that she can rule the world of broadcasting in some fashion.

Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day), Crow, Gypsy, Voice of Crow (Hampton Yount), Jonah (Jonah Ray), ... I have no idea who that guy is, possibly a puppeteer, Voice of Tom (Baron Vaughn), Joel (Joel Hodgson), Max (Patton Oswalt), Tom

 The show is basically the same. It's shot on digital and streamed via Netflix, so it looks much nicer than the usual YouTube VHS grab, although not so different from the recent remasters released officially. There's a new big band version of the opening music ('Love Theme from MST3K') performed by the Skeleton Crew, and it kind of throws me every time that Day is singing her own lines instead of lip-synching. It's also a bit of a shock to have the SoL's control bot, Gypsy, speaking with an actual woman's voice instead of a man's falsetto, and Tom and Crow are both more mobile thanks to the involvement of Jim Henson puppeteers and just the general advance of puppet technology. There are cameos from old cast members and others, including Mark freaking Hamill as a space carnival huckster, because why not. We even get some sort of running plot about Kinga planning to marry Jonah in a blatant ratings grab, while Max schemes to usurp her affections.

But at the core of it, it's the same old MST3K. We open with the invention exchange – dropped for most of the Nelson run – and then Kinga and Max explain how bad the movie is going to be. Jonah and the bots sit – mostly; Tom is now able to levitate in the theatre to mime interactions with the screen, and Gypsy drops in to throw out a joke twice an episode – in the theatre and riff at the movie, interspersed with skits and commercial break-style bumpers to maintain the expected pace on a streaming service. It's an incredibly affectionate recreation of the original, with a similar sense of humour evident in the riffing.

And then Jonah gets eaten, but I guess we'll look at the implications of that(4) next season, if there is one.

Meet the new Shadowrama, same as the old Shadowrama.

Season 11 – the show is internally numbered as a continuation of the original, including a nod to the 200^th episode – begins with Reptilicus, a Danish kaiju movie with a more than passing resemblance to British kaiju effort Gorgo (riffed in the original series.) This is high art, however, compared to Cry Wilderness, a shitty bigfoot movie with unexplained native American shenanigans and big game hunters and I don't know what else. Also, the Reptilicus episode features a catchy song about the kaiju of the world.

The Time Travelers is a low budget, downbeat scifi with a tacked on ending and a deeply annoying comic relief character. Avalanche is a disaster movie with actual stars (an aging Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow,) although the film is most notable for how long the Avalanche takes to arrive and how quickly it's over. During the episode, Joel and the Bots' attempt to curtail the trend of monster/disaster mashups by getting copyright on as many titles as possible.

"But the cowboy didn't like him so he shot him in the fa-ace!"
"Wow, that's meta."

Following the trend of taking its sweet time to get to the point, The Beast of Hollow Mountain is two-thirds of a western about the rivalry between a Texan rancher in Mexico and the local big noise over cattle and dames, before the frankly bizarre appearance of a third act allosaurus.

Starcrash is a 1978 Star Wars knockoff which shows that the perils of trying to knock out an effects heavy knock-off in double quick time were not discovered by the Asylum in the age of video. It stars Hammer Horror sexpot Caroline Munroe, master thespian Christopher Plummer and 80s heartthrob-turned-CBeebies bedtime story reader David Hasselhoff, which I confess is a sentence I never expected to write.

Yes, this happened.

The Land that Time Forgot is, by MST3K standards, a classic of the adventure genre, in that it is actually shown on TV with a fair degree of regularity. Starring American matinee idol Doug Mcclure at the height of his British monster movie period, it follows Mcclure and a crew of British character actors who hijack the U-boat and, due to the machinations of the German crew, end up in an isolated land filled with dinosaurs and cave people, as you do. Just in case we thought the show was getting mainstream, this is followed by Italian sword and sandal dickery The Loves of Hercules, in which a woman is cuddled to death by a tree; for realsies.

PT Mindslap.

Yongary: Monster from the Deep is the Korean Reptilicus, and is followed by a two-episode spectacular. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom is a slow, dull fantasy movie, and I'll be honest, I'm astonished that this one was never covered in the original series. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II is an almost entirely unrelated dull fantasy movie that is slightly less slow, has more blatant T&A, but doesn't have a score by James Horner(5). Neither is as excruciating to sit through as the soul-crushingly dull Carnival Magic, but Mark Hamill sings in one of the skits, so that's topping the best of lists right there.

We continue with the deeply meta streaming service Christmas episode, featuring The Christmas that Almost Wasn't, in which Santa hires a lawyer to help him launch the department store Santa craze and prevent his landlord foreclosing on the workshop. Then we finish with another Mcclure Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation, At the Earth's Core, in which Mcclure wears a suit reminiscent of Mark Hamill's space huckster and accidentally ends up in a hollow Earth when he and bumbling academic Peter Cushing try to drill through a hill in Wales, discovering human tribes – including Starcrash's Caroline Munroe – oppressed by psychic pteranodons.

Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Call it a comeback; I say it never left.

(1) No apparent relation to the lead in the 1950s movie version of War of the Worlds.

(2) Rather than the current SyFy Channel, home of crappy monster movies.

(3) Mike Nelson's Death Rat, by Mike Nelson

(4) I'm pretty sure that the implications will be 'none'.

(5) The score in Wizards of the Lost Kingdom is actually the one composed for Battle Beyond the Stars, but Roger Corman was never a man to waste material, be it ever so inappropriate.