Mystery Science Theater 3000 Creator Joel Hodgson Talks Live Tours, 30 Years Of Movie-Rifffing And The New Season

 

2018 marks a big year for Mystery Science Theater 3000, the movie-riffing show which survived three network changes and even cancellation to return last year thanks to a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. It marks the 30th anniversary of the show’s creation, a second Mystery Science Live Tour is rolling through the country and a new season of the series is about to debut on Netflix.
The show began its life in 1988 at KTMA, a small TV station in Minneapolis, Minnesota. During that first sets of episodes — now known as Season K — creator Joel Hodgson and collaborators Trace Beaulieu and J. Elvis Weinstein mapped out the particulars of riffing. And when the show moved to the Comedy Channel (which later became Comedy Central), the show returned to the Gamera movies it used at KTMA. But when looking back on those days, Hodgson told Comicon there is one movie from those days he would love to bring to the new Netflix version of the show: The Green Slime.
Back in 1988, he, fellow executive producer Jim Mallon, along with Beaulieu and Weinstein, put together a demo of what the show would look like for Don O’Conner, the station manager at KTMA. “It was a very abstract idea, as you can imagine, so we really just did a rough thing that showed there’s these sketches and then there’s this doorway and then you run the movie and then we say stuff,” Hodgson recalled. The 15 minute presentation, featuring Weinstein as a prototype version of Tom Servo called Beeper, did its job. But when it came time to shoot the first episode, Hodgson and his team screened a film built from several episodes of Gerry Anderson’s Stingray instead. “It was kinda my hope to make that the pilot episode, but the channel lost the rights to it,” Hodgson recalled. “It was kind of terrifying and fascinating at the same time. Scary. But to me The Green Slime is emblematic of the perfect theater movie.”
Acknowledging the fan interest in the original KTMA episodes, Hodgson said an official release is theoretically possible, but negotiating the rights to some of the films could make it a cost-prohibitive venture. Also, he is a little sheepish about those episodes as they are “kind of a glimpse into us figuring out movie riffing” and not of the caliber the show would eventual attain.
The upcoming Season 12, meanwhile, represents the show’s 30th anniversary season; a fact noted at the beginning of each of the new episodes, which is collectively known as “The Gauntlet.” The subtitle reflects the show’s acknowledgement of its place on Netflix, where fans binged the 11th Season in long stretches. In MST3K’s fictional reality, Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day) and her assistant Max (Patton Oswalt) also accept binge-watching as a format, forcing test subject Jonah Heston (Jonah Ray), and robot pals Crow T. Robot (Hampton Yount) and Tom Servo (Baron Vaughn) to endure six cheesy movies in a row to make the show more like the viewing environment at home. “The Mads (Kinga and Max) decide, obviously, not only are people gonna binge-watch this but we’re gonna ‘binge-make’ it,” said Hodgson. “We’re gonna make Jonah and the bots go movie to movie to movie for six movies and the Mads are totally expecting the audience to do the same thing.”
A number of the films in the Gauntlet, like The Day Time Ended and Killer Fish, come from the 1970s, which Hodgson recalled as “a weird time for movies.”
“[They] were getting marginalized by TV so much and it use to be the dominate creative force in the world for almost 100 years, and so it kinda took a little hit,” he explained. “That’s why when Lucas and Coppola and Spielberg came out it was so electrifying.”
Of course, the resurgence of film in the late 70s led to a number of knock-off pictures in the 1980s like Mac & Me and Ator: The Fighting Eagle. “It’s kinda like a lot of these movies are hoping you associate these better movies with these lesser movies,” Hodgson said. To him, the bizarre energy of a mid-70s sci-fi film like The Day Time Ended or the knock-off quality of Mac & Me leads to films ripe for riffing. Of the latter, Hodgson said it was perfect fit narratively for the show as well. “Mac & Me works really good because the Mads really get excited about product placement,” he explained. “To them, Mac & Me is like the universe where almost every product in it is product placement.”
Hodgson also said each of the six films have an “adorable” quality to them which make them good for riffing. Another thing they have in common is a certain level of production value. During its days on Comedy Central, the show often relied on low-budget black & white films with the suggestion of sets (Bride of the Monster) or terrible photography. But in the widescreen Netflix era, Hodgson wanted to include films with bigger scopes and budgets. “You don’t want a movie that has no production,” Hodgson said. “That’s not interesting looking and doesn’t do anything or go anywhere. You want a world that kinda surveys itself and that allows the riffers to manifest a lot of different viewpoints.” Movies with a certain competence, even if they still off the rails, became the sort of “adorable” films Hodgson and the writers wanted to spend time with. “We have to spend a lot of time with them, weeks and weeks and weeks. So, I tend to stay away from movies that are just plain.”
“There are [also] movies that just are hard to look at. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of filmmakers out there that don’t have an eye,” he added. “There’s a lot of really ugly movies in the world and we don’t do that. Hard on the eyes, you know?”
But one movie not hard on the eyes is Deathstalker II, one of two films Hodgson and the MST3K team took on the road for their 2018 live tour. “It was like an adult Cinemax movie and we obviously had to edit out the R element,” Hodgson said the film, which replaced the original Deathstalker after he discovered it had too many R-rated elements. “What’s left is this very whimsical kinda sword and sandal movie which really lends itself to the stuff we’re doing.” The live show riffing includes three sets of lyrics for the Deathstalker II theme, a couple of fun running jokes and a new concept Hodgson calls “movie crashing.” As Hodgson explained it, it is “a new way to do movie riffing where we have a green screen backstage and the robots start messing around with it, kind of putting themselves into the movie and riffing the movie from the inside out.” The format is still raw, but reflects the DIY spirit of MST3K’s earliest days.
The 2017 tour featured Jonah and the Bots doing a new riff on Season 5’s Eegah and bizarre Italian Spy/Superhero flick called Argoman: The Fantastic Superman. When asked if he was tempted to use Argoman as one of the Gauntlet films, Hodgson said no, as both tours were special events which he ultimately hopes to release on home video at some point. “We would love to find a way to release our live shows,” he said, “but it’s not super clear how to do that just yet.”
Nonetheless, the initial live tour gave Hodgson a better understanding of the responsibility he has in shepherding MST3K into a new era. “I think the bar was set higher because we were competing with people’s nostalgic version of Mystery Science Theater that they had when they were 13 years old,” he said.
At the same time, he is thrilled Season 11 proved the format is stronger than any one creative participant. “You can refill it and bring in new writers and new performers and it will work,” he said. “So going over that hurtle I think was the biggest one.” With that barrier crossed, the not-too-distant future continues to be bright for the show. Well, as long as there are cheesy movies to riff on, of course. But that seems like a given.
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Gauntlet debuts November 22nd on Netflix.