No matter the time of day, watch an old Mystery Science Theater 3,000 episode and it feels like the middle of the night. The show was set primarily on the Satellite of Love, an awkward-looking bone of a spaceship, where Joel Robinson (series creator Joel Hodgson) and the robots he’d cobbled together for company were subjected, against their will, to an endless lineup of the worst offerings in cinematic history. (This unfortunate situation was created by a mad scientist trying to find out how much bad movie watching would drive a person crazy.)
The painful pacing of those old film disasters leaves plenty of dead air, the kind of air that gets filled with numb thoughts when you stumble across the likes of Manos: Hands of Fate or Nude on the Moon at one a.m. Your eyes may be red, your thumb poised to change the channel, yet you can’t quit watching as a glorious disaster unfolds.
MST3K courted that kind of haze on purpose. Its viewers, like Hodgson, were the subject of something approaching a dare: how bad can a film get before people change that channel? Fortunately, Hodgson and his pals, most often Crow T. Robot and glorified gumball machine Tom Servo, fought back against their captors by responding to the deadly funk brought on by stilted dialogue, grainy film stock, poor direction and nonsensical plotting. They fought back by, basically, wisecracking.
The sheer inventiveness of their commentary filled all that dead air with something far more entertaining than the films themselves. The same effect, granted, can be had by gathering one’s funniest friends in front of the television to take in Plan 9 From Outer Space. A bad enough film will get taunted mercilessly, given the right audience. MST3K made that kind of evening portable and much easier to obtain. Its in-between bits didn’t always work—the mad scientists who sent Hodgson into space consistently avoided being as funny as the film commentary, and MST3K was itself a low-budget production, complete with a “spaceship” made by sticking a bunch of things together and spray-painting them gray.
But at the end of the day, the taunts and jabs delivered by Hodgson, Crow and Tom Servo made the whole thing irresistible. It would take an awful lot of evenings with clever friends to come near their scathing humor, honed beforehand by gathering the best comments. In Mitchell, a self-congratulatory and nearly unwatchable ’70s bad-boy-cop-with-a-heart-of-gold drama, the title character pauses in mid stake-out to empty an ashtray into the street, prompting the comment, “Somewhere an Indian is crying.”
That’s typical of MST3K comments, demanding as it does a knowledge of ’70s TV and falling into place with rapidfire, dead-on wit. Other moments are less rarefied in their references.
In an education short, a student holds out a weird-looking project to his shop teacher and someone says, “This just came out of me. What do you make of it?” In Sidehackers, a woman wearing extremely tight pants is given a relentless squeak with every step.
All that giddy humor was absent from screens for years. Now it’s back, sort of, as Cinematic Titanic, a “movie riffing” project helmed by Hodgson (who left MST3K several seasons before it ended) and members of the original cast Trace Beaulieu (Crow, Dr. Forrester), J. Elvis Weinstein (Tom Servo, Dr. Erhardt), Frank Conniff (TV’s Frank) and Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forrester).
Hodgson has been busy since the days of MST3K. “Because MST did so well and was so successful, I got lots of work,” he says. “I moved to Hollywood, and for about 12 years I got work doing development stuff and writing stuff.” (Hodgson co-wrote Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, and has been a creative consultant to game shows and Jimmy Kimmel Live, among other things.)
But the urge to wisecrack continued. “[The cast] had all remained friends and personally, I just really wanted to do it again. I was kind of amazed when everybody else said the same thing,” says Hodgson.
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Watching a Cinematic Titanic film is quite different from watching MST3K. Many of the same elements are present: silhouettes, occasional interaction with onscreen characters, and of course the endless wisecracking. Robot puppets are MIA, and it turns out that those humble puppets and their solitary human companion provided a very particular chemistry, a comfortable sense of late-night isolation.
The presence of five clearly human “riffers” somehow feels more artificial. Maybe it’s like Soylent Green—it was better to enjoy the illusion that those robots weren’t people. Crude as the setup was on MST3K, it still provided the barest thread of believability—a remarkable thing, considering one robot was a gumball machine with a beak.
Still, it’s hard to blame Hodgson for wanting to do something different, and he sees advantages to the five-person setup. “It’s very different,” he said in a recent interview. “I felt like it was creatively lazy to just do the three-man riff formation again. I wanted to try to bring something new to the lexicon and do it with five. I think you really get to see all the writers performing it. And there’s more of a dynamic—you can do a lot more just because there’s a lot more voices.”
Cinematic Titanic thrusts you right into its films with a bare minimum of setup. Even the backstory is much less clear than that of the original series. “It’s very vague,” Hodgon says. “I think it’s this thing that there’s a rip in the electron scaffolding, in all electricity, so all media is crumbling. And there’s a think tank that’s found a way to restore media into something that’s not electronic. It’s not electricity-based.”
Somehow the Cinematic Titanic crew is employed to “nanotate” this new media, which they then place into a “Time Tube” at the end of the episode.
So why no robots this time? “I think that, more than anything, a live show with sets and costumes was really daunting,” says Hodgson. “So the cheapest, easiest way for us to get out and movie riff was to just be an ensemble and riff. That’s really the short answer. Though people do make the robots and bring them to the show. You can actually buy working robots on eBay for around $300, and they’re pretty good.”
It’s in the live shows that Cinematic Titanic really shines. As one audience member says in a video clip on the Cinematic Titanic site, “With the live experience and everybody laughing and everything, this was a hundred times better.”
Unlike the sterile silhouettes-plus-movie DVDs, live shows have so far incorporated cast members doing standup and after-show meet-and-greets in addition to the film commentary, which is delivered by a well-lit cast, not silhouettes.
“We started [doing live shows] right after we went into the studio and shot our first show,” says Hodgson. “That weekend we had a live show in San Francisco and we did the same movie. We realized we got to a lot more jokes and actually performed better. Because we all met doing stand-up in Minnesota, we found it really improved our material. We took the new jokes and re-recorded those in the studio. That’s been a large part of how we worked from the beginning.”
MST3K, on the other hand, didn’t get the benefit of hearing how people responded, Hodgson says: “We just got really lucky that the format worked so well and people liked what we were doing. We were in a room together. We had an office, a campus where we could hang out. We could sit around on couches making each other laugh with somebody writing it all down.”
With Cinematic Titanic, the cast members spend time alone with the films. “It takes about a month,” says Hodgson. “I can do about four hours a day before I start going nutty, and that usually gets me six or eight minutes of the film. Everybody’s doing it at home and then we come together and one of us is the producer for that segment. It’s peculiar—it always works the first time we do it. It’s fresh, and we’re excited about it. In the meantime, we try to flag jokes we don’t think work well, and then we go to work rewriting and fixing.”
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It’s not Mystery Science Theater you’ll see when Cinematic Titanic comes to Northampton with a well-honed version of Danger on Tiki Island. Yet in a sense it is. These are, after all, the folks behind the most cynical puppets in TV history, the royalty of cinematic wisecracking. Expect a more intimate and interactive evening than you’ll get by merely popping in a DVD—a behind-the-scenes look at what makes their unusual art form work. It may even seem a bit earlier than one a.m.
There was one more thing that had to be asked of Joel Hodgson. His old MST3K character may have been the subject of a bad film experiment, but, after all, Hodgson really did sit through all those bad movies, and multiple times at that. What does that do to a person?
“Oh, boy. I guess I feel like the moving image is just kind of magical,” says Hodgson. “As human beings, we kind of have a love affair with it. It’s just powerful. Even bad movies are pretty powerful. That’s my take on it. People my age—I just turned 50—we grew up watching lots and lots of TV. So it’s kind of comforting, I think. I think it has something to do with the fixed focal length—since the dawn of man, we’ve stared into the fire at the end of the day. You don’t have to focus. It’s just kind of a locked focus.
“I still really like movies, the length of them. It’s just this perfect kind of thing.”
Cinematic Titanic performs live movie-riffing to Danger on Tiki Island April 15 at the Calvin Theater in Northampton at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25-35. Call (413) 586-8686.
