As I type this, I am sitting in a theater waiting for the Rifftrax live broadcast of the original Night of the Living Dead. I missed out on the live Rifftrax broadcast of Starship Troopers, and while I own several sets of the MST3K box sets, it's not as many as I want to own. if you guessed I'm a fan, you guessed right, and I'm willing to go on record that Joel Hodgson, Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, Kevin Murphy, Mary Jo Pehl, and everybody else who wrote for the show compose the smartest and funniest writing team television ever had.
Take that, Community.
You, too, The Daily Show.
I swear one day I'll start an Internet feud with something huge, and that's the moment I'll know I made it big.
When I first discovered the program Mystery Science Theater 3000, I was extremely late to the party. The show premiered in 1988, it only made national appearances on the then growing Comedy Central in 1989. I didn't stumble upon it by accident until 1994. I was instantly astonished such a program existed, and searched the still toddler-like Internet (lots of running into walls, crying, and a fixation on breasts) for more. I bought magazines that interviewed the creators, looked for blueprints to make my own versions of the robots, and even performed my own riffing with people I knew to certain memorable terrible films.
At some point I'll tell the story about a high school trip I went on where a group of us guys gathered in a hotel room, turned on a late-night Cinemax movie with the sound off, and got so bored we started making up our own dialogue.
There's also the time a group of great friends of mine and I did the same thing to the terrible remake of The Haunting, and I accidentally provided the funniest moment with the help of Catherine Zeta-Jones.
The formula is amazingly simple and yet extremely complex to pull off. It boils down to "people cracking jokes at movies you wouldn't watch if people weren't riffing on them." However, imagine the work involved in such an endeavor. You have to watch a terrible movie, think of jokes, and then figure out how to write them so you aren't drowning out anything people need to hear from the film, it has to work with filming techniques and pacing, and it can't overwhelm the watchers. The timing has to be exact, the jokes have to be razor-sharp to get just enough of a laugh to allow the hosts to continue without running over their own jokes, and as anybody who hangs out with someone who does nothing but crack jokes knows, too much can be overwhelming after too long.
The fact they were able to manage this with a successful show for eleven years makes it all the more remarkable really, especially since each episode was a good chuck of a feature film, plus commercials, plus skits, meaning you had to fill quite a long time block.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 became my number one essential "must watch" show while it was on the air, and when it finally left the air (after a brief resurrection on the Sci-Fi Channel), I was deeply saddened. I owned some of the individual episodes on DVD, but I had never been able to take part in "circulating the tapes" as the show promoted, and I was much too poor to get the early DVD sets. Of course, now that I have a better-paying job, I've been able to go back and stock up on some early sets, but as I said before, I still have a ways to go.
I was absolutely delighted when I later learned of Rifftrax, a series of mp3s you can download to play accompanying movies created by several of the crew from MST3K. Getting to hear the familiar voices was a delight, as was the fact that since they weren't buying the rights to the films, they were able to start riffing over more modern and bigger, successful films. Personally, I don't think the Michael Bay Transformers movies are watchable without the Rifftrax accompaniment.
So now that I'm back from the show, was the magic still there? Was it just as delightful this time as it was to see it in the past?
In a way yes, in a way "yes, but." See, hearing them do it live and seeing them turn to their scripts more often reminded me that this was, in fact, a scripted performance, while the TV managed to give a much crisper illusion of ad-libbing and goofing off. I think that's part of what gave the show much of its original charm, was the idea that we were right there with these people seeing the movie for the first time, and watching their wit work through it at the same time we were. When you pull back the curtain, some of that magic is lost once you remember that odds are the actors are only looking at the film as they wait for their next cue.
On the other hand, the humor was just as sharp, and there were multiple moments I and both the local audience and the audience presence for the actual reading were in hysterics. Sitting back in theater seating, when the screen just showed the movie, I could almost feel the presence of a couple of robots sitting next to me cracking jokes, and I found myself mentally making up my own jokes during the silent moments the hosts gave us.
I think humor is best experienced in a group setting, and I felt more comfortable laughing out loud when I heard others around me doing the same thing. There was a connection in the audience, because all of us were there due to our love of a long-cancelled show and a website working to keep the magic alive.
Now, some of the other MST3K alumni went on to do something called Cinematic Titanic, but I have to admit I never really got into it. From my limited exposure it seemed to be more live events, but I could easily be mistaken, and I'm saddened that it recently shut down before I could get into it further.
Now, there is some history I'm not getting into, such as a deep divide between some of the cast and producers of the show, a write-in effort to get Sci-Fi to bring the show back, and the magnificent movie that was created, but I can bring more focus on those in a later topic, for now I just wanted to talked about the program that, if I had to pick only one complete TV series to watch for the rest of my life, it would be this one without a moment's doubt.
Of course, then I might reconsider and pick MacGyver, but I think I'd stick with my original choice.
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