Magical Mystery allure
Little Rock’s Drew Jansen recalls writing for ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’
In the late 1980s, well before the internet, social media and streaming services put every type of video entertainment at one’s fingertips, there lived in the farther digits of the dial a slate of programming that catered to the weird and offbeat. One of the most groundbreaking of these was “Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K),” a program that set the bar for a generation of comics to come.
One part sci-fi sendup, one part smart-aleck nerd convo, “Mystery Science Theater 3000” set a blueprint for riff comedy using irreverent pop snark puppets, culture and skewering commentary without coming off as mean. “MST3K” starred its creator Joel Hodgson as Joel Robinson, a janitor trapped on a satellite as the captive of two mad scientists.
Forced to watch B movies, Robinson keeps himself sane by building robots for companionship. Together they deliver a running commentary of humorous heckles on the cinematic sludge before them, silhouetted in the bottom corner of the screen. Lead-ins and other short sketches also punctuated each episode. The show was originally released on local Minneapolis television station KTMA (now WUCW), a low-budget outlet that only enhanced the show’s underground appeal.
Little Rock native Drew Jansen had a ringside seat to this slice of comedic and television history.
“The concept of making fun of cheesy movies did not begin with ‘Mystery Science Theater,’ but I think just the way it was presented with the sort of intentionally cheesy effects and the rough edge set it apart,” Jansen said.
The combination of bargain basement films, oddball sketches and witty banter by Robinson and his cohorts clicked, and “MST3K’s” subsequent move to Comedy Channel/Comedy Central and SyFy Channel widened its audience and solidified its cult appeal. Or, at
least as cultish as a show can be and still be named one of Time magazine’s “100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME” in 2007, winner of a Peabody Award in 1993, twice nominated for an Emmy and garnering multiple nominations for the Cable-ACE Award.
MAN FOR ONE SEASON
Along the way, Hodgson would leave the show during season five citing creative differences and a general discomfort being on camera. As luck would have it, Jansen came aboard as a writer in season six and wrote for one season … just before things turned south on Comedy Central, which canceled the show after season seven.
“I worked season six as my first season there and was only there for that season because that’s when they were having the turmoil with the network and were about to move over to SyFy,” Jansen said. “It was sort of a last-in, first-out situation, which was fine. I was busy with so many other things. It was just, ‘OK, that was fun.’”
Fun through humor is a recurring theme in Jansen’s life, beginning with his Little Rock upbringing in a large Catholic family with a knack for making people laugh.
“We were a funny family, frankly. Very verbal, very much into words,” Jansen said of his four siblings and himself. “We’d be out shopping with Mom and she would find a misspelled word in a sign and she would make it a game. At dinnertime we had the TV on; we’d talk to each other. It wasn’t clangorous noise; our family was always just very funny.”
Coming up through the parochial schools near the family’s Midtown home, including Holy Souls School and Catholic High School, might have also had something to do with Jansen’s developing comedic streak. As anyone who has been there will tell you, there’s no audience more ripe for a good laugh than a classroom full of juveniles who are told to be quiet, especially one in the crosshairs of a quick wit immersed in comics, as Jansen was.
“Even as conservative Catholic Republican as my family was, we were allowed to have on ‘Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In,’” Jansen says of the ’60s-’70s comedy-sketch TV show. “Or maybe Mom just didn’t know what was going on. Through that, I got introduced to Lily Tomlin … I also liked the smart guys, the ones who had a touch of elegance but still didn’t mind being goofy. I love Steve Martin and early Bob Newhart. It was the really verbal people. I was always very much into words.”
Following his graduation from Catholic High, Jansen attended St. John’s University in central Minnesota, after which he was hired as music director and writer at Dudley Rigg’s Brave New Workshop theater in Minneapolis. The theater was known for its program of “theatre without a net,” improvisational comedy based around on-the-spot suggestions from the audience.
FIRST TASTE OF WRITING
“My first taste of writing, especially humor writing, was at the Brave New Workshop,” Jansen said. “I got sketch writing experience and I was the primary songwriter. I wrote music and lyrics and really loved the musical game. I knew that I had a love for writing, and I didn’t really know I was any good at it until I started putting things on stage and people started reacting to it the way that I wanted them to.
“At first, I was more than happy to be behind the scenes and write the stuff and give it to somebody else. But the more I got on stage, I kind of turned into some sort of ham.”
Jansen was gaining experience, but like many around him not much money. For cheap entertainment, the creatives would frequent a comedy club down the street from the theater. There he’d get to know Hodgson, who he’d seen in passing at college, as well as Mike Nelson, who replaced Hodgson in season five of “MST3K,” and Hodgson’s wife, Bridget, a onetime writer on the show.
Though he wouldn’t work with Hodgson on the show’s original run, Jansen recognized his friend’s genius in the finished product.
“That concept is 100% Joel Hodgson, the way his mind works,” Jansen said. “Everybody does it, watch a stupid film and make cracks. Joel just sort of codified it and that was, frankly, one of the first big rifts within the company and one of the reasons [original writer] Josh Elvis Weinstein left, is because in the early, early days it really was improv. Joel, after a while, found if we have a little more control over the humor, we’ll have a more solid product. Josh was not necessarily of the same mind.
“There was some acrimony, but not among most of the major players. I think that’s another hallmark of the family that Joel built; there was kindness and respect, nothing really mean. The whole tone of the show is really just very kind.”
Jansen would return to Little Rock in 2014. Five years later, Hodgson put together a live show, “The Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour,” that played the University of Arkansas Pulaski Technical College and he asked his old pal to introduce it.
“He and I went out afterwards and were talking. I wrote a series of musicals called ‘Church Basement Ladies’ which continues around the country. So, he’d kept tabs on what I was doing, and he knew my sense of humor from over the years. He said, ‘Hey man, we’re going to do this Kickstarter thing and get some people together. Would you be interested in writing?’
“I had no idea that 26 years later, I’d be back doing ‘Mystery Science Theater,’ this time with Joel, which was a hoot and a half. He’s the sweetest man.”
SECOND WIND
Over the summer of 2021, Hansen worked with other writers on the show’s latest revival. He said chemistry in the writer’s room, combined with the accumulated experience of the years, made for an enjoyable experience that rivaled the old days but with tools that were light years away from previous eras.
“It was more fun because of technology,” he said. “In the old days it was literally a VHS and a word processor and we would just be watching the same 10 minutes over and over again. When somebody would say something funny, whoever was keying at the word processor would type which character says it. Tedious.
“Nowadays, they send us the films already edited down with no commentary on it at all, and we can open up the film in this app. We just watch it on our own at our leisure and when we come up with something there’s a little box on the side, you type it in, it automatically time stamps it, and the particular character who says it. It’s very collaborative and a lot more streamlined. I think that also made for a more evenly paced show.”
FOUR DECADES OF COMEDY
More than 40 years have passed in Jansen’s show business career, much of it in improv and if there’s anything that it has taught him, it’s to be prepared for anything. Asked where he and “Mystery Science Theater 3000” might find themselves in the future, he just shrugs.
“It was like a three-monthlong writing period, and those three months are done,” he said. “Every once in a while, they would need us for editing a show. They would say, ‘We need some filler music here,’ so there’d be scattered jobs, but it’s real intense. The writers’ room, we do it by Zoom now. People are writing all around, writing from all around the country. That’s made it so much easier.”
The show continues to hold appeal for audiences. Part of that is nostalgia, but not all as the entire “MST3K” catalog can be seen on demand on the free streaming service Shout! TV. Jansen said the show’s enduring popularity, even across changing comedic tastes and a landscape cluttered with viewing options, lies in its simple premise and the quality of humor that stands the test of time.
“A lot of things change, but the basic idea remains the same,” he said. “People are willing to adapt to the times while still remaining true to that same core idea and not messing with that.”