Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live brings the audience aboard
In the not too distant future, in November A.D., Joel Hodgson’s creation “Mystery Science Theater 3000” will turn 30 years old. To celebrate the anniversary, Hodgson will be climbing into his trademark red jumpsuit for the first time in 20 years and teaming up with current host of the series on Netflix, Jonah Ray, as well as the robot puppets Crow and Tom Servo to laugh at bad movies with a live audience. The tour will be hitting the Hard Rock Live in Universal CityWalk on Saturday, Oct. 20 (4 p.m. and 8 p.m., $39.50-$49.50, hardrock.com).
For those unfamiliar with “MST3K” (as it’s known to fans), the premise finds a host living on a satellite, being forced to watch below B-grade movies with two robots. The trio makes the best of a bad situation by making jokes about the poor direction, crummy cinematography, ridiculous plots and ludicrous dialogue of their viewing material. The show started on a local station in Minnesota before being picked up by The Comedy Channel (which would later become Comedy Central). It was canceled in 1996 and renewed by the Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy) from 1997-1999.
The show never lost its cult following, with fans buying DVDs and watching the occasional rerun marathon. Last year, the show returned on Netflix with Ray as the new host. The second Netflix season (12th over all) is slated to drop on Thanksgiving (the traditional day for an MST3K marathon).
In his time away, Hodgson, 58, continued his passion for deriving humor from movies with a project called Cinematic Titanic. But the Midwesterner says he never became cynical about enjoying movies on their own merits. “I’m just like everybody else,” he said. “I’m hoping for that thing where you accept a movie and trust a movie and then you get taken up into it.”
A practical man, Hodgson never built the kind attachment to his robot puppet friends that audience members do with certain other fictional characters. “I’m not that precious about it,” he said. “We have a PG-13 show and we assume everyone understands they’re puppets. We’ve had a really different path than the Muppets have. It’s much scrappier.”
While many people who watch the show may think it’s just comedians riffing on what they see, Hodgson notes that a lot of work goes into the writing ahead of time, a process that has its own challenges when performing live. “Live works great. It changes it because each audience is different,” he said. “You’re constantly reshaping it for the audience.”
In the end, Hodgson views MST3K not as a critique of other works but as something that stands on its own. “Are you a creator or are you an evaluator? You can’t really do both,” he said. “We just make it.”