‘MST3K’ blasts off live to San Francisco and San Jose
Strange as it may sound, “Mystery Science Theater 3000” is turning 30. Thanksgiving Day will be exactly 30 years since series creator Joel Hodgson first sat down on TV with robots Tom Servo and Crow to make fun of terrible B-movies.
To mark the occasion, Hodgson and company are taking the show on the road, performing a live version of “MST3K” at venues including the Warfield in San Francisco and City National Civic in San Jose.
Hodgson came up with “MST3K” in 1988 after tiring of his burgeoning stand-up comedy career.
“In Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ album, there’s an illustration for a song called ‘I’ve Seen That Movie Too,’ and it has two people in silhouette in little theater seats,” Hodgson recalls. “I remember looking at it and saying, ‘Oh, that would make a good TV show.’ You could superimpose theater seats and put people in there and have them kind of heckle the movie.”
A few years later, Hodgson recalls reading Michael and Harry Medved’s book “The Golden Turkey Awards,” “which is kind of like the Oscars for bad movies.”
“People were kind of getting hip to ironic viewing; there’s movies out there that are bad, but they’re hilarious to watch. And I remember reading the book going, why isn’t anybody making a TV show with this stuff?”
And so he did just that. After a year on a local station in Minneapolis, the show got picked up by the Comedy Channel, later Comedy Central. After five years playing Joel Robinson, a janitor stranded on a satellite and forced by mad scientists to watch bad movies, Hodgson left the cast in 1993, replaced by Mike Nelson, who starred until the show was finally canceled in 1999. Hodgson revived the show last year with an all-new cast on Netflix, where six new episodes will premiere on Thanksgiving.
The tour puts Hodgson back in the old jumpsuit for the first time in 25
years, riffing alongside new “MST3K” host Jonah Ray for the first time.
“And also the guys playing Tom and Crow, Grant Baciocco and Tim Ryder, and Rebecca Hanson who’s Pearl Forrester’s clone,” Hodgson adds, referring to the show’s recurring characters. “That’s really fun, because they actually have way more experience improvising than I do. They’re very graceful with me.”
By the way, the mid-movie quips aren’t actually improvised, no matter how off-the-cuff they may sound.
“The only time we’re improvising is when we’re writing it,” Hodgson says. “That’s the way we’ve always done it. I mean, we have four people riffing at the same time, so if we just threw out the playbook, it would be a mess. The thing that is very active is the audience reacts different every night, and they could very easily laugh over the setup for your next joke. It’s not like a stand-up who gets to deliver a joke and
stand there until they’re done laughing. If the audience keeps laughing, the movie keeps going, and it could eliminate stuff. So you’re constantly editing and moving pieces of it. When we do sketches, though, they’re much more flexible and malleable, and that has a lot more to do with people’s moods when they’re on stage.”
The tour alternates mocking two movies from the late 1980s. “They’re both adorable,” Hodgson says. “One’s a science fiction movie from Canada called ‘The Brain.’ It has a giant autonomous brain with eyes and a big mouth that occasionally will eat people. And then there’s a sword and sandal movie called ‘Deathstalker II’ that’s got fantasy elements, creatures and wizards and is charming in a completely different way, whimsical and weird.”
San Francisco gets “The Brain,” while San Jose sees “Deathstalker II.” Whatever fondness they have for these oddball flicks won’t stop the “MST3K” crew from mercilessly skewering them on stage, and the fans wouldn’t have it any other way.