Mystery Science Theater Is Back

Back in the late 1980s, I attended college in a Major Midwestern University.  I was hundreds of miles from home, living in the dorms and making new nerd friends.  We watched a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation together, but they also introduced me to this goofy UHF show where Minnesota comedians would heckle bad old movies.  I loved it!  It was called Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K), and it starred local comic Joel Hodgson.

I graduated from college in the early 1990s, during the George Herbert Walker Bush recession.  Nobody was hiring fresh college graduates with Computer Science degrees.  I worked a Customer Service job and slept on the carpet of my slum apartment with 2 roommates.  In 1991, my local cable TV utility started carrying Mystery Science Theater 3000, and I made the major purchase of a VHS VCR to record it and save the tapes.

MST3K moved from Comedy Central to the Sci-Fi Channel, and I kept watching, until finally the show was cancelled in 1999.

Years passed.  I met and married the most wonderful woman in the world.  I got a car, a house, gray hair, and a Black Belt in Karate.

I had a dream one night, which I still remember today; I dreamed I got up after midnight, turned on the TV, I barely tuned in a snowy local UHF channel, and I discovered Joel Hodgson was making new episodes of MST3K on a ridiculously tiny budget.  I don't remember much of the content of the show, but it was a marvelous dream!  A forgotten treasure, found on the airwaves!

Kickstarting a Dream

Now, amazingly, 18 years later, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is back!  Thanks to a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, Netflix is now streaming a new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 with an almost completely new cast and crew.

The premise of the show is the same: an everyman hero is trapped on a space station, forced to watch bad old movies by mad scientists.  He fights back against this cinematic torment by heckling the movie with wisecracks and by pointing out the flaws in the movie's story, premise, and outdated stereotypes.  Our hero is assisted by some smart-aleck robots (played by puppets).

The Good

The fresh young comedians in the theater are very good at delivering their jokes quickly and crisply during lulls in the movie.  For Starcrash [], the hero and his robot pals play and sing an original song during a long sequence wherein a lady silently explores a mostly-empty spaceship, turning this dull snooping scene into an upbeat musical montage.

My one complaint is that the robot voices and characters are hard to distinguish: what motivates Tom Servo?  What pain has Crow suffered in his life?

The Bad

Felicia Day plays Kinga Forrester, a descendent of Pearl Forrester.  Mary Jo Pehl left some big patent-leather jackboots for Felicia Day to fill.  I get the impression that Ms. Day is still growing into the role.  Honestly, however, every scene with Felicia Day is a delicious toasty oven-fresh sugar cookie, and you won't mind waiting for Ms. Day to blossom into a sinister domineering comical supervillain.

Patton Oswalt is an excellent fit for MST3K; Mr. Oswalt is a recovering film addict, and well-acquainted with many flavors of nerd culture.  He plays Max, or "TV's Son of TV's Frank;" and whereas Frank Conniff's "TV's Frank" was a lovably dopey man-child, Oswalt's character is (like Oswalt himself) more analytical and able to stick up for himself.

The mad scientists have a ska-inspired musical band (is it still a live band if they're skeletons?) who provide theme and bump music.  The Har Mar Superstar is their capable bandleader.

Joel Hodgson is back in disguise, playing occasional bit parts.  Big name stars stop by for cameos; this is much more practical now that the new show is produced in Hollywood, rather than a warehouse in Minnesota.

The (Lovably) Ugly

The look of the show is very similar; the sets and props look like they are mostly assembled out of household junk and then spray-painted neutral spaceship colors.  The robot puppets look the same, although they now have multiple puppeteers and new comedian voices.  The doors sequence has been updated with stop-motion animated models to look more like dynamically-expanding rooms on a cramped spaceship which unfold to provide reconfigurable workspaces and living quarters.  The costumes are very similar: the hero wears a bright jumpsuit, the villains wear oppressive dark trenchcoats.

The show has a bigger budget, but they didn't lose the charm of the low-budget effects.  The models and animation are very reminiscent of Robot Chicken [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Chicken].

The mad scientists have invented the ability to store and transmit audio/video streams in liquid and use plumbing to pump liquid video around their moonbase.  No technology is perfect, and often long scenes are punctuated by clouds of bubbles.  Sure, they could go digital, but they didn't invent digital video, and they desperately want to make liquid video a 'thing.'

Conclusion

Check out the new Mystery Science Theater 3000!  Fans of the original show have a lot to like in the new show.  The new cast should make the show very approachable for new viewers.  If you ever wanted to talk back to the nonsense you saw on the screen, you will appreciate the fundamentals of MST3K.  You have nothing to lose but your bad attitude.

Fistpump of the Beelzebub

Have you heard of TV Crimes?  It's a podcast wherein film critic Mikey Neumann and screen actor Wil Wheaton dissect and prosecute ciminally bad old TV shows, mostly from the 1980s.

Their most recent episode tackles The Day My Kid Went Punk, a 1987 ABC Afterschool Special about Terry, a sweet teen neglected by his parents who explores a punk lifestyle and gets persecuted for it by all the adults in his life.  I haven't seen it, but I understand it's hard to watch.

Wil Wheaton has both lived through the 1980s and (as a child actor) seen dear friends get screwed up and even die due to bad home environments; as a result, Mr. Wheaton is passionate about the plight of poor Terry.

In the special, Terry starts a punk band so awesome it sells out the local rock club.  The rock club is unnamed.  Sadly, Terry's band is also unnamed, so Mikey gives it a name: Fistpump of the Beelzebub.  Wil is inspired; he wants to see album covers or posters from this band, and proposes a contest; the best entry wins one of his audiobooks!

Accordingly, I threw together this 72dpi 8.5x11 poster, suitable for printing at the local copy shop and stapling onto the local bulletin boards:

Wil mentioned the "Rainbow Room" and "Jane Gerous" (accidentally a great band name at 79:36); Mikey mentioned "Satan's Underpants."  The background image is a detail of a John Martin illustration for Paradise Lost by Milton.  I wanted this to look like the low-budget rock flyers I used to see in the late 80s and early 90s, crudely photocopied with torn paper strips providing the details.

Azure Catacombs

An ancient culture developed a method to preserve the souls of their wisest and most learned citizens at the moment of death.  These souls would continue in a new existence of pure mind, without the pain of old age nor disease, bound in bodies very much like immobile Lantern Archons without offensive capabilities, appearing as glowing dots of light.  An enchanted structure would protect and preserve them, known as "The Azure Catacombs;" labyrinth-like with glowing blue walls.  Powerful members of society would consult with ancient viziers, and descendants of the deceased would be consoled by their revered ancestors.

The Ghostly Warriors yield no quarter!

For maintenance and security, 4 great warriors were also preserved as Ghostly entities:
"Blinky" Oikake (glows red)
"Pinky" Machibuse (glows pink)
"Inky" Kimagura (glows pale blue)
"Clyde" Otoboke (glows orange)

Eventually the Azure Catacombs were sealed and forgotten, either through disuse borne by social disaffection or in order to protect the catacombs from disaster.  Still, the residents persisted peacefully, discussing philosophy and high-minded topics in between long periods of meditation.

This Eye Creature is a hideous yellow orb with a gaping maw

A fissure has opened in the ceiling of the catacombs.  Tragically, a floating Eye Creature has found its way inside, and it has been preying on the hapless Archon-like residents.  This hideous yellow orb has been relentlessly gobbling the poor glowing dots with its huge maw.  The ghostly warriors have been unable to stop it.

The Eye Creature might yield a quarter.

Scale: 5 feet per square

On the map, you can see the glowing blue walls.  There is an "X" near the center of the bottom half of the map where the player characters enter the catacombs, presumably dropping in through a fissure in the ceiling.  The small yellow dots are the helpless lantern archons.  4 large yellow globes serve as failsafe devices which render the ghostly warriors harmless.  On the center of the right and left side are magic portals which teleport those who enter to the opposite side of the map.  The center rectangle is a crypt for the ghostly warriors.  Attractive foods (mostly fruit) occasionally (5% probability per round) appear for 5 rounds at the "X".

If the players can defeat the floating Eye Creature, the grateful residents will provide the player characters with directions to a cache of level-appropriate treasure, and will of course provide their ancient knowledge and wisdom to a limited number of future visitors as if they were a library of minds.

If your players don't recognize this map nor the nature of its inhabitants, deduct them 10 XP each.