Sunday Geekersation: 25 years of Joel Hodgson's 'MST3K'

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Exclusive clip: Joel Hodgson's last 'MST3K' episode An exclusive clip from the bonus features of the new "Mystery Science Theater 3000" 25th-anniversary DVD set taking a look at creator Joel Hodgson's last episode of the series.

%27Mystery Science Theater 3000%27 debuted 25 years ago

A new 25th-anniversary DVD set is out Tuesday

Creator Joel Hodgson is heading up a special Turkey Day marathon of episodes Thursday

Making fun of bad movies was more of a private thing than a public forum in the 1970s when Joel Hodgson was attending Ashwaubenon High School near Green Bay, Wis., and Elton John inadvertently gave him the creative idea of a lifetime.

The album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was popular at the time, and John included an illustration for each song. The one for I've Seen That Movie Too definitely struck a chord for Hodgson more than the others.

"There's these little theater seats and two people sitting in them in silhouette and they're watching a movie," he recalls. "I remember in high school saying, 'You know, that would make a really great show.'

"But nobody's giving out development deals for high school students in Wisconsin."

Maybe they should have. With the help of pals and a loyal fan base, Hodgson launched Mystery Science Theater 3000 25 years ago today at the little Minneapolis UHF station KTMA, took it national to become arguably one of the funniest shows of its time and created an art form out of something many of us just do naturally with our friends.

On the award-winning sci-fi comedy series, which aired 1988-99 on KTMA, Comedy Central and the Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy), Hodgson starred as Joel Robinson, a janitor forced by mad scientists to watch horrid old movies but would make the best of the situation by riffing on the various Z-grade flicks with his in-cinema posse of Crow T. Robot (voiced by Trace Beaulieu) and Tom Servo (Josh Weinstein and Kevin Murphy) on the "Satellite of Love."

Out Tuesday, a special 25th-anniversary MST3K DVD set features four classic episodes with Hodgson and Michael J. Nelson (who replaced Hodgson after his departure in 1993) — Moon Zero Two, The Day The Earth Froze, The Leech Woman and Gorgo — plus retrospective interviews and a bonus feature, Hodgson's last episode featuring the Joe Don Baker cop drama Mitchell.

And to celebrate MST3K's debut on Thanksgiving 1988 — and because Turkey Day marathons were a staple for the show — fans can watch six classic episodes in a row beginning at noon ET Thursday at MST3KTurkeyDay.com. (Have a favorite? Hodgson is taking requests on his Twitter feed.)

A former standup comedian in his pre-MST3K days, Hodgson, 53, is currently finishing up a tour with old cast members as part of the Cinematic Titanic live show. He talks with USA TODAY about MST3K's influence, honing a new style of comedy and what modern movie he deems most riffworthy.

Trailer: 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' 25th-anniversary set A trailer for the new "Mystery Science Theater 3000" 25th-anniversary DVD set, out Nov. 26.

Q. When people take to Twitter to live-snark their way through Sharknado, that seems to be the legacy you've wrought upon pop culture.

A. I just feel so grateful that I acted on my notion. That's the thing I think of the most — it was one of many ideas, and I'm just super glad I talked the other people who helped me do Mystery Science Theater into it.

It's Thanksgiving, man. It's time to give thanks.

Q. What do you most remember about doing the show in its heyday?

A. It was a great job because really we just hung out, watched bad movies all day and said stuff, and had somebody there with a computer recording everything and putting it to time code.

That was the secret of it — we had all this material, every movie had like 700 or 800 riffs and there wasn't any way when we started to create a script that would be a normal script but also have 700 riffs in it. We had to figure that out, but that's what allowed us to make the show. We were able to use a Mac and write everything down and record it and attach it to the movie via time code.

Q. How much time did you spend riffing and recording each MST3K episode?

A. We started out riffing the movies in real time, like improvising. When we got paid to do it, I just decided we had to start writing them. It was going to be a national show and my friends were going to see it. It wasn't going to be a local show in Minneapolis.

We would take about a week when we started to write them, and pretty soon within the first season, it took us about five days, and there were between six and eight of us writing these shows. It was a pretty quick turnaround, and since nobody had ever movie riffed before as a TV show, we didn't have anything to compare it to. We just did as much as we could and then moved on. There was nothing prior to help us go, "Oh, we're shooting for that." It was this new land that we had found.

Q. With this manifest destiny of movie riffing, did you enjoy the freedom of being unshackled and the only show in town?

A. The weird thing about it that I think is interesting is that before movie riffing, there were three flavors of comedy: sketch, like on Saturday Night Live or SCTV; there was standup; and there were sitcoms. We didn't do any of those things.

When we started, it wasn't like they treated us like a real show. It was like sitting at the little kids table at Thanksgiving: "Oh yeah, that's cute. I get it, you're in theater seats and saying smart things." It wasn't like real comedy people when it started.

I have to say, it really all changed when the show was done and there were almost 200 episodes. And then with the Internet, people found it.

People talk about binge-watching — I don't even know what you'd call Mystery Science Theater. It's crazy. But if you like it, there's a lot you can binge on.

Q. Do you feel you set the stage for Rifftrax, Screen Junkies and people just being funny on social media?

A. I love that other people are doing it. It was just lucky — it wasn't by design. We were just doing the right thing at the right time.

In the 25 years since we started, the world has become much more visual. Kids have sleepovers and watch movies, and they show videos at funerals and weddings now. Not saying people should riff on people's videos during a funeral or wedding, but video's really a part of our lives and they're used all the time. I just think that's a natural reaction: to talk and say stuff.

Traveling with Cinematic Titanic in the last six years, we did a very conservative estimate that I've shaken hands with 30,000 people who like Mystery Science Theater, and a lot of them are movie riffing.

Q. You grew up at a time before YouTube and Blu-rays and DVRs, but were visuals and movies always a big thing for you?

A. Oh yeah. A big part of me getting to make Mystery Science Theater was I started out as a standup. When I was 22, I got on (Late Night with David Letterman) and the next year I was a special guest on SNL five times. My whole act was about visuals —creating and showing pictures — and every joke I ever did had a visual component to it. It was natural that movie riffing evolved out of that.

Part of the success of Mystery Science Theater and movie riffing is that you're sharing an image with the audience at the same time – you're both looking at the same thing.

Not to get too flowery in the explanation of it, but standup comedy is really like a straight line between two people, it's a comic telling you a joke, and movie riffing is a triangle because the people performing and the audience are both looking at the same thing.

Q.Your last episode taking on Mitchell is included in the new DVD set. Was that a bittersweet ending to this important time in your life?

A. No. 1, we're Midwesterners so our emotions aren't really that available, I have to say. We're kind of stoic-y, austere people. So it wasn't really emotional.

I wasn't looking at it like I'd leave the show — I just wasn't going to be on camera anymore. I just said, "I created this show. We've gotta put new people in." I wanted to get out from being on camera and just be behind the scenes, really. Once I was out of that, I assumed I'd come back to the show and that's when the fighting happened (with executive producer Jim Mallon).

The fighting didn't happen before I left — the fighting happened after. We just weren't getting along. I really wanted it to keep going and I knew that if I really dug in and he took half the cast and crew and I took half the cast and crew on my side, I felt it'd really hurt the show. I saw that coming and I just decided to avoid that.

Q. From The Beatles to even in a little cult thing such as MST3K that became big, it seems everything goes through that at some point or another.

A. It's just really part of it. When you get something that works, it's magic, but it's impossible to know how it works. It's like lightning in a bottle. And then you get a lot of credit. Basically everybody thinks they're the reason why it's successful. That's where it begins to get hard to keep collaborating on a certain level if there's a lot of scrutiny on it.

Creativity just doesn't do well with a lot of stress, and that's why I wanted to avoid putting stress in the pipeline at Mystery Science Theater.

Q. Looking back, what was your favorite day on the show?

A. I remember specifically there was one day sitting in the writers' room and we were just starting to get press. Surveying what was going on in comedy at the time, Tom Shales from the Washington Post, a really respected big-time media critic, loved Mystery Science Theater. I remember reading that and just being in the room and it was a really fun movie we were riffing on

When we started it was like, "Who cares? You're talking over a movie." That's kind of the attitude I was getting from other people who were in real legitimate show business, and guys like him really legitimized what we did.

Q. One of the reasons why MST3K is so classic is no matter what your sense of humor is, you guys were doing so many rapid-fire jokes that maybe you didn't get one joke but maybe the next two you did and then your buddy next to you got the next one.

A. That's another function of the art form. You think about prior to that, if we were writing on a sitcom, they're all saying, "Well, you've gotta hit the button. You've gotta say your funniest joke before you go to commercial." With us, that's not it. There was nothing like that because the movie was really carrying the story — our job was to just add whatever we thought was funny and interesting and amusing.

Q. How did you find so many horrible movies? Were they little Lost Arks of the Covenant you had to go on an adventure to find?

A. (Laughs) What was going on with syndicated TV was all these guys who were producers and distributors of these B-movies, they basically created movie packages they were licensing to all these local TV channels.

When you're a little local TV channel like KTMA, when you bought a movie package, half the movies you had heard of or were good movies, and the other half were these B-movies. Every little TV channel had these movies and they could run them because the next movie was going to be good — and by good movie I mean like Tarzan or something like that.

We just started to get the movies out of the archive at KTMA that were already licensed as part of a movie package. Those first 22 episodes were just what was there, and when we went to Comedy Channel, HBO/Downtown Productions were the ones who would get rights to a movie. They would send us big boxes of VHS tapes, and (co-star) Fred Conniff, he loves movies more than anybody, he would watch every movie and pick his favorites. During lunch, we'd just watch them and pick out the movies we thought would work well.

It wasn't that hard. In some ways, the distributors were kind of shocked. We were going, "We don't want to pay for these good movies. We just want the crap movies." That was very disorienting to them, like if you're buying cocaine from a dealer and just said, "No, We just want the baby powder instead of the cocaine. Just whatever it is you're filling your cocaine with, we want that."

Q. Did you ever hear from any of the people involved in the movies you riffed on, good or bad?

A. I remember Beverly Garland, a really famous actor who was in a bunch of our movies, and I think she kinda liked it. She was in It Conquered the World and Gunslinger. She also went on to be the mom in My Three Sons.

Actors love attention, and my impression from her was these were just things she did for a paycheck a long time ago, for five or six days of her life. She was in good movies, and she was in really terrible movies. Actors really understand the reality of that more than anybody.

This is probably getting a little too theoretical, but movies back then were so sacred. Movies are something you should be impressed with, movies are magic and they're big and they come into theaters and they come on TV and you should be really impressed all the time. We messed with that a little bit and disrupted that, but really at the end of the day all the people making them kinda go, "Yeah, you know, a friend of ours was doing a movie and he wanted us to be in it and we made $600 that week." They have a clear impression of what that means.

Q. What recent movie would you most want to tackle with Crow, Tom Servo and the whole gang?

A. There are some movies you just know are going to be crazy. Olympus Has Fallen was one that I thought would be pretty awesome.

The truth is, I don't really think of it like that. Movie riffing isn't about serving justice on a bad movie. It's really just collaborating with a movie to make entertainment. It isn't about saying, "You, sir, just wasted $120 million by not making a good movie, and because of that I'm going to riff you." That's kind of the coloring-book version of what we do. It's really just, "Hey, we just want to hang out with you. You're like Margaret Dumont, and we're going to be the Marx Brothers." Everyone looked at Margaret Dumont and believed she didn't know she was in a funny movie. It just shows you what a genius she was.

I'm like everybody else — when I'm in a movie theater, I'm relaxing and hoping for what everybody hopes for when they watch a movie: that it'll take you into it. I compare it to a magic show. A really good magic show is amazing, but a bad magic show is even better.