Tuesday, March 19, 2013

One Of My Guilty Pleasures

I was asked by a friend recently if I remembered the show "Mystery Science Theater 3000". I most certainly do!

I was late to the party when I first heard about this show, but once I started watching, I rarely missed an episode.

In a nutshell: The series features a man and his robot sidekicks who are trapped on a space station by an evil scientist and forced to watch a selection of bad movies, often (but not limited to) science fiction "B-movies". To stay sane, the man and his robots provide a running commentary on each film, making fun of its flaws and wisecracking (or "riffing") their way through the movie.

There are no shortage of websites about this show. Just google "mst3k" and see for yourself. 

The worse a movie was, the funnier the show was. Fans of the show agree that the absolute worst movie they ever featured was a turkey called "Manos: The Hands Of Fate".

See for yourself:



Once the show ended, the staff went their separate ways and formed 2 separate websites that continue riffing on more current films.

One is called "RiffTrax" and it features Kevin Murphy, who was the robot Tom Servo on the show. Mike Nelson is also featured. He was the human who was 'imprisoned' with the robots for the last few seasons of the show.

Another website called "Cinematic Titanic" was created by Joel Hodgson, who created the show, and features the same team that first brought the series to life: Trace Beaulieu (Crow, Dr. Forrester), Frank Conniff (TV's Frank), and Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forrester).

There are samples of the recent riffing all over You Tube, here's a look at what RiffTrax is doing:


These shows are like a certain kind of potato chips: "You can't eat just one".




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