"Mystery Science Theatre 3000" 8.01, "Revenge of the Creature"

So the Man with No Name is
actually..."Jennings (uncredited)"

“I’m different!” – Crow T. Robot, Season 8 Intro

“This guy’s bad; this is his first and last movie.” – Crow on a young Clint Eastwood

When I developed my list of season premiere episodes, I quickly recognized that they were overwhelmingly shows and episodes after the year 2000. Even taking my predisposition towards modern television into account, I still had trouble thinking outside the narrative box. I still kept it that way for the final list – I found looking at both a change in the tonal climate and overarching story was more fruitful – but I wanted to also show an episode that had to account for an additional kind of change. Thus, now we discuss the first episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 on the Sci-Fi (now SyFy) channel.

I don’t think that I need to explain the basic premise of the series – it’s probably as Internet-friendly as you can get – but just to be sure, MST3K is essentially a demented and comedic fusion of Greek chorus and DVD commentary. One man – creator Joel Robinson for the first half of the series’ run, head writer Mike Nelson for the second – and his two robot sidekicks, Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot, are trapped in a spaceship (the Satellite of Love, named after the Lou Reed song) and repeatedly forced to watch an unending litany of incompetently-made films. The image of the three characters in the bottom right of their theatre, cracking jokes at a Z-list horror movie with a name like Fire Maidens from Outer Space provides a level of schadenfreude nearing the sublime. Some MST3K subjects include:

• Gamera, the first in the long-running and well-mocked Japanese Godzilla knockoff series, replacing the lizard with a radioactive, rocket-powered turtle who wreaks havoc on Tokyo after being thrown out by his precocious owner’s parents
• Outlaw, a truncated adaptation of John Norman’s fantasy series that replaces most of the sadomasochistic and misogynistic themes with a hideously loathsome sidekick and shots of Jack Palance in a silly robe
• Riding with Death, one of the series’ many films that were actually two episodes of a failed show ineptly stitched together in a desperate attempt to recoup its losses, in this case an adventure series about 70s has-been Ben Murphy as a secret agent who can turn invisible…but doesn’t do so nearly enough
• Werewolf, a (comparatively) recent picture in which an Indian lycanthrope assaults a group of Eastern Europeans pretending to be Americans, as well as Charlie Sheen’s uncle and a corrupt scientist with a dynamic haircut

Of course, any ten-year show inevitable features some amount of change, and by the end of its run, MST3K was on its third channel (if we count its origin on local Minnesota station KTMA), with the entire original cast having left at various points. While I’ve generally found the intensity of its fans regarding their least favorite eras to occasionally silly, it isn’t particularly surprising: with the possible exception of more bizarre and potentially off-putting works like Fishing with John, MST3K is probably the most cult-friendly show ever. If its friendly, snarky design didn’t already make it essentially an entire inside joke, the communal mentality of its fanbase sealed the deal. The constant rights issues (movie rights were only bought for showings, not for repeats or home video), coupled with the show’s inauguration with the World Wide Web, led to some fans engineering a system of sending home-taped VHS recordings around the country, leading the series’ mantra for viewers to “keep circulating the tapes” (even as Shout! Factory and Rhino Home Video have gotten a large portion of the show on DVD, almost all of the show has been individually ported to YouTube, which the producers have supported as a natural evolution of the concept).

Despite the series’ open request for its viewers to not take it seriously, all of these were invariably controversial – Kevin Murphy, probably the best actor in the entire cast, and among the most well-liked by fans, has an anecdote about receiving an 8-foot long banner of hate mail from a single person after taking over the voice of Servo from J. Elvis Weinstein in the 2^nd season – but outside of creator Joel Hodgson’s (Robinson) 5^th season departure and replacement by Nelson, no move was more controversial than the series’ purchase by Sci-Fi from Comedy Central.

Going into the eighth season, the show faced a number of challenges. The fantastic Trace Beaulieu, the last original cast member who had played both Crow T. Robot and the villainous Dr. Clayton Forrester (as well as the last remaining member of the KTMA cast), had left the show due to the increasing amount of network influence (part of the later Comedy Central’s tone in its twilight years was a response to the influence in making Mystery Science Theatre 3000: the Movie, which among other things stipulated that the film be shorter than any normal episode). While it was not yet known to the public, Sci-Fi would continue this demand, wanting the show for whatever reason to make the non-theatre segments more extensive and plot-heavy (an environment Nelson never seemed as comfortable in), and the new season would have to fuse that with the premise’s innate opposition to plot, continuity, and any level of self-seriousness. More than that, however, the show needed to prove that it could be as acidic and funny as ever.

Naturally, a show as deranged and metatextual as this addresses these changes in an almost aggressive way.

The opening segment deals with the logistics of Mike and the bots’ return from the seventh season finale as 2001: a Space Odyssey-esque states of pure energy almost as an afterthought, and the main narrative – Mike has to acclimate himself back on the Satellite in a Planet of the Apes future in the year 2525 (where man is apparently no longer still alive) – barely even questions why Professor Bobo (Murphy’s second main character role) needs to keep sending him bad movies; Mary Jo Pehl’s Pearl Forrester only shows up at the end to barely justify the reestablished premise. The break segments on the Satellite are largely about the tension between Mike and Crow (now voiced by theater actor/writer Bill Corbett), and how the latter’s inexplicable change in personality (and voice, although it isn’t explicitly mentioned here) to the point of not remembering his second human partner. The show essentially sidesteps this change by giving him an elaborate number of off-screen adventures, but his line in the new intro sequence undercuts this anyway by being entirely about him having a different voice.

While Corbett’s Crow quickly became a beloved addition to the cast (while his skill compared to Beaulieu is debatable – I personally find them comparable – his chemistry is very strong, even in the outset), and Bobo would remain Pearl’s underling for the rest of the series (although he was overshadowed somewhat by Corbett’s second underling, the ineptly omnipotent god-alien Observer), a lot of the other additions to the universe were ultimately discarded. The nanites, a microscopic alien species living in the Satellite who would build various tools for the characters, were eventually forgotten (for the best, really, as their jokes were labored and part of plots that only really answered questions the show had no interest in asking), while the future Earth setting would be gone in a few episodes afterwards after Mike accidentally destroys the planet with a nuclear warhead.

Beyond its narrative/cast alterations, the show looked vastly different. The Satellite’s bridge now has a nice, dark blue hue (which Mike highlights, in what is probably the episode’s most explicitly positive reference to the changes), and Bobo’s lab/zoo looks as expansive as its predecessor Deep 13. Even the first film chosen has a much higher caliber than MST3K’s usual fare: even discounting a small role by a young Clint Eastwood, a sequel to Creature from the Black Lagoon is far more respectable than, say, Daddy-O or Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy. While on its own an awful, cheap, public-access film, the fantastic season finale Overdrawn at the Memory Bank managed to star Raul Julia. Season 8 – and the rest of the Sci-Fi years – was also much more willing to use more recent films (Season 10’s standout Future War was apparently described by its own crew as MST fodder, and the cast and crew of Time Chasers had a viewing party for it), while deemphasizing as many black and white movies or, until the last season, non-science fiction or horror films.

Of course, this attitude does bring with it problems for a show that was almost always savage towards any sense of self-seriousness in the films it aired. The new set does look great – it’s not like the show needs dramatic lighting, but it is more visually interesting than the light grey room from before – but it does beg the question of how much attention the show needed to pay to its actual non-riffing elements. I do understand the argument that paying too much attention to the auxiliary elements of a puppet show that itself mocked the self-serious conventions of science fiction can seem a bit self-conscious, but that only really leads us into a circular - and pointless - debate. If the new look goes against the point of the show, then the soul of the show is lost, but then why is the show's value so ingrained in the tertiary parts? I feel like these kinds of debates (and I've found some debates among fans to be aggressive even over a decade after the fact) to kind of miss the forest for the trees, falling into the trap of caring maybe a little too much about the wrong things.

Which leads me to the more important element. I don’t want to deemphasize the riffing in favor of the show’s tertiary elements, but the biggest changes are only particularly relevant there. Of course, this is where the criticisms of older fans can feel more legitimate, because Revenge of the Creature is not quite a classic of the series. It’s by no means a bad episode – Season 10’s German adaptation of Hamlet, starring the recently departed Maximilian Schell manages the trifecta of being too boring, confusing, and existentially bleak – and it has a lot of really good lines, but I didn’t find them quite as memorable as the nigh-constant stream of brilliant cracks in, say, Mitchell or Space Mutiny. There is a lot of fun to be had with John Agar’s almost comically stereotypical ‘50s science team as they torture the Gill Man and crack sexist jokes, but it does take time to get for the riffs to really get going. I suspect this is due to the structure of the riffs. Pretty much the entire second act at Sea World is filled with fantastic jokes, but the first is a little bland and makes the episode feel a little less contiguous.

At the same time, the actual quality of the riffing remains the same, and Corbett fits in very well (some fans take issue with the more antagonistic tone that Mike introduced, and Corbett extends a little, I’ve never had a problem with it). He gets off some good lines while managing two of the series’ favorite tactics: goofy impressions (“does he got a thing?” as a thuggish audience member) and long, over the top monologues and lists, and most importantly manages to do so while not being either too aggressive or passive with Nelson and Murphy. Considering that the Sci-Fi crew would later join up as the main members of Rifftrax, Nelson’s post-MST3K riffing company, the chemistry is expected, but it is surprising how strong it is right now.

I re-watched this a few months ago to prepare for this article (it’s taken some time to actually finish this), and in starting it again while finishing it I was planning to be more critical on the episode because of how comparatively slow it is. But by the end of the second act, I was much more positively inclined, and not just because the riffs had gotten much funnier. I started to think more contextually, and how the season looked by the end. Season 8 started a little rough, but it would eventually give us some of the most best and crazed episodes of the entire series, such as Space Mutiny, Prince of Space, and Time Chasers, and while there were definitely problems in the Sci-Fi years (namely the somewhat weaker and fairly more extensive host segments), it remained a wonderfully anarchic example of snarky, 90s humor at its more anarchic and best. While some of the peripheral changes were a little odd, the show remained as good – and bizarre – as it ever did.

Lingering concerns:

• I’ve found that almost all of the time, a MSTie’s preferred era is based on when he or she started watching. As I came in long after the fact, I don’t really have a real preference outside that for Kevin Murphy's Servo. To a certain extent I find Mike to be funnier but Joel’s more lackadaisical, less judgmental attitude better for the premise.
• I mentioned earlier that Eastwood’s role might be part of the reason this film was used to kick off the season, partially because the actual methods of boosting ratings are kind of lost on a show that has literally two sets and about 15 minutes of plot in a 90 minute show. However, Best Brains was able to get actual celebrity cameos into the show. Minnesota Viking Robert Smith (as a mute, post-apocalyptic caveman) and longtime critic Leonard Maltin (as himself, presumably suffering penance for his mocked positive review of Season 7 finale Laserblast) appeared onscreen later, respectively in 8.03 (the Mole People) and 9.09 (Gorgo).
• Also, I don’t want to imply that “guest stars” only got on now; one of the rare pleasures of the series was seeing actors like Gene Hackman, Adam West, Robert Vaughn, or Sho Kosugi slumming in some dumb movie.
• I tried very hard to avoid just turning this into a list of my favorite quotes, but I loved many of the riffs from the Sea World portion. Among others, I really liked Mike’s voicing the militant dolphin with, “if we had opposable fins, we’d kick your ass!” and “I do not accept my slave name!”, as well as Servo’s “I know you’re bewitching a man into your web of deceit and lies…” as the obnoxious reporter talking to Lori Nelson).
• One part that was surprisingly not touched on, but I actually find hilarious, is how in the initial fight scene in the pool, the injured milkman guard is pulled out of the water by a guy just yanking him up by his wrists.
• Man, it seems like every crappy science fiction/horror movie from this era involves a love triangle with two totally unpleasant jerks. Considering how common the subtextual threat of sexual violence against women is (and in the 80s Creature offshoot Humanoids from the Deep, horribly textual), the concept of romance in these films always seems like an awful Hobson’s choice.
• Servo’s joke about the stereotypical writing for Lori Nelson’s ichthyologist character would later be brought back in Rifftrax as the “makeup, boys, and shopping” running gag.

Next time: Chuck Bartowski goes out for dinner, Adam Baldwin enjoys photo editing, and a high concept show starts to really come together in "Chuck Versus the First Date".