Like a lot of lucky viewers, you’ve just stumbled on cable’s hottest cult hit. It’s “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (MST3K to initiates), airing Friday and Saturday nights on the two-year-old Comedy Central channel. The premise is a hoot. As part of a fiendish experiment, mad scientists subject a bumbling lab janitor (played by comedian Joel Hodgson) and his two robot pals to an endless screening of the world’s lousiest movies: “The Slime People,” “Godzilla vs. Megalon,” “Jungle Goddess,” “The Amazing Colossal Man,” “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” … you know, baaaad.
The trio preserve their sanity by riddling the theater screen with nonstop one-liners-as many as 800 per two-hour show. Some are as dumb as their targets, the verbal equivalent of spitballs. Others aim surprisingly high. ALIEN HUNK (on screen): “Man’s destiny is predetermined.” HODGSON (off-screen): “Oh, he’s a Calvinist!” Funny or not, the zingers fly from every imaginable point on the pop-cult compass. Monitoring just a few episodes yields references to Keith Richards, Harold Pinter, Willie Mosconi, Tom Stoppard, Curt Gowdy, Jimmy Durante, Oscar Wilde, Yoko Ono, the Milwaukee Brewers, “Of Mice and Men,” karaoke and the Kurds.
No wonder MST3K draws such eclectic devotees (yes, they call themselves Mistees). Emilio Estevez is hooked, as are the star of “Doogie Howser,” a producer of “Cheers” and the Harvard/Radcliffe Science Fiction Association. Then there’s the MST3K fan club, whose 20,000 members range from juveniles to doctors to computer hackers. Obviously, what bonds them all is the universal urge to sass back at the set. Everyone does it: these wise guys are making a career of it. But there’s more to this show’s appeal. For a generation of viewers, woofers like “Fire Maidens in Space” were part of the diet of their tube-fed childhoods. Now MST3K lets them hoot at the same junk-only this time through three hip surrogates. As for Hodgson, who created MST3K when his comedy act foundered, what matters most is keeping up all those upscale allusions. “We never say, ‘Who’s gonna get this?’” he says. “We always say, ‘The right people will get this’.”
Spoken like a true Calvinist.
