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Basically; some of the crew behind the beloved cult TV series Mystery Science Theatre 3000 are, seven years after the cancellation of the show, returning to what they do best—making fun of bad moves, under the new moniker Cinematic Titanic.
For novices: Although the conceit of MST3K is very simple—a man and two robots, trapped in space, are forced to watch bad movies and crack jokes throughout, appearing onscreen mostly as silhouettes against the movie—the history is a little complicated. In the course of the show's ten-year run, all three leads were eventually replaced, with the triumvirate of Joel Hodgson, Josh Weinstein, and Trace Beaulieu giving way one by one to Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett. Their various career trajectories post-MST are too diffuse to relate here; the important thing is that, in one way or another, all the principals are back doing work based around the MST concept—suggesting that it really is one of those once-in-a-lifetime ideas.
Mike Nelson was the first to revisit the idea—and the first to find a way to effectively monetize it, with RiffTrax. Essentially, RiffTrax are the MST concept as audio-only—mp3s that sync up to various films and function as an alternate audio track. The consumer provides the DVD, slips on hir iPod, and laughs away. They're cheap to produce, since (unlike the TV version) they don't necessitate buying the rights to movie itself; it's an adjunct product that doesn't infringe on the copyright of the film. nelson started off doing RiffTrax solo, and eventually brought Murphy and Corbett into the fold, essentially recreating the late-season MST3K line-up.
Now Hodgson has reunited with his original partners to do something far closer to the original MST3K concept—obtaining the rights to crummy old B-movies, onscreen silhouettes—and distributing the whole thing on the Web, as torrented video. This may be the purist's choice, but it's sure to be more of a specialist product than RiffTrax; it will probably cost more to produce and generate less revenue.
Not to be outdone, some of the lesser-known folks behind the original show are doing their best to keep the MST3K brand alive, having revived the robot characters for a new series of web animations.
I think it's interesting to look at MST3K as a cultural moment, and to look at what the various people involved took away from that moment—the varying opinions on what made MST3K "work"; was it the jokes alone? the interactive element of the silhouettes? the characters? Each of these new projects takes some element of the old show and runs with it, hoping to put the lightning back in the bottle.
But I don't know—there's a whiff of reliving past glories, here. All of these people are very talented and funny—Joel Hodgson, in particular, is possessed of a truly strange and creative mind. And as I said above, MST3K is one of those great, brilliantly simple ideas, with no built-in expiration date: the idea can run as long as there are bad movies being made.
But doesn't it seem a little—well, like a waste for these guys to still be picking over a corpse that's seven years dead? Wouldn't it be better to leave the past behind and move on to the next thing? |
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