Fans of the beloved TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988-99) have had several reasons to celebrate in recent years; in addition to continued DVD releases, the majority of the cast members have returned to create new, similarly-themed projects that utilize a variety of media to deliver their fresh takes on the format (“riffing,” or comedically commenting on all manner of B-movie dreck as it unspools onscreen).
Michael J. Nelson (the series’ head writer, and host for the second half of the series run), Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy offer downloadable audio commentaries at Riff Trax, where films of a supposedly higher caliber than those on MST3K get skewered. The other new project, headed by MST3K creator and first-half host Joel Hodgson, is called called Cinematic Titanic (pictured, above) and also features Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, Mary Jo Pehl, and J. Elvis Weinstein. While Cinematic Titanic sells DVDs and downloads through its site, the backbone of the project is the live show, which comes to Chicago’s Lakeshore Theater this Thursday (riffing on Santa Claus Conquers the Martians), Friday (Blood of the Vampires), and Saturday (Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks).
We recently spoke with Joel in advance of CT’s Chicago appearance, and here are some excerpts from the interview.
JOEL HODGSON: We’re kind of like re-treading tires…with movies. It’s value-added. You take a movie that people may not be that interested in watching, and then we do our pass on it and make it something that’s fun and interesting and suddenly has more value, whereas prior to that it wouldn’t be.
FACETS: For people who may only know MST3K, what would you tell them to expect with Cinematic Titanic?
JH: There are a couple of differences. Mainly, the people behind the scenes like Frank [Conniff] and Mary Jo [Pehl], who wrote a lot of those riffs that I delivered-and Tom and Crow delivered-they’re out in the theatre now, performing their stuff. I think that’s kind of a major difference. The other thing is, Cinematic Titanic is designed to be performed live and so I really created it with an eye towards doing it live and Mystery Science Theater wasn’t, that was obviously a confection designed to be made in a studio. So if you come to see Cinematic Titanic, it’s really made for that.
FACETS: Didn’t I read that you did a MST3K live show very early on?
JH: Yeah, we did one show at a theater in Minneapolis. That was awkward, because it had to be like a play, you know what I mean? We couldn’t really behave like we were doing a concert of riffing. It was kind of like we were trying to make people believe they were watching us on the Satellite of Love [the space vessel aboard which the series’ story takes place, named in homage to the Lou Reed classic]. It’s also very weird to sit with your back to the audience when you’re performing. It’s the weirdest feeling, and so that was one of the reasons I changed the silhouette array to be the way it is now. You don’t have to turn your back, we’re kind of at a ¾ position where we’re looking at the screen and can physically turn and talk to the audience too.
The live component is a really big part of Cinematic Titanic, much more than Mystery Science Theater. With a lot of movies, we had a chance to perform them live and then we’d kind of take what we learned and bring it in to the movie. We did that with The Oozing Skull [Brain of Blood re-titled], our first feature. We’d actually recorded the first feature then did a live show in San Francisco, and so much new stuff came out of it that we just said, “we actually improved this a great deal, let’s go back and re-record and do it again.” Because we’d improved it, and it was our first movie, so we wanted to make it as good as possible. It really is interesting because when an audience is there and they’re waiting and they’re watching, you just put so much more into it. You’re just sharper for some reason. I think it’s just the way you behave when people are watching and you just want to get a laugh, you know?
FACETS: I remember that Santa Claus was originally done by you back in the MST3K days and I’ve yet to see the Cinematic Titanic version on DVD. What’s the difference with the version you did with CT for DVD and download, and the old days?
JH: It’s one of those things that I was really interested in, over time I thought I really would like to re-riff these movies. It’s kind of like riffing is like beats, you know? You can kind of re-use just like something from a George Clinton record, you can re-use it endlessly in different songs and I believe that about movies. That was kind of the experiment, to go in and take another run at it 15 years later, or however long it’s been since we did Santa Claus, just take another whack at it. I think that the only thing that’s different in our version is that there are a couple more scenes, there might be 5 more minutes of it that we had to cut out when we did it on TV. So that was really it, it’s kind of a way of going back in. It’s such a great movie, and none of us remember writing it. We didn’t look at it prior to writing it, and then we went back and just checked it to see if we had any similar jokes, so we were happy that there weren’t any duplicates.
FACETS: Can you tell me a bit about Blood of the Vampires and Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks?
JH: Blood of the Vampires is really an amazing, strange movie because it’s about Mexico in the 1800s, it’s about a land baron who is a vampire. It takes place in Mexico, but it’s a period movie that was shot entirely in the Phillipines, completely with a Filipino cast, so it’s very weird from the get-go. The other movie is Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, and that’s an Italian Frankenstein movie that’s got, oh…it’s got Frankenstein it and it’s got a hunchback in it…I’m trying to think what else, if there’s another monster in there…
FACETS: I read it also has a “horny, necrophiliac dwarf,” and then someone described it as “just too involved and way beyond twisted to describe,” so it definitely got my curiosity up… Obviously you’re a fan of the whole B-movie genre, what would be some of your favorites?
JH Let’s see…I was just watching The Wasp Woman, which is a [Roger] Corman movie [CT version available here]. There is an aesthetic to that, even though the monster is really awful, it’s kind of like not even monster makeup, it’s kind of just a hat she wears when she becomes the wasp woman. It was a very stripped-down aesthetic, he did a lot with what he had. I like the Italian movies too, all those early Steve Reeves Hercules movies. They kind of have a magic to them. The people making those movies were really talented and they’re really nice-looking movies. I remember, I think it was Hercules Unchained where I was just blown away. There’s the scene that’s lifted from the Samson legend from The Bible, where they have Hercules chained up in a temple. He tears the temple down, and they really tore down a temple on camera with the horses falling down the steps. In today’s world where everything is done on a green screen, you have to admire how dangerous and how strange that was and how really that is a spectacle. And then I remember reading something about that movie, Steve Reeves said it, where he had these chains…he escapes, he tears down the temple and then he goes and fights these gladiators. They were chains that were supposed to look like steel, some artisan had carved them out of wood to try to make them lighter. And he’s whipping around these actors who are dressed as gladiators and he asks the director, “What should I do? I’m afraid I’m going to hurt these guys.” And he [the director] says, “That’s alright, if they don’t get hurt, they don’t get paid!”
-Dan Mucha
Michael J. Nelson (the series’ head writer, and host for the second half of the series run), Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy offer downloadable audio commentaries at Riff Trax, where films of a supposedly higher caliber than those on MST3K get skewered. The other new project, headed by MST3K creator and first-half host Joel Hodgson, is called called Cinematic Titanic (pictured, above) and also features Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, Mary Jo Pehl, and J. Elvis Weinstein. While Cinematic Titanic sells DVDs and downloads through its site, the backbone of the project is the live show, which comes to Chicago’s Lakeshore Theater this Thursday (riffing on Santa Claus Conquers the Martians), Friday (Blood of the Vampires), and Saturday (Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks).
We recently spoke with Joel in advance of CT’s Chicago appearance, and here are some excerpts from the interview.
JOEL HODGSON: We’re kind of like re-treading tires…with movies. It’s value-added. You take a movie that people may not be that interested in watching, and then we do our pass on it and make it something that’s fun and interesting and suddenly has more value, whereas prior to that it wouldn’t be.
FACETS: For people who may only know MST3K, what would you tell them to expect with Cinematic Titanic?
JH: There are a couple of differences. Mainly, the people behind the scenes like Frank [Conniff] and Mary Jo [Pehl], who wrote a lot of those riffs that I delivered-and Tom and Crow delivered-they’re out in the theatre now, performing their stuff. I think that’s kind of a major difference. The other thing is, Cinematic Titanic is designed to be performed live and so I really created it with an eye towards doing it live and Mystery Science Theater wasn’t, that was obviously a confection designed to be made in a studio. So if you come to see Cinematic Titanic, it’s really made for that.
FACETS: Didn’t I read that you did a MST3K live show very early on?
JH: Yeah, we did one show at a theater in Minneapolis. That was awkward, because it had to be like a play, you know what I mean? We couldn’t really behave like we were doing a concert of riffing. It was kind of like we were trying to make people believe they were watching us on the Satellite of Love [the space vessel aboard which the series’ story takes place, named in homage to the Lou Reed classic]. It’s also very weird to sit with your back to the audience when you’re performing. It’s the weirdest feeling, and so that was one of the reasons I changed the silhouette array to be the way it is now. You don’t have to turn your back, we’re kind of at a ¾ position where we’re looking at the screen and can physically turn and talk to the audience too.
The live component is a really big part of Cinematic Titanic, much more than Mystery Science Theater. With a lot of movies, we had a chance to perform them live and then we’d kind of take what we learned and bring it in to the movie. We did that with The Oozing Skull [Brain of Blood re-titled], our first feature. We’d actually recorded the first feature then did a live show in San Francisco, and so much new stuff came out of it that we just said, “we actually improved this a great deal, let’s go back and re-record and do it again.” Because we’d improved it, and it was our first movie, so we wanted to make it as good as possible. It really is interesting because when an audience is there and they’re waiting and they’re watching, you just put so much more into it. You’re just sharper for some reason. I think it’s just the way you behave when people are watching and you just want to get a laugh, you know?
FACETS: I remember that Santa Claus was originally done by you back in the MST3K days and I’ve yet to see the Cinematic Titanic version on DVD. What’s the difference with the version you did with CT for DVD and download, and the old days?
JH: It’s one of those things that I was really interested in, over time I thought I really would like to re-riff these movies. It’s kind of like riffing is like beats, you know? You can kind of re-use just like something from a George Clinton record, you can re-use it endlessly in different songs and I believe that about movies. That was kind of the experiment, to go in and take another run at it 15 years later, or however long it’s been since we did Santa Claus, just take another whack at it. I think that the only thing that’s different in our version is that there are a couple more scenes, there might be 5 more minutes of it that we had to cut out when we did it on TV. So that was really it, it’s kind of a way of going back in. It’s such a great movie, and none of us remember writing it. We didn’t look at it prior to writing it, and then we went back and just checked it to see if we had any similar jokes, so we were happy that there weren’t any duplicates.
FACETS: Can you tell me a bit about Blood of the Vampires and Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks?
JH: Blood of the Vampires is really an amazing, strange movie because it’s about Mexico in the 1800s, it’s about a land baron who is a vampire. It takes place in Mexico, but it’s a period movie that was shot entirely in the Phillipines, completely with a Filipino cast, so it’s very weird from the get-go. The other movie is Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, and that’s an Italian Frankenstein movie that’s got, oh…it’s got Frankenstein it and it’s got a hunchback in it…I’m trying to think what else, if there’s another monster in there…
FACETS: I read it also has a “horny, necrophiliac dwarf,” and then someone described it as “just too involved and way beyond twisted to describe,” so it definitely got my curiosity up… Obviously you’re a fan of the whole B-movie genre, what would be some of your favorites?
JH Let’s see…I was just watching The Wasp Woman, which is a [Roger] Corman movie [CT version available here]. There is an aesthetic to that, even though the monster is really awful, it’s kind of like not even monster makeup, it’s kind of just a hat she wears when she becomes the wasp woman. It was a very stripped-down aesthetic, he did a lot with what he had. I like the Italian movies too, all those early Steve Reeves Hercules movies. They kind of have a magic to them. The people making those movies were really talented and they’re really nice-looking movies. I remember, I think it was Hercules Unchained where I was just blown away. There’s the scene that’s lifted from the Samson legend from The Bible, where they have Hercules chained up in a temple. He tears the temple down, and they really tore down a temple on camera with the horses falling down the steps. In today’s world where everything is done on a green screen, you have to admire how dangerous and how strange that was and how really that is a spectacle. And then I remember reading something about that movie, Steve Reeves said it, where he had these chains…he escapes, he tears down the temple and then he goes and fights these gladiators. They were chains that were supposed to look like steel, some artisan had carved them out of wood to try to make them lighter. And he’s whipping around these actors who are dressed as gladiators and he asks the director, “What should I do? I’m afraid I’m going to hurt these guys.” And he [the director] says, “That’s alright, if they don’t get hurt, they don’t get paid!”
-Dan Mucha
