Joel Hodgson Platon

Released in 1966, Manos: The Hands of Fate is a D-minus of a B movie: Its plot, about desert-­dwelling pagans, makes little sense. Its cast could be out-acted by the stars of a day care holiday pageant. And the film is paced with the urgency and focus of a box turtle on lithium.

Luckily, no one has to watch Manos alone. It’s just one of the nearly 200 horror flicks, teensploitation romps, and outer-space oddities to appear on Mystery Science Theater 3000, the cult-­stoking comedy series that provided awful films with hilarious, sharp, high-speed detractors’ commentary. MST3K is the story of a sarcastic Earth dweller—played initially by series creator Joel Hodgson and, in later years, by head writer Mike Nelson—who’s exiled to a ramshackle spaceship called the Satellite of Love, where he’s forced to watch an endless supply of crapola movies. Our hero’s response to such torture, naturally, is to unleash a torrent of withering one-­liners, or “riffs,” that he delivers with the help of a couple of robot pals. “It was all based on this ­simple idea: that people say shit when they’re watching movies,” Hodgson says.

And the shit-saying on MST3K was brilliant. The show was awash in quick, smart wisecracks, not to mention cultural references that ran the gamut from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Miles Davis to Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. Watching MST3Kwas like hanging out with a trio of underachieving-­genius best friends. At a time when depictions of geekery were limited mostly to Urkel and Comic Book Guy, the denizens of the Satellite of Love were brazenly brainy—which explains why MST3K’s fan base reportedly included such meganerds as Al Gore and Patton Oswalt.

As fun as MST3K was, though, life aboard the Satellite of Love wasn’t always easy: The show was never a ratings smash, and tension between Hodgson and producer Jim Mallon led to Hodgson leaving the show just a few years into its run. In later years, members of the show’s Midwestern-based, DIY-determined staff found themselves struggling with the sort of big-TV bureaucracy they’d long fought to avoid.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of MST3K’s national debut, wired presents an oral history of the greatest talk-back show ever made. It all begins in the late ’60s in rural Wisconsin, where there was this guy named Joel, not too different from you or me …

PART I: IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE

Joel Hodgson (creator, writer-producer, host, 1988–1993): I was a TV junkie as a kid. This was when there were three channels, so I’d watch the farm report or this terrible polka show called Dairyland Jubilee. If I happened to run into a Godzilla movie—or a monster movie of any kind—it was like hitting the lottery.

Sometime around seventh grade, I got into ventriloquism and magic. There were these amazing magic catalogs where you could find any trick that you would see a magician do on TV. But because my parents were really big do-it-­yourselfers, I started learning to build my own stuff, like magic tables and tricks. Through high school I figured I’d be a comic magician. I thought I’d work on a cruise ship.

Instead, in 1982, after graduating college in St. Paul, Minnesota, Hodgson left the Twin Cities and headed to Los Angeles, where he befriended such comics as Jerry Seinfeld and Garry Shandling and where his clever, prop-filled stand-up act quickly made him a breakout star.

Hodgson: It was right when stand-ups were becoming famous. If you had chops and were original, you could move really quickly. I got on Letterman within maybe four months of relocating to LA. Then I got on HBO’s [1983] Young Comedians special and was a guest on Saturday Night Live.

Eventually I got asked to be in a Michael J. Fox sitcom called High School U.S.A. I didn’t think it was funny and said no. They doubled the money, and that kind of offended me. I realized, oh, that’s right, my opinion means nothing in Hollywood. I’d seen other people compromise, and I felt that once you gave up on what you wanted to do, you couldn’t go back. It was selling out. So I decided to go back to Minneapolis.

Josh “J. Elvis” Weinstein (writer-performer): I met Joel after he came back to Minneapolis. I was 15 and had just started doing stand-up. He had an air of specialness about him, because he had been in the big time. He was definitely an artist among comics.

Hodgson: I had money in the bank from stand-up, and I was living off that. And I found I had more ideas when I was bored, so I got a job in a T-shirt factory putting appliqués on T-shirts. I also started collaging these robots out of objects I found at the Salvation Army. That’s what I was doing when I met Jim Mallon.

Mallon, a filmmaker and prankster, was the production manager at Channel 23 KTMA, a small Twin Cities station whose programming included network reruns and regionally produced shows. One of his first hires was crew member (and future MST3K performer) Kevin Murphy.

Jim Mallon (writer-performer, producer): The programming at KTMA was bottom-basin. Our prime-time headliner was Love, American Style paired with Hawaii 5-0, and we had the worst movie library imaginable.

Kevin Murphy (writer-performer, producer): We started seeking out people in the community who could be on TV, and one of them was Joel Hodgson.

Mallon: Joel had three or four drawings on a yellow pad, and he said, “You know how they have these hosted movies? How about instead of having the host at the commercial breaks, we have the host be in the movie?”

Hodgson: It was an idea I’d had tucked away in the back of my mind since high school: On Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album, there are illustrations in the liner notes. And for the song “I’ve Seen That Movie Too,” it’s got little silhouettes watching a movie. I remember going, “Someone should do a show like that. Run a movie and have these people in silhouettes say stuff.”

Hodgson set the show in outer space and cast himself as “Joel,” a likable janitor who is blasted into orbit and forced to endure all manner of bad movies. Inspired by the 1972 sci-fi drama Silent Running—in which Bruce Dern plays an outer-space botanist who befriends a trio of robots—Joel created and built three chatty pals to join him: the pseudo-suave, sarcastic Tom Servo; the bigmouthed, perpetually eye-rolling Crow T. Robot; and the sweet (but appropriately spacey) sidekick Gypsy. Though Jim Mallon would eventually play Gypsy, in the early seasons the robots would be voiced by local comedians (and MST3K costars) Josh Weinstein and Trace Beaulieu. The program debuted on KTMA on Thanksgiving Day 1988.

Hodgson: The movie in the pilot is The Green Slime, which was perfect for Mystery Science Theater: It has big, goofy monsters, guys in suits, and serious people trying to put across real emotion in an absurd situation. But it became clear, after a few films, that this format would work with anything.

Weinstein: The whole production cycle at KTMA was like 24 hours long. We’d gather at the station and Jim would have a couple of movies that he’d pulled out of the station’s library. He’d say, “What do you think about this?” We’d watch maybe 10 minutes and go, “OK, yeah. That will do.”

Trace Beaulieu (writer-performer): I learned how to talk back to movies by reading Mad magazine. They were the first to not treat film like the reverential art form that Hollywood would like you to believe it is, and they would do it visually and verbally. It was an absolutely brilliant thing for a kid to read that and go, “Hey, not everything is the way grown-ups are saying it is.” But in the first season we basically went in cold without watching the films. If you look at those episodes, they’re real hit-or-miss. It was just off the top of our heads.

Weinstein: We eventually realized, hey, this might be funnier if we had some jokes in our back pocket.

Beaulieu: As a character, Crow was a wiseass. He was certainly influenced by Groucho Marx—always tilting at some kind of authority. But he started out with a very stilted, robotic kind of approach. We had scripted it so that after every line, Crow would say, “Yes, Joel Hodgson. No, Joel Hodgson.” It’s very hard to generate other voices or impressions in that sort of voice.

Weinstein: I was inspired to make Tom Servo sort of a smarmy AM radio DJ. He had this incredibly inflated opinion of himself and considered himself a ladies’ robot.

Hodgson: Josh really is Tom Servo. When Josh was 16, he drank single-malt scotch and smoked cigars; he was like a 40-year-old man in a 17-year-old body, which is like Tom Servo. And Crow is like Trace: He can do millions of characters, and he splits the difference between being playful and cynical.

Mallon: If I channeled anybody for Gypsy, I channeled my mom. She had a heart of gold and always looked to the best of everything and the best of everyone. And when confronted with difficult things, she was somewhat lost [Laughs]. She didn’t know how to negotiate when things went poorly. She would be hurt, so Gypsy would be hurt at times and turn to the other robots for support.

Crow T. Robot Platon

Beaulieu: Our budget for the show was microscopic. I think Josh and I were pulling down $25 a show, and I think Joel’s budget was a little higher, because he had to build props. We thought, well, let’s see how far this goes. We didn’t really know how long the show would last or if anyone was even watching it.

Then we put the station’s phone number up on the screen and started getting feedback. That’s when we realized, hey, there’s more than just four or five people watching this.

Hodgson: Jim Mallon had the presence of mind to go to the station and make sure we had the rights to the show. He then said to me, “The only logical thing is for us to be 50-50 partners, so we’re not working for each other.” And I shook his hand and said, “I’ll run the creative; you run the business and the technical.”

Mallon: The show was a lot of work. By around March or April [of 1989], we were all kind of burned out. And it just happened at that time that HBO decided—based on the success of music TV—that they could create comedy TV, and they were looking for programming. We went through our tapes and pulled out seven minutes of the best material we had.

PART II: UNTAMED YOUTH

On November 18, 1989, Mystery Science Theater 3000 made its cable-­network premiere on the nascent Comedy Central network (then called the Comedy Channel). It was the first effort from Mallon and Hodgson’s company, which they named Best Brains.

Mallon: Initially they wanted us all to move to New York to make the show. Some of us had fami­lies, and none of us wanted to just drop everything and move. Also, we’d been shown the new studios they built, and they were tiny—to us it looked like a horrible place to make the show. Finally, we said, “We have to make it out here.”

Murphy: If we had done the show in New York, it would have been canceled within a season or two. There would have been people in there sticking their fingers in it. And the reason the show got to grow was because nobody wanted to come out to Minnesota.

Bill Corbett (writer-performer): The Best Brains office was in this industrial park in a second-ring suburb, by all these medical-­equipment buildings. It could not have been more generic-­looking. When people took the Best Brains tour, they were often shocked: “Is somebody going to kidnap us and kill us?”

Mallon: We had to take a warehouse space and turn it into a feasible studio—and also pay staff and support people—on next to no money. So hardly anybody made anything on the first [Comedy Channel] season. But everyone was getting to do what they’d dreamed of, which was to make a living making television comedy. Even if it was a poor living, it was intoxicating. And that energy helped carry the day for the first season.

Hodgson: We weren’t very strict about who we hired. They weren’t prebuilt writers, and that’s probably a good thing.

Frank Conniff (writer-performer): I’m from New York City. I’d moved to Minneapolis in 1985 to go into drug rehab. I ended up staying and doing stand-up comedy. Basically, I was a very unknown stand-up comedian when I got on Mystery Science Theater.

Mike Nelson (writer-producer, host, 1993–1999): At the time I was hired, I was a waiter-slash-comedian, and I was working at a TGI Friday’s so I could have a flexible schedule. My stand-up was a little bit heady. I would do an impression of Robert Frost, which was tough in places like rural Wisconsin and Minnesota. People didn’t want experimental stuff. They wanted their dick jokes, and they wanted them now.

Though MST3K boasted a remarkably talented writing staff, its real stars were the B movies that were riffed apart in each episode. The series would skewer all manner of films, from cheapo action flicks like The Pumaman (1980) to drecky sci-fi-horror amalgams like Night of the Blood Beast (1958) to creepy kids’ fare like Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders (1996).

Hodgson: Film distributors would do this trick where they’d license you several movies. Half of them might be movies you’d heard of, and half were the movies we actually wanted, the B movies. We didn’t want the cocaine—we wanted the baby laxative they put in the cocaine.

Art Bell (Comedy Central executive, 1989–1996): We probably sent 10 films for every one they picked for the show. It seemed like we’d find the perfect movie for them, and they’d say, “No, that doesn’t work.” But the fact that they were so picky helped make the show as good as it was. They honed bad-movie selection into a fine art.

Beaulieu: It’s a little dangerous to say, “Yeah, we watched television all day, and it’s really hard work.” But you’re watching the movie in second-by-second increments. It becomes an extremely grueling process. Josh will remember this better than I, but there was one movie that caused us to go out and get beer and tequila.

Weinstein: That was [the 1957 camp classic] Untamed Youth. I don’t think it was necessarily worse or better than any other film; I think we were just in a bad mood that day. We went out while we were writing it, got tequila and Mickey’s Big Mouth, and got a little hammered [Laughs]. It didn’t really up the productivity, but it elevated the mood, because it was drudgery.

Corbett: When we watched the movies, we were looking for a bunch of things. It couldn’t be god-awful in terms of sound and picture, although we did a bunch of them that were borderline in that regard. And the ones that were just boring and really, really talky—where we couldn’t find any space to get any jokes in—those were rejected pretty quickly. We also tended to stay away from super­violent or NC-17 stuff.

Mike Nelson: You’d get, like, a box of gory Italian horror movies where there were nuns eating each other. And we’d just go, “We can pretty much disqualify that.”

Murphy: There was one submission called Demon Rugsuckers From Mars, or maybe just Rugsuckers From Mars. [Ed. note: It’s actually titled Over-Sexed Rugsuckers From Mars.] It’s about vacuum cleaners. And there was a scene with this dorky bearded fellow making graphic love to a vacuum cleaner. That was the one time I thought, what the hell am I doing with my life?

Corbett: One of the movies that stood out for me was [1988’s] Space Mutiny. It was a South African film that was really fun and really dumb and gave us the gift of having a character killed off pointedly one moment and then, five minutes later, sitting back at her desk. Another one was [1995’s] Werewolf, which was set in the Southwest but had all of these inexplicably Eastern European people mangling the pronunciation of the word werewolf—there are about seven different ways they pronounced it. And the werewolf looks really different every time. It’s like they had a new makeup artist recruited every day to do it. Sometimes it looked like a little bat; sometimes it just looked like a guy with some fur glued to his nose.

Bridget Jones Nelson (writer-performer): When I started on the show, Mike and I were engaged. I was writing scripts at home, so Mike would come home and the movie was still on the VCR, and he’d be like, “Oh, God—please!” But occasionally, you’d be watching the movie and you’d forget to riff, because you’d get wrapped up in it. Even if it was [the sluggish 1985 fake-doc] Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues, I’d be like, “I kind of want to know what’s going to happen!”

Hodgson: Our riffs were never too negative. We were the audience’s companions, and people don’t want to spend time with assholes. If you’re negative, it may be funny, but it’s not sustainable. So we had a lot of respect for the movies, because we had to work with them. Trace once said a really clever thing: “The movies are Margaret Dumont, and we’re the Marx Brothers.”

Mallon: A lot of these films were owned by, say, fertilizer salesmen. They were all characters, and part of the challenge of the show was dealing with them.

Bell: There were crazy chains of ownership for all of these films. Sometimes people died and left the movie to their grandson. We had to track them down, and some people were reluctant, because they said, “What do you want to do with this movie?” They often didn’t know how to price these things, and we were trying to buy this stuff by the pound. We had a lot to buy, and we didn’t have a lot of money.

Steven Paul Mark (Comedy Central executive and lawyer, 1991–1996): The biggest legal challenge was clearance. Mystery Science Theater 3000 used feature films, and in those days it was a real struggle to get the studios to grant licenses. Some of the bigger movies they wanted never got on, because the studios wanted too big a license. And sometimes, you’d clear a movie and somebody would come out of the woodwork and say, “Oh, no, no, no—that’s our film.”

Conniff: Once we agreed to do a movie, and once we got the rights to it, we never abandoned it. We were all-in and committed to however bad and however painful it could be. And a lot of time, the pain that the movie gave us would be incorporated into our riffing and our comments. That fit into the basic premise of the show—that Joel and the bots were being subjected to cruel experiments by watching these movies, and making jokes was a way to help them get through it.

Hodgson: I’m really proud of how the writers’ room was set up. I had read a bunch of creativity books and I wanted to avoid ever saying no to anybody in the writers’ room. I knew that would be really bad. And there was no one sitting at a table and pitching jokes—you said your riffs to the TV. That’s what allowed us to do them so quickly. It freed up everybody’s id.

Corbett: We all had our riffing styles. Mike Nelson’s style was to kind of hang back, and then come in with a precision joke, as opposed to a lot of us who just blurted out a bunch of stuff and, due to the laws of chance, got a good one off eventually. Mike usually waited and struck and then made everybody laugh. Mary Jo and Bridget Jones Nelson often provided these two vaguely Valley Girlish characters, often called Debby and Susan, who every now and then would just be imposed on the reality. And Kevin Murphy often had sort of strange musical ephemera—yodeling and whatnot.

Mary Jo Pehl (writer-performer): The atmosphere in the writers’ room was cacophonous. There was no pausing to say, “Let me add to that joke.” And the typist had to transcribe everything that he or she could catch. Sometimes we’d be stopped on a frame for a good 10, 15 minutes, because there were so many jokes.

Corbett: Everybody had sort of group Tourette’s syndrome, and we tried to capture it all.

Hodgson: There was so much space in these movies to make jokes. And that allowed us to explore really deep references that were amusing to us.

Bridget Jones Nelson: We didn’t have the Internet when we started, so our references were from our own brains. There was no looking stuff up.

Mike Nelson: In one movie, there was a Japanese girl running, and Trace said, “Look, she stole Mike’s keyboard.” And this was based on a girlfriend that I had who stole my keyboard and flew it over to Japan. That was officially the most obscure joke we ever made.

PART III: IT CONQUERED THE WORLD

Because Comedy Central was still struggling to define its sensibility, it took a while for MST3K to find viewers.

Weinstein: We had to go to an outer-ring-suburb bar on a Saturday morning to see a premiere, because none of our cable companies carried the Comedy Channel at that point.

Bell: The network had a variety of movies and some television shows, but Mystery Science Theater 3000 really got noticed. It became a cult hit, which was good enough for us in the first six months. It was the Comedy Channel’s first attention-getting show, in a big way. And we really rode that to success in terms of getting better distribution and advertising sales, and keeping the network alive.

Mallon: In those early days of cable, ratings weren’t anything—but if you could get positive media, that was huge.

Keith Olbermann (from a December 17, 1990, review of Mystery Science Theater in the Los Angeles Times) Wrapped in the guise of a kids’ show (Joel Hodgson—the human—regularly reads mail from youngsters who send him drawings of the robots), Mystery Science Theater 3000 contains some of the hippest, deepest satire of the generation.

Mike Nelson: We rode a lot on the fact that critics really liked it. It was kind of like the way HBO makes its money on Real Sex, but then has a couple of prestige projects. We were like a prestige project, if you can call a comedy puppet show a prestige project.

Beaulieu: There was an early article about the show in a national publication (I can’t remember which). We all went to the mall for lunch, so we went and bought a copy of the magazine and read it as we were eating our pink gravy from the Chinese restaurant. We went, oh, that’s really cool. Other people are watching it. I guess we’ll go back to work now. It’s a very Midwestern response to getting any praise.

Mike Nelson: The Minnesota Vikings had their training camp kitty-corner from us. And there were guys on the team who loved the show, and they would just come over. So occasionally there’d be these giant guys standing in the editing suite. We would go, “Who the hell is that?” “He’s the long snapper for the Vikings.” So that was our personal little fan club.

Beaulieu: Frank Zappa was a fan. He actually called the office once, and we got to talk with him. He was very complimentary. He said it was “the funniest fucking thing on TV.”

Weinstein: During the first Comedy Channel season, the level of arrogance throughout the company was huge [Laughs]. We totally believed that we were incredibly hot shit who’d beat the system and knew how to do show business better than anyone else. They like to aw-shucks it, language-wise. But I mean, Christ—the company was called Best Brains!

Hodgson: When you’re from the Midwest, especially back then, it’s do-or-die. You’re not in the business, and you don’t have relatives in the business, so you only have one shot, and you really have this adversarial feeling about the business. And part of our attitude was because of the band the Replacements. In Minnesota we were so excited about them because they were so unpredictable and talented. But they hated the industry. That’s what was on everyone’s minds: If you let the executives tell you what to do, they’ll wreck your product forever. And as a comic, I had the same worry.

Weinstein would depart the show in 1990, leaving Murphy to take over the role of Tom Servo. It was one of several staff exoduses MST3K would endure during its run—though the show’s following would continue to grow, especially with the advent of home-­Internet providers in the early ’90s. Newsgroups like alt.TV.MST3K were hives of show-specific discussions and trivia, and the series’ outspoken viewers—dubbed “MSTies”—became one of the first fan bases to rally themselves via the Internet.

Mallon: Fans of Mystery Science tend to be above-average smart—you know, B-plus students and higher. And those are some of the ­people who first adopted the Internet. They were very passionate about the show.

Later we did our first national convention, and about 2,500 people flew in from around the country. We also did the first live show, and afterward we had a party. On Monday morning somebody looked at one of these Usenet groups and there was a detailed blow-by-blow description of who had come to the party, who they’d danced with, who had been drinking, and who hadn’t.

Mike Nelson: Since the conventions were focused on the show, it was the only place you could go and actually be recognized. So you walked through a convention and people would actually go, “Hey look, it’s Mike Nelson.” Otherwise, I could live a very easy life without ever being bothered by anyone. Occasionally someone would see me buying a toilet plunger at Sears and go, “Are you Mike Nelson?” But it was once in a blue moon.

Murphy: We always encouraged people to share tapes of the show with each other. But the online thing was born of itself. The whole newsgroup that started was self-generated. We didn’t have anything to do with it.

Occasionally the producers and stars would hear from the creators and stars of the very movies they mocked.

Mike Nelson: In the early days, we’d go to lunch and divide up the mail. There’d be maybe 10 letters, and it was either fan mail or it was hate mail—it was a little lottery. Sometimes we’d open them up and say, “Oh, mine’s a ‘Why the hell are you guys talking over my movie?’ letter.” It was really exciting to get one of those. Most of the time we heard that sort of complaint secondhand, because nobody’s going to call you up and say, “How dare you make fun of my really, really crappy movie that everyone acknowledges is crappy?” But privately you would hear, “Oh, I worked with this director, and I brought up MST3K, and he started yelling.”

Hodgson: The first guy to contact us was Miles O’Keeffe, the star of Cave Dwellers [a 1984 Conan the Barbarian rip-off]. He tracked us down and called us. And he was supersweet, like, “Man, I’ve been waiting a long time for something like this to happen to one of my movies.” It was really cool.

Tom Servo Platon

Rick Sloane (director, 1988’s Hobgoblins): I actually submitted three movies to them. I really avoided giving them Hobgoblins, because I had a bad feeling that they were going to grab that one. But I know Hobgoblins is bad. I mean, I was there when we made it. On the very first day of photography, when the script called for a puppet fight, we threw a puppet on one of the actors. But the puppets couldn’t do anything, so the actors were pulling them on and off themselves. I knew then that we were in trouble.

Eventually, I submitted the film to them, and they had it 12 hours before calling me and saying they wanted the movie. The night the MST3K episode aired, I phoned all my friends and told them to watch. But if I had seen it first, I wouldn’t have told anybody when it was on [Laughs]. They improved that movie—they made it watchable. But I’ve never been fond of the fake interview they did with me over the end credits. They drag down a cardboard cutout and say, “Let’s do an interview with director Rick Sloane,” and ask, “Is it true you have rat droppings for brains?”

But I love the episode. I’ve actually had parties where I screened it. And it gave me an excuse to make a sequel. [Ed. note: Hobgoblins 2 was released in 2009.]

PART IV: THE DAY THE EARTH FROZE

In 1993 MSTies got some unwelcome news when Hodgson—the Satellite of Love’s affably goofy leader—announced he would be leaving the ship (and the series) for good. It was a departure that shocked fans but surprised few of the show’s veteran staffers due to long-simmering tensions between Hodgson and Mallon.

Murphy: When you have something successful, it starts to look like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Jim Mallon and Joel ran the show, and I don’t think they liked each other at all.

Mallon: I think Joel operated under the idea that this was his show, and everyone was working for him. And everyone else was into this sort of cooperative mode—that it’s all of us working together. So it would be somewhat analogous to John Cleese saying, “Oh, by the way, this is my show, and you guys work for me.” The rest of the Pythons would have probably taken exception with that.

Hodgson: I was fighting with Jim Mallon. We had decided, oh, let’s be like Star Trek: The Next Generation and do a movie. Instead of 22 movies a year, we’ll do one really good one and be rich and famous. And that’s when Jim said, “OK, well, I’m the producer and I’m the director.” And I just felt like that didn’t acknowledge my position. I’m like, I created this. Where’s my acknowledgment? I felt that was kind of a power grab on his part. We were an ensemble. We did everything as a group. So that’s when I kind of said, “If you direct this, I’m leaving.” And it just all fell apart after that.

Mallon: Basically, we got to this conclusion that whatever Joel thought the show was at the beginning, it now didn’t function that way. And so Joel had a choice of what he wanted to do about it. And ultimately he chose to leave the show.

Hodgson: I wasn’t the kind of person who would have done a bad sitcom, and I also wasn’t the kind of person who would have done a crap version of the movie. I knew it was wrong. And I decided to walk away.

PART V: THE CREEPING TERROR

Hodgson’s replacement would be Mike Nelson, then the show’s head writer and a fan favorite known for his ­arsenal of onscreen impressions that included everyone from the Smiths’ Morrissey to A&E Biography host Jack Perkins. Nelson would host the show for more than five seasons and star in the commercially disappointing but fan-embraced 1996 MST3K film.

Mike Nelson: We brought people in and auditioned them, and that was a little weird. We’d be writing, and I’d see these guys marching in and throwing on jumpsuits. I’m like, “Whoa, whoa—who’s that guy? I’m not going to write jokes for that guy!” But I did a camera test with Trace and Kevin, and we just sort of improvised and messed around. We knew that people really had a fondness for the show, so we tried to make it as nonjarring as possible. We said, “Let’s just go slow here and not make any radical changes.”

Hodgson: When they told me, my only objection was that he was kind of like me—a white doughy guy from the Midwest. But it worked out great. They stuck with the formula really closely. I think they did a really good job.

Beaulieu: Since Joel’s character created the robots, his relationship with them was kind of parental. Then when Mike’s character came in, it was a completely different dynamic. He had to keep those guys in line, but he was also one of the gang. The onscreen persona was like a pizza restaurant manager who’s only like maybe a ­couple of months older than the staff is.

Mallon: If you go through whatever’s archived on the web, you’ll see right away that the fans divided into the Joel camp versus the Mike camp. But at the end of the day, the bulk of the show was making fun of bad movies, and that didn’t change at all.

In the mid-’90s, two more beloved cast members exited the show: Conniff, who played a moronic, Joel-torturing henchman named Frank, left in 1995. Beaulieu—who played Frank’s boss, Dr. Clayton Forrester, while also voicing Crow—departed in 1996.

Beaulieu: One of the most frustrating things for me was finally realizing that all we were going to produce out of Best Brains was Mystery Science. We had such a beautiful environment, we had our own studio, our own production facility, we had a shop, we could build anything, we had the talented people. But the way it was structured, from a business standpoint, it was just impossible to produce anything else and be fair to everyone involved. Jim Mallon was going to own any new show produced. And that didn’t really sit well with a lot of us.

Conniff: I’ve never gotten any residuals or royal­ties from the show, or any money from merchandising. But that has never been a bone of contention with me, because Mystery Science Theater was my first TV show. It was my entry into something that I really wanted to do with my life, which was to write for television shows. And it was my passport into that world, and besides my salary, that’s kind of my payment for being on the show. I’ve always been totally cool with that.

By the mid-’90s, Comedy Central was experiencing the success of shows like Politically Incorrect, with soon-to-be hits like South Park and The Daily Show on the way. It was getting harder to figure out where MST3K fit on the network’s increasingly crowded schedule, and in 1996 the series was canceled. It was quickly picked up by the Sci-Fi Channel, where its cast and crew soon realized they no longer had the autonomy they had previously enjoyed.

Mallon: We didn’t cost Comedy Central that much money, and we got a lot of press. So for many years we had immunity because of that. Ultimately, though, the network started getting a sense of who it wanted to be, and that didn’t include us in the formulation.

Corbett: Sci-Fi wanted the movies to be more “hard sci-fi,” which always sounded a little bit risqué to me.

Pehl: That considerably reduced our available movie pool. And they were also more attentive when it came to reviewing the scripts. They went through them for standards and practices. Somebody objected to our using the word putz.

Murphy: It began getting difficult when USA Network started exercising more control over the Sci-Fi Channel. And then we picked up these fucking production executives from the network. We had these—I won’t name any names—but these bitter, dry, humorless trolls were in charge of our show. And they were giving us notes. And they were insisting on our having a story arc. What the hell do you want with a story arc? This is a puppet show.

In 1999, after 11 years, two hosts, and 198 episodes, Mystery Science Theater 3000 was canceled for good. On August 8, the crew signed off with a screening of the ’60s stinker Diabolik before crashing back on Earth.

Mike Nelson: I was still having a lot of fun. And I felt like in the writing room we had a good system down. It was probably the most confident writing room in that we were self-critiquing better than we ever had before. There were no sensitivities about anything.

Corbett: I was really sad about it. I could have gone a little further. I felt we had found a comfortable way to do the show without trying to incorporate Sci-Fi Channel’s overambitious—or not very smart—notes.

Pehl: It had been coming down the pike, and I was not surprised. And I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I also remember being pretty pragmatic about it. I had worked there seven years, which was the longest I’d ever had a job in my whole life. And that is a great life for a television show.

Throughout the ’90s, many MST3K alums made their way to Los Angeles—including Hodgson, who relocated to the West Coast shortly after leaving the show. While there, he worked on The TV Wheel, an experimental HBO pilot for which Hodgson created a turntable-­like TV stage with a camera mounted in the center—allowing for a half-hour’s worth of sketches to be performed and filmed in real time without editing.

Hodgson: Those were kind of my wilderness years. I didn’t really want to be a performer. I’m not built for that, and I can’t really act. But after Mystery Science Theater ended, I felt like people were expecting me to break open a rock and find a new color of the rainbow, you know. So that’s what I kind of thought I had to do. TV Wheel was kind of that. It was great creatively, but it was not what Hollywood wanted.