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In a cozy suburb of Minneapolis, a guy in a blue jumpsuit is once again stuck aboard a space station with his robot pals, watching the worst movies ever made.
To paraphrase the show’s catchy theme song, if you’re wondering
how that works, it’s just a TV show, so you should really just relax.
In May, Variety went behind the scenes of “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The RiffTrax Experiments,” the latest revival of the beloved cult comedy series “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” to get an up close and personal look at how poking fun at bad movies gets done at the highest level.
The series — which features an amiable host and his sharp-tongued sidekicks Tom Servo and Crow riffing on obscure movies like “Manos: The Hands of Fate” and “Space Mutiny” — originally aired from 1988 to 1999, mostly on Comedy Central and the Sci-Fi Channel.
Joel Hodgson created and starred as that guy forced to screen cheesy flicks; he left mid-run and was replaced by Michael J. Nelson. After the show wrapped, Nelson and fellow “MST3K” writer-stars Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett took the basic idea and launched their own version, RiffTrax, which started as a website and branched out into live performances and its own FAST channel.
Then, in 2017, Hodgson revived “MST3K” at Netflix and launched a related streaming platform called The Gizmoplex, but the RiffTrax team wasn’t involved.
That all changed this year. In January, Hodgson sold his ownership in the series to Radial Entertainment and once again departed. Radial then recruited the RiffTrax team to return for four new episodes. “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The RiffTrax Experiments” was born.
The transition of “MST3K” to Radial allowed the company to approach the RiffTrax team (who hadn’t been formally involved in any new interations of the show since 1999) about joining forces, which they were eager to do. Fans were in: They raised $2.7 million in a Kickstarter campaign to fund the revival, and “The RiffTrax Experiments” were off and running.
As Variety visits the “MST3K: RiffTrax” set, the cast and crew are nearing the end of a rapid-fire shoot on the new episodes. At this point in the shoot, the host segments that serve as interstitials for the movie mocking that made the original a success have all been filmed. As a result, most of the main sets are already torn down.
But there are still various robot puppets and spare props lying around the studio, including a sign for the show’s fictional sponsor, ‘Syd’s Olive Loaf.’ There is a definite handmade quality to the props and puppets that are part of the show’s charm.
“Not to make too much of a social point, but there’s a lot of people getting sick of slop,” Corbett says. “So to know that it is actually physical stuff that was built is kind of a nice thing.”
Like the original show, “The RiffTrax Experiments” was filmed in Minneapolis, this time at the Cinequipt production facility. Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett return in their original roles both onscreen and behind the camera, while much of the show’s original crew are back as well. That includes director of photography Jeff Stonehouse, props master and puppeteer Patrick Brantseg, and costume designer Beth “Beez” McKeever.
“I was really proud when we got this thing together and you call people up, and you realize…there’s no baggage,” Nelson says. “It’s not like a band where, “Oh, we don’t talk to that guy anymore.’ It’s just been fun to have everybody back.”
Also returning to the series are “MST3K” vets Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff, both of whom were writers on the original series. Beaulieu also starred as Dr. Clayton Forrester – the mad scientist who initially shot Joel then Mike into space – while Conniff played his sidekick, “TV’s Frank.”
“I’m glad Jeff [Stonehouse] pushed me to do it because it was so much fun,” Beaulieu says. “And then once we were all on set as the Mads, it was just like we hadn’t left.”
“I was overweight and old looking even back then, so there wasn’t much of a much of a change to anything,” Coniff chimes in. Beaulieu laughs and continues, “It just felt very natural. If anything, I wish we could have hung around longer. We should have screwed up more takes, Frank!”
“I know, our damn professionalism ruined everything,” Conniff adds.
The shoot is also a family affair. Both Brantseg and Corbett’s daughters worked on the show, while Stonehouse says his son contributed to the design of one of the robot puppets. It’s in keeping with “MST3K’s” legacy of bringing families together for decades now.
“A very nice lady came up to me once and said, ‘My dad used to watch you!’ Then she had her child with her too,” Corbett says. “So, how many generations are we like pets too? We accept it. We accept our decrepitude.”
While movie riffing as a comedy form has not taken off to a massive degree, “MST3K” has influenced generations of comedians and performers. “There’s a group in Austin, Texas, called Master Pancake Theater who we’ve worked with, and are really, really good,” Conniff says. “They took what we did and made it their own.”
The focus of the day is recording riffs for one of the four movies to be featured in the new episodes. While three of the four movies have been revealed — “Sting of Death,” “Space Raiders,” and “Deathsport” — the one being riffed on this particular day is being kept a closely guarded secret.
For filming the riffs, Nelson, Corbett, and Murphy (and Murphy and Corbett’s puppet characters) take their positions in front of a giant green screen as they do in the show’s trademark silhouette — just like they did in producing the original show.
Concealed behind a cutout made to look like a row of theater seats are the monitors the guys use to watch the movie in real time along with their scripts. It’s incredibly precise, with jokes timed out to the second to match what’s happening in the movie.
Keeping a watchful eye over the shoot from a balcony above the soundstage floor are Sean Thomason and Conor Lastowka, RiffTrax’s longtime senior writers and producers. They follow along with the script, making sure everything matches up.
On how writing for RiffTrax differs from “MST3K,” Lastowka says, “There’s no comparison. It’s a very different rhythm writing for this show. The bots & Mike are characters, but at RiffTrax Mike, Kevin and Bill are just themselves, so we can make references to their lives in a way we can’t for Mike, Servo and Crow.”
“Bill and Kevin are like Little Rascals as the bots, and then Mike reins them in,” Thomason adds. “It’s very much that big brother dynamic.”
While all involved say that movie riffing is not an art form for all writers, it is nevertheless incredibly efficient once shooting begins. Given that you can’t really see the actors’ mouths moving, if they happen to flub a line, they can quickly re-record and dub it in later. The team starts shooting around 9:30 a.m. and wrap up for the day by 2 p.m.
Still, it’s a big change from doing RiffTrax as the three main stars have been doing for the past 20 years.
“RiffTrax is audio-based,” Murphy says. “So we have a studio at our homes. We can start and stop. We don’t have the same sort of performance aspect to it. This is more akin to when we do live shows, where we really have to be on and have to have everything buttoned down before we get out there.”
But recording the riffs is the end of a long process of watching bad movies — a regimen that few would recommend, including the stars of the show.
“You’re watching the same movie, chunks of it at least, over and over and over again. It’s almost like a close reading of a text, you just dive into it so much, it’s really bad. It’s probably not mentally healthy,” Murphy jokes.
“Mystery Science Theater 3000: The RiffTrax Experiments — Sting of Death” is now available at the RiffTrax website. The remaining three episodes will debut in the coming weeks.
