Mystery Science Theater 3000 Has Sold Its Soul
I consider myself a practical person with regards to what I carry in my pockets. I don’t have a lot of time in the morning to collect everything that I think I’ll need, so I limit myself to just the essentials — wallet, phone, keys. Even then, there’s little impracticality in those objects — I only carry the cards I need and cash in my wallet, there’s no cosmetic case around my phone, and my key chain consists solely of keys, with one notable exception: a Mystery Science Theater 3000 Kickstarter Backer key chain, with the iconic logo-carved-into-the-moon-by-lasers emblem mounted to spin around freely on axis. Whenever I was bored, I might pull out my key chain and spin the moon around, flicking and flicking, watching it spin.
For the unaware, MST3K is a show dedicated to riffing on bad movies, the worst of the worst. Every week, evil scientists would beam up atrociously awful movies and subject the host and his friend robots to the film in an attempt to drive the host insane. In an effort to keep their sanity, the host mocks the hilariously awful movies as he watches them, thus turning what should be an unpleasant viewing experience into something uproariously funny. It’s possibly the only to turn the hysterically unwatchable into the hysterically funny — where else might one derive something resembling entertainment from train wrecks such as MANOS: The Hands of Fate or Mitchell?
I can’t claim to have been “an original” MSTie — I was born far too late to watch the show in its original run, but thanks to my father (himself a fan during the 90s), I’ve caught up with so much of the original show, and I eagerly anticipated the Netflix reboot, so eagerly funded by Kickstarter backers like myself. And when it finally came around, I sat down, I watched, and I was disappointed. I take no issue with the content: the show is still funny, it’s smartly produced, and Jonah Ray Rodriguez does an excellent job filling in Joel and Mike’s shoes. But there’s a philosophical difference that the new show cannot possibly hope to reconcile, and the soul of the show feels, well, lost.
“Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful,” wrote Molly Ivins — recognizing humor as an instrument of class. Humorists lampooning our political leaders in the country represents this dynamic, and it’s why The Onion is funny for mocking the president, and why the president is abhorrent for mocking the physically disabled. Humor is a one-way street, and the powerful can rarely travel down that road without checking their own privilege at the door.
The same is true of media. There are certainly “elite” films, the types that dominate the box-office and fill our television screen with advertisements day in and day out — and there are the other films, the films which miss the zeitgeist, and regardless of whether or not a sincere attempt has been made to reach cultural consciousness, it is a movie decidedly on the outside, looking in.
The original run of MST3K was essentially a vessel into the mainstream for these movies (there is no a chance that I might have heard of Laserblast had it not been aired on the show) through this ribbing and mockery. MST3K worked because it presented itself as outside of the mainstream in the same vein as the films it mocked, improbably operating with a budget lower than the films it presented so that this dynamic was appropriate philosophically. Whether or not MST3K was truly on the outside looking in or not is inconsequential — what matters is that the show presented itself through the same lens of self-deprecation and cheapness that it examined so many of these other films. At worst, MST3K was the equal of the subject of its ribbing. No one in show business could have feasibly mocked these movies than a couple of public access television hosts from Minnesota — anything else would betray the power-dynamic of comedy.
But the new run of MST3K, to its own detriment, is no longer on the outside looking in. Jonah Ray-Rodriguez is hardly a nobody, Patton Oswalt is a nationally known comedian and Felicia Day has nearly 3 million Twitter followers. There was no chance that someone tuning into their first episode of MST3K during the original run might recognize the subject or the mad scientists — but in its current iteration, it is more probable than not that an audience member has seen these actors somewhere before.
Similarly, the set pieces and execution of the production have become far more slick with the new show — again, to its own detriment. Consider the introduction of this episode of the original run — the planets are obviously on strings, the ships are obviously models, and the production studio couldn’t even be bothered to hire actors who were actually children to portray kids within the show.
Compare this to the intro sequence for season eleven in the new run of the series: everything is far slicker. The original season of MST3K never engaged with a large crew of choreographed dancers, digital graphics, or even such intricately detailed puppets as used in the intro. To be sure, this intro is not intending to pretend to be reality, but at the same time these expensive, main-stream qualities are present. It’s faux-camp: the presentation is far too polished to be of genuinely poor quality, especially to the degree where the irony of the presentation might be genuinely enjoyed.
MST3K’s new run brings out a number of innovations that were not explored in the original show, such as professionally produced props, guest stars, fully-fledged musical numbers, and gasp green screens.
Don’t take this to be some kind of rant against the progression of technology and its implementation in a beloved television show. I’m not going to sit here and stew over how “things were better back in the old days” when the show’s presentation is obviously improved by better funding and improved technology.
But the problem with the upgrades is that MST3K can no longer feasibly lay claim to being on the same level of entertainment as that which it uses as material for mockery. MST3K has gone Hollywood, and for all the polish and shine that my Kickstarter money has placed on the show, it has betrayed its origins. It’s difficult to laugh along with a Netflix show mocking movies that Netflix would not be caught dead carrying in its catalog.
There is value, humor, and even beauty to be found in awful movies. Rocky Horror Picture Show is not a good movie because it tries to be a good movie, it is a good movie because it is willing to embrace camp and dodge the mainstream. MST3K served to similarly embrace those aspects and drag those same bad movies back to cultural relevance, bridging the gap between elite media and outsider media. But while MST3K may have straddled that border for so long, it now solely resides as a member of the elite in its latest iteration and in all future iterations.
There is something deeply, philosophically wrong about Hollywood writers using a platform to mock movies written by people who will exist on the fringes of mainstream media in perpetuity, and it is a far different feeling that when it was simply some public-access television personalities from Minnesota behind the microphone. It is impossible to view MST3K as a gentle-ribbing among friends — it is media with power mocking media without it.
My nervous habit of spinning my key chain around finally caught up with my last month. The metal axle keeping the center disc in place finally snapped, and the moon fell. Now I’m just carrying around an empty ring in my pocket, with nothing to fill that hole.
