THE BOTS GO BYE-BYE
As MST3K sinks into misty memory, its creators hope Crow and company will fly again
BY JOHN BREAM
Crow, Tom Servo, and Mike Nelson are in their familiar places in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie theater. Mary Jo Pehl, one of the show's writers and bit players, walks in during a break in the filming of the final episode of the series' seven-year run. "I don't know when I'm going to see you again," she whimpers.
"We'll see you at your show [a local play]," assures fellow actor and writer Trace Beaulieu, the voice of the quick-witted robo-puppet Crow. "Do you have any comps?" Tears well up in Pehl's eyes as she walks away without another word.
"I guess that means no comps," says Beaulieu -- who could have used the free tickets. A few days later, right after Christmas, he would be standing in a Minneapolis unemployment line. "I was the only puppeteer there," he reports later. His is a typical MST3K comment: dry and benignly twisted. But for now, the robot characters who speak those one-liners are being silenced, victims of diminished ratings and a change of executives at cable's Comedy Central.
For seven seasons, the Emmy-nominated, Peabody Award-winning Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been the flagship of the cable network and an oasis of laughs for the No Doz set. Its premise: Mad genius Dr. Clayton Forrester (Beaulieu) strands a janitor (Nelson) on a spaceship and forces him to watch grade-Z movies with a pair of robots, affectionately called 'bots. Their running commentary, rich in pop-culture references, yields more midnight guffaws for fans than a week of Leno and Letterman monologues.
"A lot of their jokes make you think," says Mike Harney, 36, a Boston computer programmer who spearheaded an 11th-hour drive to save the series. "It's one of the funniest TV shows I've ever seen."
Actress Beverly Garland, now Lois's mom on Lois & Clark, is a fan of MST3K even though three of her old films have been "critiqued" by Nelson and the 'bots. "Some of these movies are really horrendous, but they are so funny when they do what they do with them," she says.
MST3K has singular fans -- Vice President Al Gore -- and fans in droves. More than 68,000 MSTies have joined the show's fan club. In April, 110 of them bought a $4,700 full-page ad in Variety, the Hollywood trade publication, to encourage some television network -- any television network -- to finance new shows. Those efforts have so far failed, and the inevitable twilight of the 'bots arrives: the two-day filming of the MST3K finale.
The target for this 128th episode is "Laserblast," a 1978 flick about a teen with a ray gun and a monster alter ego. In typical fashion, the movie becomes fodder for a savvy gabathon with references to Haile Selassie, Georgia O'Keeffe, Anna Nicole Smith, Bill Gates, Scott Baio, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Gino Vannelli.
The MST3K crew marks the occasion with gallows humor. Production manager Wendell Jon Andersson wears a black armband. Kevin Murphy, voice of 'bot Tom Servo, sports a black T-shirt showing a Mexican Day of the Dead skeleton. On-camera at the outset of the show, Dr. Forrester makes a pointed comment about funding cuts forcing him to move back in with Mom.
Luckily, a few trips to unemployment aside, things never got all that bleak for the MST3K masterminds. In February, they struck a TV-movie deal with the company that produces Hercules and Xena. "There are Vikings in it," Murphy leaks.
There is also an MST3K CD-ROM, a book, a fan convention Labor Day weekend in Minneapolis, and, as always, proposals for new puppet-based projects. Ironically, as the cable series goes into limbo, the big-screen and, by comparison, big-budget ($1.8 million) "Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie," is opening in limited theatrical release.
None of that activity, of course, spells any more episodes for the show's TV fans. But the brains behind the 'bots seem determined to give Mystery Science Theater 3000 a future. "In science fiction," Murphy says, "nobody dies forever.