'Mystery Science' Sails Again With Great Craft

Noël Coward once noted "how potent cheap music is." The old boy never saw "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" or he might also have observed how enjoyable, how amusing and even how comforting a lousy movie can be.

It's no sacrilege to quote Coward in a story about a television series that celebrates bad movies: "Mystery Science Theater 3000," which, like Sir Noël, had its wit about it. To the dismay of its truly devoted fans, the show is gone now but then again, not entirely gone. Old episodes, including the one featuring "The Brain That Wouldn't Die," are available on DVD; a special 20th-anniversary collection is just out. Even better, the show was reincarnated in late 2007 as "Cinematic Titanic," a series of videos available on the Web and reuniting most of the original cast.

That includes, most critically, Joel Hodgson, 48, the brilliant boomer who created the series 20 years ago and hosted it on Comedy Central in the channel's pre-dirty era. His high concept: An astronaut, stranded in space with a bevy of wacky robot pals (puppets assembled from odds and ends found on the spacecraft), is forced to watch terrible old movies by a mad scientist who controls their environment from Earth. To keep themselves sane, Hodgson and his puppet crew make the movies entertaining by pelting them with wisecracks.

There was nothing on TV like it, and it was wonderful. Al Gore was one of the show's fans -- and admitted it. In its day, it received the prestigious Peabody Award, and much more recently, it popped up on Time magazine's list of the 100 best television shows ever.

In "Cinematic Titanic," the robots, sadly, are gone, but the basic format and the show's essence remain -- an indoor sport that Hodgson calls "riffing on movies" and thus turning such sow's ears as "The Wasp Woman" or "Earth vs. the Spider" into hilarious silk purses. He is joined by four colleagues from the original cast and writing crew. In stark silhouette against the movie screen, they watch the nearly unwatchable and poke fun aplenty.

Fourth and most recent of the releases is, in a break from usual practice, a title previously lampooned on "MST3K" but with all-new smart-alecky remarks: Joseph E. Levine's presentation of "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians," a 1964 monstrosity that features little Pia Zadora as Girmar, a green Martian child who watches too many lousy TV shows from Earth, thus bringing the concept full circle, sort of. "Santa Claus" stands, or rather wobbles, as one of the all-time classic howlers of the screen.

Reached in Chicago, where he and his cohorts had just finished a live stage version of "Martians" -- to the laughs and cheers of "MST3K" fans and their kids -- Hodgson says that as a rule, he doesn't want to revisit films in the new episodes but "Santa Claus" posed too many tantalizing possibilities, had holiday allure and offered the challenge of coming up with fresh material.

"It's kind of been our top-selling new title so far," Hodgson says. "And we didn't repeat a single joke."

Yes, he misses the robots, but "this is a little more direct, kind of like a play. We can kind of be ourselves. We all met in stand-up originally, so everybody's got that performer instinct."

Hodgson apparently could not have simply put "MST3K" back into production, because the copyright belongs not to him (even though he created the show) but to a former partner. They split partly over the partner's insistence on directing a feature-film version of the show that flopped in 1996. The movie, which Hodgson sat out, made the mistake of ridiculing "This Island Earth," a 1955 sci-fi film that was just a little bit too good to lampoon. But the cast and crew had organized a fan write-in campaign that all but forced Universal to make the picture. Three years later, the show ran out of steam and was canceled.

Hodgson left the series several years before it ended because he became disenchanted with what interlopers were doing to his baby. The final collapse of the original partnership essentially divided the gang into two camps. Those who were faithful to Hodgson joined him on the new project.

"I'm super-proud of 'MST3K,' " Hodgson says, "and of all the really talented people I work with. I say that because they're nearby and can hear me talking."