From: Star Tribune*

Date: April 1, 1990

Headline: Great Fun If You Can Get It

Subline: Cover Story

Cover photo: Joel Hodgson/ Dave Matheny writes about the local comedian's return to TV on the HBO cabel Comedy Channel [l-r, Crow, Hodgson, Servo on old set from first CC season.]

Photo(s): Joel Hodgson [in jumpsuit next to planet.]

Author: Matheny, Dave

Page(s): TV Week 1, 3, 34

Note: "Local" review of MST3K after it went to the Comedy Channel.

"Mystery Science Theater 3000" is not like any other show you have ever seen. It's a new way of watching bad old movies. Comedian Joel Hodgson and two robotlike puppet friends sit and watch old cinematic turkeys and make funny remarks. The viewer sees the movie, but with Hodgson and friends superimposed, as if they were sitting a few rows in front of you in a movie theater.

"Ouch," says the robot named Crow, when a character is impaled on a spike or ininerated by a rocket exhaust. "That's got to hurt."

"Yeah, I don't care *what* your background is," adds Hodgson.

"No amount of training is going to do you any good in that situation," says Tom Servo, the other robot.

The show originated in the Twin Cities, at KTMA-TV, Channel 23, in 1988. Local viewers who became fans of "Mystery Science Theater" (MST) during the show's first season will have mixed feelings about the show having gone to cable. They'll be proud that MST now has an estimated 6 million viewers and get fan mail from Texas, Hawaii and all over.

On the other hand, they can only see it if they get the Comedy Channel on local cable. So far, Nortel, Star Cablevision and King Video Cable are the only systems carrying the Comedy Channel locally.

The new MST could be described as like the old one only a lot more so, with strong upward mobility.

After that first season of scraping by on a tiny budget, Hodgson got the Comedy Channel to bankroll the ritzier version. Although grateful to KTMA, the crew was happy to move from a corner of the KTMA studio to a roomy set of offices and studios in an industrial park in Eden Prairie. The MSTproduction company is now called Best Brains.

Producer Jim Mallon, who midwifed the original show, left KTMA to produce MST full time, as did production supervisor Kevin Murphy and several others. And the voices of the robots, local comics Trace Beaulieu (Crow) and JoshWeinstein (Tom Servo), went from a very limited gig--a day and a half for each show--to working full time for Best Brains.

And the movies got a lot worse, which means they got wonderfully better. The original MST had used an obscure 1960s Japanese series about a turtle-monster called Gamera, a low-rent Godzilla so devoid of personality that the producers tried to give him some by having him save childrenn from other monsters. The new MST plucks films from the public domain, such as "The Crawling Eye," "The Slime People," and something that Hodgson described as "several Mexican TV shows edited into one movie" and called "Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy."

Still, the MST crew liked the crazy imagery of the Gamera movies. Producer Mallon (who also is the voice of the robot Gtypsy) said the show "works best with fantastic images. They give the comedians silly things to work off of."

Weinstein and Beaulieu also appear as evil scientists in the MST introductory segment, which explains the show's prmise: The two evil scientists, who run the Gizmonics Institute, have shot Hodgson into space; once there, the lonely Joel uses spare parts to build robots so he can have friends to help him watch the dreadful movies sent up by the scientists.

The Comedy Channel's vice president for original programming, Julian Goldberg, said the show was chosen partly because of its evocation of the memory of going to stupid movies as a teenager, partly because there is something delightful about the idea of a man building robots that become friends.

"The fan mail runs the gamut, from 10-year-olds to factory workers coming home from the second shift," he said. "People ask why Crow is the way he is, or why Servo is like that." Crow has an innocent, childlike quality, Tom Servo is a wise guy, Gypsy is a remarkably dense but lovable.

Hodgson is that rarest of all showbiz types, a young comedian who jettisoned a career in the comedy big leagues. In 1984, having made appearances on the "David Letterman Show" and "Saturday Night Live", and having had NBC president Brandon Tartikoff after him to participate in a proposed new situation comedy, Hodgson got out.

"You go on Letterman so you can get booking in clubs in places like Columbus, Ohio, for two weeks. I hate having to be in some place like Columbus when I want to be here."

He isn't that kind of comic. He's the kind of comic whose office wall is given over to a big diagram explaining Masters of the Universe toys. He's in a category of one, shy and genuine, with an uprecedented, goofy, gadgetoid-science humor.

He came back to the Twin Cities, to a bungalow near the State Fairgrounds, and made and sold robot sculptures, repaired Gobot costumes used in Tonka trade shows, and co-wrote a comedy special for cable TV.

He resumed live comedy, breaking up audiences at Scott Hansen's Comedy Gallery in Riverplace/taking a leaf-blower and using it to blow thousands of straw wrappers at an audience, or to play "Amazing Grace" on a bagpipe.

Best Brains does not stop with Mystery Science Theater 3000. Among Hodgson's new show ideas is "Robotropolis," in which a prominent human being, such as Joe Montana or Bill Moyers, "would be interviewed by robots about what it's like to be a human being," Hodgson said.

The concept is "a little dangerous," Hodgson said, because the show would explore the relationship between man and robot and the level of sophistication that robots will achieve in this decade.

Said Goldberg, "There's a sense that he really is orbiting the Earth, he's not an actor, he really works at the Gizmonic Institute."