MST3K cast to reunite for Comic-Con
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By Gary Warth
Lee Newspapers
Friday, July 25, 2008 9:33 AM CDT
SAN DIEGO (LEE) -- The television show has been off the air since 1999 and there are no signs it will be coming back, but these are good days for Mystery Science Theater 3000.
The show's last host, Mike Nelson of Del Mar, has teamed with some past cast members and again is skewing movies with snappy wisecracks as part of the company RiffTrax. On Aug. 27, he will host a RiffTrax version of "The Matrix Reloaded" at Stone Bistro in Escondido.
More recently, Mystery Science Theater 3000's creator and original host, Joel Hodgson, has teamed with other cast members in a similar project called Cinematic Titanic.
And for the first time, Nelson, Hodgson and all the past cast of MST3K, as fans knew the show, are reuniting for a panel discussion at the San Diego Comic-Con at 7:15 p.m. Friday to help launch the 20th anniversary boxed set of the show, which will go on sale in October.
Looking back on the show he created for the Minneapolis station KTMA, Hodgson said he only began to understand its impact in recent years.
"I have to say last summer was a really profound time, where I kept meeting these people, professional people in Hollywood, who said, 'I'm a writer now because of Mystery Science Theater,'" Hodgson said in a phone interview. "There's a lot of people in their 30s or late 20s who just grew up with it."
The show was both sci-fi cornball and cutting-edge hip, with Hodgson's character and two robots forced to watch bad movies as part of a mad scientist's plot. Among the three, they got off more than 300 jokes in an episode, an unheard-of accomplishment in television writing.
Hodgson said he left the show abruptly in 1993 because of infighting with producer Jim Mallon, believing the turmoil would end the show. MST3K continued another five years with Nelson as host, while Hodgson bounced from project to project with no real plan.
Although the show was eventually canceled, its fan base remained strong. Time Magazine named it one of the top 100 shows ever, and Hodgson got the itch to do it again.
Realizing the show was the most fun he'd had professionally, Hodgson contacted former cast members and writers Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein, Frank Conniff and Mary Jo Pehl. As Cinematic Titanic, they have giving the MST3K treatment to the B movies "The Oozing Skull" and "Doomsday Machine" on two DVDs.
"None of us are famous enough to even be on 'The Surreal World,' but we have 100,000 fans out there who want us to keep on going," Hodgson said. "And that's all you need, in a way." .
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