Way the heck back in 1991, working at a college newspaper called The Arizona Daily Wildcat, I was asked by an editor asked if I’d like to do a phone interview with two cast members from a new cable-comedy show called Mystery Science Theater 3000. (Aka MST3K.)
My answer: Abso-freaking-lutely, thank you, because I’d been watching the show regularly with college friends. I still remember falling off my friend’s weird-shaped chair (it had a disconnected circular cushion frame, tilting at an angle on an unstable base) because of the utter silliness of the show’s bedroom-items-turned-into-crazy-telekinetic-spectacle live segment during the MST3K cast’s parody of Pod People (1983), a cheap knock-off of ET: The Extra-Terrestrial.
MST3K‘s premise was that evil scientists forced a custodian and his robot sidekicks to watch the worst movies they could find. During framing scenes, these characters have back-and-forth conversations in actual space-like sets. Then we see silhouettes of the custodian, a “guy named Joel” (played by prop comedian Joel Hodgson) alongside his witty, recycled-part robots, as they make numerous wisecracking comments about actual terrible movies, which the program has licensed and targeted for mockery. It’s like you’re sitting in a movie theater behind them, enjoying their jokes while suffering through the film.
It’s a terrific format as it allows for all sorts of free-roaming comedy riffing, quipping, pun-dropping, cultural references, and almost limitless other types of jokes thrown against the wall (or in this case, screen) to see what sticks. Simultaenously the show appeals to afficionados of campy, so-bad-it’s-good, low-budget filmmaking on par with Ed Wood’s cult Plan Nine From Outer Space (but often even worse than that).
The show began in the late 1980s, at KTMA Channel 23 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. By 1989, Hodgson and producer Jim Mallon signed a deal with the Comedy Channel, which was a budding upstart in the freshly evolving cable-network realm. The Comedy Channel and Ha! merged in 1991, becoming Comedy Central, eventually the home of such influential programs as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. MST3K continued being produced out of Minnesota, however, and in its early days had a reach of 20 million homes.
Decades later, the show has gone through numerous permutations and cast changes, bringing in other comedians (including Patton Oswalt) and eventually being updated to the Internet era with RiffTrax, podcast Movie Sign With the Mads, live show The Mads Are Back, and DVD series Cinematic Titanic. Both Beaulieu and Conniff have had extensive careers as comedy actors, writers, and in Conniff’s case, political commentators, in the decades since.
Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff
So, in 1991, I talked to Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff on the phone for about 45 minutes. Beaulieu played the evil Dr. Forrester as well as the bubblegum-machine-headed Crow robot, and Frank Conniff played the evil scientist’s oft-attacked lab assistant. They were at the start of their journey into immense cult fandom.
“We’re starting to hear from people in the movies we make fun of,” says Conniff. “We heard from Miles O’Keeffe [the actor whose main claim to fame was playing opposite Bo Derek in Tarzan, The Ape Man] from Cave Dwellers. He really loved it. His friends always kid him about those movies.”
During opening credits to Cave Dwellers, a campy swords-and-sorcery movie, Joel asks the robots, “How much Keeffe is in this movie, guys?” Tom Servo replies, “Miles O’Keeffe!”
I asked them about their use of obscure cultural references, which they would sling at such a high volume that even people with limited cultural knowledge could feel “in” on the jokes.
“There are some comments that most people are going to laugh at, and some comments that a lot of people won’t get,” explained Frank Conniff, adding that this made MST3K unique from other forms of comedy performance, such as stand-up. “In stand-up you’re really trying to get 300 people to laugh at once. Here our jokes are tailor-made for people. There’s everything from obscure literature references to jokes about crapping in your hand.”
“I kind of look at it like Mad Magazine was for me as a kid,” said Trace Beaulieu, the voice behind the puppet-robot Crow. “It was an introduction to popular culture, piquing my interest so I could go find out what those references were.”
I asked Beaulieu and Conniff about their evil-boss characters, temperamental scientist Dr. Forrester (he of the green-framed glasses), and Frank the sidekick, who’s often recipient of Forrester’s abuse.
“I think the characters are a lot of the show’s charm,” said Beaulieu. “Dr. Forrester is kind of jealous of Joel. Joel is very talented and creative, whereas Dr. Forrester is kind of a plagiarist … not talented, just evil.”
“Joel’s natural whimsical sense of humor comes through in his character, and the robots are very close to him, maybe abnormally so. I think a lot of my own personal twisted-ness comes through in Crow. He’s a goofy character, sarcastic, naive, kinda dumb. I guess that’s me, kinda dumb.”
They then told me that the show had been renewed for a fourth 24-episode season, and mentioned their plans to eventually make a Mystery Science Theater movie — plans that were realized five years later, in 1996.
I kept them on the phone perhaps a little too long, as I was thrilled to talk to fellow Mad Magazine fanatics. As the conversation wound down, Beaulieu mocked my college-student thoroughness, asking, “So, are you going to get an A on this?”, and Conniff gently chided him with, “Be nice, Trace.”
