30 Years Ago, A Cult-Classic TV Series Made The Leap To The Big Screen
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie was supposed to launch a cult series into mainstream fame. It didn’t quite work out that way.
There was a time when all screens were not created equal. By 1996, Mystery Science Theater 3000 had become a beloved mainstay of late-night cable with a devoted cult following. Its seventh season (eighth, if you count the KTMA episodes) had just aired on Comedy Central. But in the pre-streaming era, TV didn’t count — at least, not in the way movies did.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 began its life on public access in Minnesota, and was about as far from Hollywood as a production could be while still airing on a Time Warner TV network. For the uninitiated, MST3K was the original movie-riffing show, taking a group of smart-aleck puppets and pairing them with an everyman host — creator Joel Hodgson for the first five seasons, followed by Mike Nelson, Jonah Ray, and current host Emily Marsh — who’s held captive on a spacecraft called the “Satellite of Love” and forced to watch cheesy B-movies as part of a mind-control experiment conducted by the show’s coast of mad scientists. It’s where Manos: The Hands of Fate was first introduced to connoisseurs of trash, along with hundreds of other artifacts.
Both the show and the movies it riffed on were made outside the mainstream, and this underdog attitude was very much present in the show’s creative team. Discussions about turning the show into a big-screen experience were present in the writers’ room basically from the moment that it became clear, as writer and performer Kevin Murphy put in in 2021, that Mystery Science Theater 3000 “was going to be around for a little while,” but not everyone wanted to make a bid for the mainstream: In that same oral history, Hodgson says that, “the reason I left the show was because of the feature. There were creative differences.”
Still, director Jim Mallon was adamant that MST3K would work on the big screen, because “the more people that are in the room watching Mystery Science with you, the more fun it is.” References, some of them quite obscure, were (and are) a big part of the show’s humor: From hyper-local Midwest in-jokes to nods to high-art figures like Jacques Tati and Phillip Glass, Mystery Science Theater 3000 refused to talk down to its audience or dilute its identity in an attempt to become more universal. That is, until Universal Pictures got involved.
Although Hodgson had taken meetings with Paramount before leaving the show in 1993, ultimately Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie landed at Universal, which steered the team away from an early idea that would blow the interstitial segments with Mike and the ‘bots into a feature-length narrative and into what was basically an episode of the show blown up for cinema screens. (Ironically, at only 78 minutes, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie is shorter than an average episode of the show.)
The studio also wanted the MST3K crew to riff on something that was already in the studio’s catalog; eventually, they landed on This Island Earth, a 1955 sci-fi movie starring Jeff Morrow, Rex Reason, and Faith Domergue that, unlike most MST3K fare, was actually well-received by critics upon its initial release. In retrospect, however, its flying saucers and glowing green rays were just goofy enough to get the movie-riffing treatment.
Mike, Tom Serve, Crow, and Gypsy may have never become household names, but Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie was still an important part in deciding the franchise’s legacy.
Curiously, only about 55 minutes of this 86-minute film actually made it into Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. The riffs were rather underwhelming as well, cut down by studio executives who were concerned about alienating audiences who were less educated in pop-culture ephemera than your average MST3K fan. A reference to Parliament-Funkadelic bassist Bootsy Collins was excised, for example, as were multiple host segments and the original ending from the film’s script. “We were not used to justifying or having to explain jokes,” writer and co-star Mary Jo Pehl said in 2021. I think that was really frustrating for us because we have the sensibility that if you got it, great. If you didn’t get it, you’ll get the next joke. I don’t think we were used to it being so under a microscope.”
And so, while fans did turn out for opening weekend, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie failed to launch MST3K into the mainstream. It’s wasn’t strictly for the fans, but it wasn’t strictly for newbies, either. Universal also did little to promote the movie, choosing instead to put all of its promotional efforts for the week into the Pamela Anderson movie Barbed Wire — the kind of movie that the MST3K crew made their careers out of mocking.
All was not lost, however. Although Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie is rarely cited as one of the show’s greatest episodes — and that’s really what it is, an episode of the show — it still brought a new generation of fans to the series. One of them was future host Jonah Ray, who said in 2021 that, “I loved all the shows, but the movie is such a solid memory of mine.” So while Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie didn’t make Mike, Tom Serve, Crow, and Gypsy into household names, it did its part to ensure the show’s longevity, ensuring that VHS tapes of the movie would circulate for decades to come.
