When Fandoms Collide... in a big way

[krpalmer]

After running into bash after bash of The Phantom Menace in assorted MSTings, which usually tended to kill my enjoyment of them right then and there, I became mildly glad that Mystery Science Theater 3000 had been cancelled early in 1999. However, the series's head writer Michael J. Nelson has recently started a new project, RiffTrax, in which he records audio commentary-like "riffing" which you synch up with your own DVDs. Part of me started to wonder if he would ever take on a Star Wars movie...

The waiting is over. There's going to be a "RiffTrax" for The Phantom Menace... and I got a slightly sick feeling watching MSTies celebrate the news in a particular discussion thread. Even so, while there may be a "RiffTrax" for Star Trek V, there are ones for X-Men, Top Gun, The Fifth Element, and The Matrix... it doesn't seem quite a matter of taking on the biggest, fattest targets of the world consensus. Still, I can't see myself in any real rush to check out this particular project.

Comments

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

I don't blame you.

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

I did wonder if I'm maybe in the same position as fans of 1950s SF movies who would get upset whenever Mystery Science Theater 3000 would take on a movie like This Island Earth, The Black Scorpion, Rocketship XM, or The Magic Sword... a movie that even the MST3K writers would admit in their episode guide wasn't quite as bad as some of the other stuff they tackled. The problem with that, of course, is the definite danger that any derisive take on TPM may start from the position that it has no redeeming features whatsoever, and you wind up with two hours and twenty minutes of insults to George Lucas and Jake Lloyd and death threats against Jar Jar Binks... That, unfortunately, seems to be the starting position of the MSTies I noticed.

Being a Star Wars and a MST3K fan combined may have tied me into odd knots. I admit that I have a slight preference for the later seasons of MST3K specifically because I think the "riffing" got sharper and more cutting... but I've also reached the point where I would prefer to see the show as drawing out the unintended humour in a particular movie, not as some sort of general bulwark against a mass culture dissatisfying in the whole. With that may also come the ambiguous feeling that I simply decided not to be offended by TPM because I saw where that would lead, and that leaves me uncertain if I could actually mount a coherent defence of it.

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

[i]The problem with that, of course, is the definite danger that any derisive take on TPM may start from the position that it has no redeeming features whatsoever, and you wind up with two hours and twenty minutes of insults to George Lucas and Jake Lloyd and death threats against Jar Jar Binks... That, unfortunately, seems to be the starting position of the MSTies I noticed.[/i]

The fun in watching MST3K for me was drawing out the unintended humor of a particularly bad or strange film. No one is going to argue that "Mitchell" was a great work of cinema or that "Teenagers From Outer Space" was anything brilliant. The trouble with doing movies like 'This Island Earth," which many aficionados of '50s sci-fi consider a classic, is it just isn't as funny.

I don't really interact with MST3K fandom but my impression is it's, as you've said, made up of people who find "mass culture dissatisfying as a whole."

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

I'll admit that I've watched (http://krpalmer.livejournal.com/4547.html) both Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie and This Island Earth, and both of them worked for me in their own way. I wasn't offended when Dr. Clayton Forrester called This Island Earth "a stinky cinematic suppository," because after all his character is a mad scientist...

However, this could be significant. I once saw an article attempting to defend Mystery Science Theater 3000 to an audience of 1950s SF movie fans, and one of the points it made was that the frame helps distance us from the thought that the movies are just plain targets to demonstrate how much more discernment the audience has. It's not a case of Joel Hodgson going to a studio after an evening spent enjoying better works to record a contemptuous commentary (and this isn't how I saw the creators anyway), it's a case of Joel Robinson, stranded in space and subjected to an unceasing barrage of bottom-of-the-barrel cinema... and perhaps in MSTings, the offputting viewpoint of the authors could come through a little more clearly at times.