I still remember my first
riff.
I was about fifteen, my parents
were out of town and I was on Easter break.
MST3K had just begun airing in syndication; I had been deprived of the
show for years because our cable company
didn’t have Comedy Central (and it wouldn’t for another three years). It was somewhere past midnight when I turned
on what would one day be my local CW affiliate and heard it: “the hat from
Breakfast at Tiffany's is coming in for a landing.” I would later learn that that was Mary Jo
Pehl’s first ever riff for the show, and when Pearl Forrester became my
favorite character it felt like kismet.
It would be another few years
before I would get to watch the show regularly, when it was picked up by the Sci-Fi
Network, which my cable company did have.
When I started watching I never
stopped; the show got its fingerprints on my heart and it started tutoring me
in the ways of Rowsdower and Big McLargehuge.
There’s something unique to the
show’s humor that made me feel happy; it may center around tearing down cheesy
b-movies but there was never anything really mean about the show’s humor (in
fact, Kevin Murphy has said in the show’s episode guide that actually hurting
somebody was something the show explicitly tried to avoid) . Tom, Crow and their designated human actually
care about the characters they watch suffer and grow onscreen in a hands-on
way, and they’re the first to protest when the movie pulls a trick too cruel
(best example: Joel encouraging the robots to rewrite the fate of Carrie from
Girl In Lover’s Lane , delivering a bit of perfect advice. “It’s just fiction,
I mean you don’t have to accept the ending they hand you.”). The characters and their relationships are
engaging enough to make you care about them, especially the pathetic and yet
menacing Doctor Clayton Forrester, our Big Bad, and his hapless, innocent
assistant for most of the series, TV’s
Frank.
The Sci-Fi years introduced a
rather surprising upheaval to the world of Mike and his robot pals; they would
be tortured by Pearl, and eventually her assistants Bobo, a large
semi-intelligent ape and Brain Guy, an omnipotent being from another world
forced to live with Pearl after his homeworld is destroyed. Pearl was everything to teenage me; being
presented with a woman my size who was in total command of the situation and of
her own immediate world was a revelation.
The show itself continued on its merry way until cancellation brought it
to a permanent halt in 1998.
 |
| Seriously, when will my eyeliner game be this strong? |
By then it was firmly one of my
favorite series, and the idea of losing the show felt particularly
unacceptable. Thankfully, the series’
writers split off into two separate performing troops a few years after the
show folded; Joel Hodgson’s Cinematic Titanic and Mike Nelson’s Rifftrax. Cinematic Titanic folded recently but Rifftrax
continues to expand, allowing fans to relive their MST3K memories in a new
context. They stream four live shows a
year to movie theaters nationwide and release commentary tracks and video riffs
monthly.
Joel Hodgson, meanwhile, hosts a
yearly Thanksgiving marathon on the
official MST3K stream run by Shout Factory.
Featuring original host segments it’s a sweet blast of nostalgia that
greets Riff fans on a yearly basis.
As for me, I filled the void the
way a lot of people my age did back in the day; I wrote stories, and
participated in the lively fan community the show still boosts. I still attend Rifftrax
streaming events and participate in the traditional circulation of the tapes –
or in this case, circulate links to fan-uploaded copies of every single episode
ever produced by the show. When the episodes come out on Shout Factory's expansive and beautifully-crafted DVD sets, they're the first things I buy. And whenever
I find myself mocking a movie ever now I hear Tom Servo’s expansive bass and
Crow’s complaining treble in the back of my mind.
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