--- title: That Old Feeling: MST2K+1 description: On the last day of this year's Cannes Film Festival, I was standing in line for Jean-Luc Godard's "Éloge de l'amour" when a familiar voice... canonical: https://time.com/archive/6907970/that-old-feeling-mst2k1/ author: Richard Corliss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2001-06-15T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-22T15:14:53.564Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: That Old Feeling: MST2K+1 og:description: On the last day of this year's Cannes Film Festival, I was standing in line for Jean-Luc Godard's "Éloge de l'amour" when a familiar voice... og:url: https://time.com/archive/6907970/that-old-feeling-mst2k1/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: That Old Feeling: MST2K+1 twitter:description: On the last day of this year's Cannes Film Festival, I was standing in line for Jean-Luc Godard's "Éloge de l'amour" when a familiar voice... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # That Old Feeling: MST2K+1 > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Jun 15, 2001 4:00 AM UTC by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Jun 15, 2001 4:00 AM UTC On the last day of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I was standing in line for Jean-Luc Godard’s “Éloge de l’amour” when a familiar voice called out, “Richard?” Familiar? I’ll say. Every week for years on my tied-for-all-time-favorite TV show, “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (tied with, yes, “The Simpsons”), the clear, friendly tones of Kevin Murphy contributed to the comic intelligence of that cable-channel thing with the robots and the bad movies. He was Professor Bobo, sweltering to play an ape who evolved from men. His handsome Irish tenor, overdubbed about a dozen times, made “The United Servo Academy Men’s Chorus Hymn,” led by United Servo Academy Men’s Choral Director Vice Brigadier Sir Thomas “Bullhead” Servo, one of the series’ sonic highlights. And for all but the first 13 of the show’s 176 nationally-aired episodes, Murphy was the voice of that lovable, slightly pretentious, gumball-machine-headed Tom Servo, one of the two robots who kept a human company on the Satellite of Love as they all watched cheesy movies and, in the deflating wit of their gibes, exalted TV comedy. Murphy and I had met at the “MST3K” Conventio-Con-Expo-Fest-a-Rama, a meeting of 2,000 or so of the show’s faithful in September 1994\. I said hi a couple years later when the Best Brains (as the “MST3K” writer-performers had incorporated themselves) came to New York’s Museum of Television & Radio to celebrate their move from Comedy Central, where the show reigned for seven years, to the Sci-Fi Channel, where it aired until August ’99\. The period thereafter is known as The Dark Age to MSTies, the fans who preserved every episode on highest-quality SP videotape, devoted scholarly Websites to the show’s history, achievements and obscure jokes, and would re-watch old shows with a knowing veneration that rivaled a medieval monk’s defiant devotion to the Gnostic Bible. Murphy and his erstwhile cohorts went into hibernation or, worse, to L.A. And now one of my comedy Colossi was paging me at the Cannes Film Festival. We chatted for a half-hour before the film, I peppering him with questions that began “Please, Mr. Murphy, Sir,” he responding with amiable, animal grace. He told me of his current project: a book called “A Year at the Movies,” in which he would be seeing a different movie in a different place each day. He’d penciled in Cannes for May 20, so here he was. Then we all filed into the theater, and — I want to phrase this as modestly as possible — KEVIN MURPHY SAT NEXT TO ME THROUGH A WHOLE GODARD MOVIE! You are perhaps hoping that he behaved as Servo might during a Coleman Francis melodrama, uttering witty put-downs of the modernist master, in French with English subtitles. But no: he remained respectfully, or at least considerately, quiet throughout. When the film ended, we waved and parted. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of my Brush With Greatness. …Until two weeks later, when I got an e-mail from the Kevinator. Since I have no shame (and no life), I will share it with you: “It was swell running into you at Cannes. It was even sweller to screen the Godard film with you; like a boyhood dream come true — but remember, I was a sick boy.” He then invited me to a “reunion panel” of the “MST3K” gang — creator and first star Joel Hodgson, original Servo-puppeteer Josh Weinstein, Mad Scientists Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff and Mary Jo Pehl as Pearl Forrester — that was to be held, at Columbia University’s Alfred Lerner Hall, as part of the Toyota Comedy Festival. What MSTie could miss it? So last week more than a thousand votaries sat on Lerner Hall’s folding chairs, strained to hear the panelists’ remarks through a ramshackle sound system and had a wuuunnnderful time. What follows are some of the Brains’ comments, as best I could transcribe them while laughing in the dark. Are six of you still wondering, What the heck is “Mystery Science Theater”? Well, for once in this column’s brief life, I am not going to provide an exhaustive exegesis of something I loved when I was a kid. For those who don’t know “MST3K,” and want to experience a higher form of laughter, I suggest you rent or purchase some of the 32 shows or packages available from Rhino Video; or peruse the 21-part [Website history of the show](http://www.mst3kinfo.com/history); or consult some of the many appreciations written about “MST3K,” including a few I [did in TIME](/time/magazine/archive/1996/dom/960422/cinema.mst.html) and Film Comment (July-August 1995). If none of these prescriptions convince you that the show is worth cherishing, seek therapy. Just two brief points. (1) Each two-hour show, most of it devoted to the screening of and “riffing” on a B movie, contained hundreds of crackling-smart observations — many of which can be synopsized in Servo’s weary comment on the film “Laserblast”: “There’s a point where it stops being a movie.” And (2) the humor was both outsider and heartland. The show was, after all, produced by Midwesterners — guys from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois — in a mall in Eden Prairie, just outside Minneapolis. Except for Weinstein, these guys were former stand-up comics, so far out of the power-comedy loop that they weren’t even Jewish. Imagine: for most of its time this was an all-Gentile comedy show. And imagine this: it was something for them all to be proud of. As Conniff said of the experience: “It’s great to make a really good show that only a few people watch — instead of a really crappy show that a lot of people watch.” The evening at Columbia had its loopy moments. Murphy mentioned that Hodgson “has great calves” and Conniff added, “He’s the 51st Sexiest Man in America.” When moderator Liz Winstead (a stand-up comic and co-creator of “The Daily Show”) told Joel he had a reputation for being unconventional, he replied, as if in ’50s-hipster ecstasy, “I’m wild inside!” To prove that he had way too much of something inside, he announced that he was going offstage to pee. Murphy suggested that the sound technician keep Joel’s body microphone on; the audience was then treated to the sound of spurting water. Murphy then walked offstage as well; when he returned, he said, “This is New York — you can do it in the street.” But most of the hour-plus evening offered an informal retelling of the show’s creation and evolution. Master Builder Joel, who devised the “invention exchanges” that preceded each film in the 86 episodes he hosted before leaving in 1993, discussed his very first invention — “a cracker cracker” — which he did as a third grade project. It was a karate chop that cracked a Saltine. The teacher, he admitted, wasn’t crazy about his invention. “Yeah, but I got to eat the cracker.” Hodgson and Weinstein discussed the first season on the Minneapolis UHF station KTMA. Mallon had given Hodgson the opportunity to fill a two-hour time slot, and Joel quickly proposed the format that, with surprisingly few modifications, held for the next decade. Hodgson, aided by Beaulieu as Crow T. Robot and Weinstein as Servo (they both also played the Mads), pieced the puppets together from gizmos found in a Salvation Army basement, built the satellite set and wrote the catchy theme song (“In the not too distant future…”). The young staff — Hodgson was 28, Beaulieu 29, Weinstein only 18 — didn’t bother writing their riffs; mostly the three guys crouched before a wall and, watching a film for the first time, ad-libbed when ready. That often meant arid stretches of silence. As Weinstein recalled of “Untamed Youth,” one early movie, “We just watched it with Mount Rushmore-like stares on our faces.” The station paid them all of $2,400 for the show. (Trace earned $25.) It was fun, Joel said, “but we all had to sleep in the same room.” MSTies with the Check Spelling utility on their Apple computers know that, if the function is applied to “MST3K,” it assumes the word is a typo and suggests, as a proper spelling, MISTOOK. Well, from the beginning, some people mistook MST3K for a kid’s puppet show. (Which it is, in a way, but then so is “Chicken Run.”) It’s always been a challenge to explain the charm and sting of the show to people who haven’t seen it. As Weinstein said, “It’s kind of tough to pitch: “I got this thing where puppets mock movies. For two hours. ” So at the end of the first season, they made a reel of their best bits and peddled it to New York. “We basically did a 40-hour pilot,” Hodgson said. The channel that soon became Comedy Central picked up the show, and the Brains were off and percolating. One bright idea was to replace Weinstein, who soon departed because of “creative differences” (or, as Hodgson explained at the time, “Let me put it this way: he’s 18 years old”), with Murphy as Servo the robot and Conniff as one of the Mads; Conniff also acted as pre-screener of the films to be chosen for riffing. A second inspiration was to hire Nelson, first to do “some typing,” then to head the writing staff; they decided that they did need scripts, and Mike had the organizational and social skills to harness a half-dozen people who were wild inside. (But, really, all the writers displayed great comedy taste: the creator’s sense of what’s funny, the smart editor’s sense of what isn’t.) A third was for the Brains to create their own fan club — why wait for real viewers to do it? The show quickly connected with an audience of educated, pretty-hip, mostly-white viewers, and the club eventually mushroomed to some 64,000 members. Discussion of the show intensified with the blooming of the Internet. “MST3K” was one of the first pop-cultural artifacts to fill chat rooms with hot debate and divided loyalties: the Joel-vs.-Mike debates about the founding host and his successor escalated from rancor to death threats (some people were taking the show way too seriously). The creators said they knew they were getting through when critics they admired wrote about it. Murphy mentioned Tom Shales and TIME magazine (Richard Zoglin in 1990: “Not since Woody Allen’s “What’s Up Tiger Lily?” has anyone had so much fun with bad movies”). “Also,” Conniff put in, “the fictional guy who loved ‘The Animal’ really liked us.” The show inspired a raft of lame imitators: the series “Reel Wild Cinema” (with Sandra Bernhardt) and a DVD version of “Ghostbusters” with the actors making fun of themselves. And when “MST3K” moved to the Sci-Fi Channel, it was aired in England, where it was so popular that even subsidiary players became cult icons. Can it be coincidence that in the mid-’90s a local columnist, fishing about for a name to attach to her bright, desperately-seeking Londoner, borrowed the name of occasional “MST3K” writer- performer Bridget Jones? We think not. Well, all good things must come to an end… Wait a minute! Why must they? In this case” because after Sci-Fi bowed out in 1999, not one of the 517 other cable channels chose to pony up the measly $2 million a year for 24 episodes of a terrific show. I mean, as the Brains constantly reminded us, “MST3K” won a Peabody Award! All right, wait another minute: Just what is a Peabody Award? Turns out it is administered by the University of Georgia’s Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication — hmmm — and among other TV shows it has honored are “The Simpsons” and “The Sopranos.” So it’s probably a good thing for “MST3K” to have won. Anyway, the gang dispersed. Hodgson, Weinstein, Beaulieu and Conniff, who had already departed, worked variously on such shows as “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” and “Freaks and Geeks.” (Conniff on Hollywood type-casting for writers: “They only want you to do something you’ve done already.”) Murphy and later writer-performers Paul Chaplin and Bill Corbett contributed humor pieces to the Ironminds website. Nelson made the biggest literary splash last year with “Movie Megacheese,” a paperback collection of essays on, gee, bad movies. Nelson reveals an encyclopedic, universal disdain for movies, TV, actors — nay, the human experience. (He takes just two short breaths to say nice things about Jackie Chan and the Three Stooges.) Yet he does so in a voice of wry depression that could only have emerged from the bleak midwinter Midwest; really, he’s up there with George Ade, Jean Shepherd and Celine, except Celine lived in Paris. I said something like this in TIME, but I would have preferred to say it on the “Megacheese” book jacket. Instead, the publicists at HarperCollins, in soliciting a blurb for Nelson’s book from a TIME movie critic, sent galleys to the wrong Richard. Through this fudge-up, my colleague Schickel got a quote on the cover, greatly increasing the esteem with which he was held at the magazine and winning him many more movie-review assignments than I’ve had lately. Dammit, though I could have written a book blurb — the kind you see on London theater fronts, in which an otherwise respectable member of the British press reveals to what extent he was rendered helpless by some raucous comedy or other (actual blurb from the Sunday Times, on “The Pub Landlord”: “I laughed so much, lager came out of my nose”). So I will confess what is true; reading the book, I nearly peed with laughter. (Note to self: get prostate exam.) Nelson was busy the night of the Columbia panel. So Winstead addressed this question to those who were present: What film would they pick to pick on if they were doing the show now? Said Conniff, immediately: “Pay It Forward.” Others mentioned “Town & Country,” “Unbreakable,” “Battleship Earth.” Winstead also wanted to know which film had been the hardest to sit through. Hodgson: the hands-down MSTie fave, “Manos — The Hand of Fate” (“Honestly, I hit the wall on that one”). Pehl: “Laserblast.” Conniff: the fifth “Gamera” movie. Beaulieu: “Sidehackers” (“We’re riffing merrily, then we find out the movie’s about murder and rape”). Murphy: “Red Zone Cuba.” Weinstein: “Honestly, after the eighth time they all hurt.” The soldiers on Bataan get to complain this way; it’s not appropriate for guys who had the best job in the world and did it brilliantly. As Conniff remarked, “I always liked to keep in mind that I was being paid to watch TV.” The Columbia evening reminded everyone, perhaps even the Brains, that the “MST3K” decade was something special. The show ransacked all art, trash, misery and science; its welter of allusions, especially the obscure ones (“Nurse Feratu,” “the Mothra Graham Dance Troupe,” Roddy McDowall as “Dr. Casabamelon”), made viewers not only laugh but feel smarter. And not smarter than other people, but smarter than they were before. The writers said, in effect, that all of pop and high culture — current and classic, the stuff you forgot in high school and the stuff you thought no one else remembered — was up for grabs. That’s why a show of the ’90s fits in a column called That Old Feeling: because it wasn’t a slave to the new, it was a sassy servant to the wisdom and idiocy of the ages. Toward the end of the evening, Frank Conniff recalled his favorite fan letter: “Are you guys really old, or do you just read a lot?” A few days ago, I got another e-mail from Kevin Murphy: “The show was great fun, and of course it’s always a boost to the old ego.” But he, like the other “MST3K” alumni, was loath to wallow in the past. He had new silly things to do. “I’m off to Finland for the Midnight Sun Film Fest,” he wrote. “Tack!” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6907970/that-old-feeling-mst2k1/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6907970/that-old-feeling-mst2k1/"},"headline":"That Old Feeling: MST2K+1","datePublished":"2001-06-15T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-22T15:14:53.564Z","description":"On the last day of this year's Cannes Film Festival, I was standing in line for Jean-Luc Godard's \"Éloge de l'amour\" when a familiar voice...","url":"https://time.com/archive/6907970/that-old-feeling-mst2k1/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Richard Corliss","url":"https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/6907970/that-old-feeling-mst2k1/","name":"That Old Feeling: MST2K+1"}}]}] ```