Now that the ”Bring Back MST3K” Kickstarter campaign has reached its $2 million goal, The A.V. Club feels confident in saying: Felicia Day will definitely play the villainous Mad on the newest incarnation of Mystery Science Theater 3000. (As comfortable as a MSTie ever feels, anyway. We’re an anxiety-ridden lot.)
Anyway, Day will co-star alongside new host Jonah Ray as Kinga Forrester, the daughter of original MST3K baddie Dr. Clayton Forrester and granddaughter of Pearl. Hodgson explains that he envisioned the character of Kinga as a redhead from the start—”I’ve always felt the Forrester clan were from Scandinavian backgrounds, mainly because MST3K has such deep roots in the Midwest, and especially Minnesota,” he explains—and that he considered a number of actresses before discovering Day. “[S]he can pull off being likable, intimidating and ‘crazy’ all at the same time: a total wild card!,” Hodgson says.
Perhaps even more importantly, since they’ll be the ones doing all the riffing and all, Hodgson also revealed the identities of the two brave souls who will consent to having their consciousness transferred into the robot bodies of Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo for the duration of the show. Those would be comedians Hampton Yount and Baron Vaughn, respectively, both of whom Hodgson says were recommended to him by Ray. He adds that the crew has already been testing its riff chemistry on Skype, and that Yount does a killer Trace Beaulieu impression, but he told him to make the character his own:
I don’t want them to make “sound-alike” Tom Servos and Crows. The bots aren’t like the Muppets: they’ve always been manifestations of the people running them. Kevin didn’t sound exactly like Josh, and Bill didn’t sound exactly like Trace. And the way I see it, the point of being a movie riffing robot is that you can do a bunch of voices and dialects – not just sound like the last guy.
That just leaves one silhouette on Hodgson’s mystery lineup, seen below; speculation at The A.V. Club’s offices is that the outline is rather Patton Oswalt-shaped, but then again, that could be any number of dorks.