It was somewhere in the middle of Sting Of Death when it dawned on me: Bill Corbett, Kevin Murphy, and Mike Nelson have spent more time performing as RiffTrax than any of them did working on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Murphy was with the flagship movie-riffing program from its UHF debut in 1988 to its basic cable sign off in 1999—11 years, but that’s still just a little over half as long as he’s been doing comedic audio commentaries alongside one-time MST3K head writer and host Nelson and indispensable Sci-Fi Channel–era addition Corbett. As much as RiffTrax is built atop the foundation of the three final seasons of MST3K‘s initial run, it’s very much become its own thing since its 2005 launch, with its own voice and sensibility. Those qualities are backward compatible with the cowtown puppet show that first brought Murphy, Corbett, and Nelson together. But getting back into their old, respective roles of Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot, and Mike Nelson for Mystery Science Theater 3000: The RiffTrax Experiments requires some adjustment—say 40 minutes of an 80 minute movie.
Good thing they’ve been working on and refining the fundamentals across the past two decades. The guys have kept their reps up, taking jabs at major Hollywood pictures and vintage cheese alike, and the two younger writers who’ve established themselves as the other key parts of the RiffTrax core, Connor Lastowka and Sean Thomason join them for this improbable MST3K re-revival. (A re-re-re-re-revival, if you want to get pedantic about all the times the show has been pulled out of the dustbin.) The in-theater jokes in Sting Of Death are strong, if a little dependent on pop-culture allusions in the early goings. But the tone, and the maturity level of the content, are reminders that while the basic shape of MST3K never changes, the kinds of wisecracks that make up the majority of its runtime do. RiffTrax, never beholden to broadcast standards and practices, but never trafficking in the type of kneejerk lowbrow material that might get it confused for “Bozo Dubbed Over,” work a little more off-color than cable- or streaming-period MST3K—a fine fit for a movie with as much drive-in-packing close-ups of shimmying asses as Sting Of Death. And, operating fully independently and far away from any showbiz hub, the writers of The RiffTrax Experiments seem like they’re free and more willing to lob bombs at mainstream entertainment than the show’s L.A.-adjacent Netflix crews. One riff at the expense of Young Sheldon would’ve been right at home alongside the potshots Mike and the Bots used to take at big-time ’90s comedy contemporaries like Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler (the latter of whom comes in for some ridicule in Sting Of Death, accompanied by an impression of his signature babytalk gibberish). New MST3K hasn’t felt this countercultural in quite a while.
But let’s not get bogged down in games of compare and contrast; that sort of thing’s been holding MSTies back since Nelson replaced Joel Hodgson at the show’s helm in 1993. This is not a flame war, you’re not reading these words on a Usenet board, and we all understand that the basic MST3K concept is elastic enough to reshape itself to the priorities of whoever’s in charge. For the RiffTrax guys, who have traded primarily in sound for 20 years, that means an emphasis on the joke-telling while playing around within the visual framework of the show as it existed on Comedy Central and The Sci-Fi Channel. (I’ll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Syfy.) During the movie, Mike, Crow, and Tom Servo don’t get up to any high wire physical chicanery with their shadows. They move their heads with the motion on screen in Sting of Death, but stay seated for the duration. The silhouettes, however, have received an upgrade, with a nifty illusion that makes it look like the light of the big screen is illuminating the contours of the three figures at the bottom of the TV. It looks more like we’re sitting directly behind them in the theater, and less like they’re the two-dimensional audience members providing the fourth-wall busting setup to a Bugs Bunny punchline.
It’s an aesthetic decision in line with The RiffTrax Experiments’ redux on the Satellite Of Love‘s spray-painted bric-a-brac architecture. More onscreen texture, more depth in which to arrange Mike’s once and current captors—Pearl Forrester (Mary Jo Pehl) and her henchman The Observer (Corbett) and Professor Bobo (Murphy)—in the frame during the episode’s bookends and lone intermission host segment. Of course, other alterations must be made to acknowledge the changing times: Yes, that means Mike and the Bots’ reference points have been updated to include Star Wars episodes seven through nine, but also that the abbreviation for their orbiting home now also stands for Syd’s Olive Loaf. At a time when world domination has become the province of Earth’s most tedious dweebs, Pearl’s given up the game, selling the satellite’s naming rights to a fittingly retro-Midwestern brand with a catchy jingle and recouping the retirement savings she never had by feeding her prisoner’s movie feedback to the reportedly intelligent current-day hobby horse of those aforementioned tedious dweebs. Sting Of Death gets one of its first big laughs when Mother Forrester reveals the “monitor his mind” part of the MST3K theme song is now just more data for the hungry maw of “the AI.” Not any AI in particular, just “the AI”in aggregate (and phrased like the gosh darn Minnesotan grandma that Pearl’s always been at heart.)
The episode quickly dispenses with this catch-up (Turns out Mike’s made a pretty good life for himself at a dairy co-op, continuing a thread from the history-altering sections of season eight’s Time Chasers) to get to its feature presentation. Sting Of Death is a colorful, Floridian nightmare whose hilarious massacre of middle-aged college students by Portuguese man o’ war (played, naturally, by out-of-focus plastic bags) is preceded by Neil Sedaka’s introduction to a dance sensation that swept no nation, “Do The Jellyfish.” It’s a tack that’s worked for past back-from-the-dead MST3K episodes The Crawling Eye, Revenge Of The Creature, and Reptilicus: rubber monster, “exotic” setting, plenty of doofy cannon fodder to clown on. Sting Of Death‘s sluggish opening strains to spark the writers’ imaginations, but they eventually latch onto some winning running gags: the evidently advanced ages of the onscreen undergrads, the clumsy creeping of the film’s obvious killer, and jokes built around marine biology arcana whose depth put all the film’s scientist characters to shame.
Eventually, the level and nature of the interactions in the theater start to feel like both RiffTrax and MST3K. Not to get too “wonder how he eats and breathes” about it, but it makes a certain amount of sense—both from a storytelling perspective and a newcomer-welcoming one—that Mike and The Bots wouldn’t immediately slip into their established, ball-busting-buddies dynamic. Around minute 60, Servo reaches for an old chestnut, and things really lock into place: a less-than-romantic image prompts the chance to roast their human pal with a “Look familiar, Mike?”
From that point forward the interplay between the characters is a little more prominent, a little more rooted in their established personae. Here’s hoping there’s more of that to come in the remaining episodes. The guys have a good, considerably less fussy thing going on as RiffTrax. If they’re throwing themselves deeply into the MST3K of it all in the wraparound segments (“Do The Tardigrade” > “Do The Jellyfish”) but not in the theater, the puppets may as well have stayed in the box.
Stray observations
- • Hey, it’s me, certified MSTie Erik Adams. Consider this a test balloon for RiffTrax Experiments recaps—MST3K isn’t exactly a show that lends itself to this format (hence the “streaming diary” approach I took with season 11 back in 2017), but this first episode at least provides enough material to dig into. Will the format of these recaps change? Find out in two weeks we enter the arena for Deathsport.
- • One piece of continuity picked up from the end of MST3K’s initial run: Gypsy must still be living large, because she’s neither running all the satellite’s vital functions nor in the Robot Roll Call—under her original name or her more culturally sensitive moniker, GPC.
- • The drawback to the new theater effects is that they kind of fuzz out Crow’s face guard “net”, making it appear the way it did in the first three seasons of the show.
- • The new hallway sequence is fun. The influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey on the show’s visuals gets a direct acknowledgment with the floating Dave Bowman, and I love the cameo from the Laserblast aliens.
- • What was everyone’s favorite riff? I was really tickled by this Byzantine answer to the simple question of “Where’s Ruth?”: “Probably starting a steakhouse with her Chris.”
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