Word: mst3k
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...routine is the same in their big-screen debut, except that Best Brains chose a not-so-bad film, This Island Earth--Universal-International's 1955 space opera about American scientists kidnapped to a distant planet, where they are attacked by macrocephalous monsters. The MST3K prologue is a bit ragged, but once This Island Earth kicks in, so does the Brains' mother wit. It finds the absurd everywhere, from the studio logo ("Doesn't the fact that it's Universal make it International?") to the ethereal, annoying ringing sound that accompanies the aliens ("Now we know what the world sounds...
...typical MST3K show has perhaps 700 of these asides. There are fewer in this riff on This Island Earth--the whole thing, ruthlessly pared down, lasts only 73 minutes--but watching it in a crowd offers a different high. As the gags pile up remorselessly, and the viewer strains to keep up with the story line and the cutting subtext, a furious but benign apnea takes hold. You can't enjoy a good long laugh because you'll miss too much; you must let it explode in short blasts. It's the happiest form of internal injury...
Next month the Laserblast episode will take MST3K out in style, with deftly flicked allusions to, among others, Eddie Deezen ("heir to the Arnold Stang fortune"), Ram Dass, Georgia O'Keeffe, Haile Selassie, Sister Mary Elephant, Iron Eyes Cody and Roddy McDowall ("as Dr. Casabamelon"). Crow notes that "this movie was run through a highly technical process called 'tension extraction.'" And in an especially inert section of Laserblast, Servo says what might be said of any MST3K experiment: "There's a point where it stops being a movie...
...MST3K may stop being a TV show. In the last episode, Dr. Forrester announces that his funding has been cut and, before he goes off to live with his mother, he's disconnecting the satellite; Mike, Crow and Tom will drift off in space toward a rendezvous with a mysterious monolith. Back on earth, Comedy Central will air reruns till February '97. Rhino Home Video is issuing 25 MST3K shows, the first three (Cave Dwellers, The Amazing Colossal Man, Mitchell) April...
...when MST3K made its network debut, so did the Kids in the Hall, the Toronto quintet noted for their daft, deadpan playlets about modern domesticity--and for their fondness for women's frocks. From these five young men (David Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson) now comes the inevitable feature film, Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy. This movie, borrowing the plot of the 1951 Alec Guinness comedy The Man in the White Suit; is about a "happy drug" that makes everyone miserable. Bad news for the Kids: the movie (directed by Kevin Makin) will have...