Word: servo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Area 51 must be a busy place; everyone has a theory about what's inside. Aliens. Abductees. Elvis. "I think what's hidden in Area 51 is Kyle MacLachlan's career, particularly after Showgirls," suggests comedian Kevin Murphy, the voice of the robot Tom Servo on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which last week found a new home on the Sci-Fi Channel. "Or how about this? All those socks from all those dryers get sucked through your dryer vents into a porthole, and they end up in Area 51. The government scrapes some of your DNA off the socks...
Each TV show starts with a jingly theme song explaining that a mad scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu), is conducting a bizarre "experiment." He has launched into space a satellite containing a human named Mike (head writer Michael J. Nelson) and the automatons Tom Servo (operated and voiced by Kevin Murphy) and Crow T. Robot (Beaulieu again) and forced them to watch bad films: Ed Wood classics like Bride of the Monster and stuff way, way worse, like the 1965 Attack of the the Eye Creatures--a movie so inept that its makers put the word the twice...
...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...
...Comedy Central, is the smart person's all-purpose entertainment event of the '90s: a deftly satirical musical-comedy puppet show that masquerades as a two-hour put-down of bad films. Three figures -- a human, Mike Nelson (played by head writer Michael J. Nelson), and two robots, Tom Servo (Kevin Murphy) and Crow (Trace Beaulieu) -- sit in front of a movie screen and, as First Spaceship to Venus or Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster or I Accuse My Parents unspools, they crack wise. That's about it, plus a sketch or two and some edgy banter with...
Along with standard kid stuff, like the endless fascination with bong jokes, the show offers giddy social commentary. Watching a '50s industrial film promoting General Motors cars in a gleaming world-of-tomorrow landscape, Servo (he's the red gumball machine with Slinky arms) intones, "Future not available in Africa, India, or Central or South America." Listen to Crow (the gold robot constructed of a lacrosse helmet, a split bowling pin and some Tupperware sections) explain the Hercules sex-and-pecs epics of the late '50s: they stem from "European indignation toward postwar conservatism and sexual repression, which translates onto...