The Magical Mst Tour

By RICHARD CORLISS

Two thousand folks milled genially around the swimming pool of the Radisson South Hotel in Bloomington, Minnesota. In the gaudy gathering were folks bedecked as alien creatures and Japanese dinosaurs, staggering derelicts and severed heads on surgical trays. If anyone looked displaced in this demented Renaissance Fayre, it was the two gents in Starship Enterprise uniforms. Their name tags read whoops wrong convention.

Wonderfully wrong. This was no Star Trek reunion, with techno-dweebs debating the mythic import of Episode 34. It was the first ConventioCon ExpoFest-a-Rama of cable TV's Mystery Science Theater 3000. On a recent weekend, fans paid $45 each (plus room and board) to bond with one another, meet the program's writer-performers, attend a live show, comb through old props, view rare tapes of early episodes and dress up for the Midwest's ginchiest costume ball.

The MSTIES, as the show's 50,000 registered fans are called, were in pig paradise. They squealed like Beatlemaniacs when a cast member came onstage, and seemed as knowledgeable as the show's creators about every aspect of the canon. But why devote so much energy to a TV show? One woman replied, "Let's just say we're good solid American citizens with a lot of time on our hands."

There is a better reason. The Emmy-nominated MST3K, now in its sixth season on 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 the mad scientists, Dr. Clayton Forrester (Beaulieu again) and TV's Frank (Frank Conniff), who supposedly have stranded Mike and the 'bots on the Satellite of Love deep in space and who send these cheesy movies as experiments to monitor Mike's mind.

This could be a tiresome jape. Making fun of show-biz effluvia has become the easiest, sleaziest way to get a laugh and feel superior. Even cut-rate exploitation movies can possess a delirious visionary gran-deur that makes any sarcasm directed their way seem small-minded. But the MST3K gang have gone far beyond Golden Turkey Awards. For this clever crowd, inept movies are mere cues to asides on politics and society, which they attack with scimitar wit. The show can even be seen as a branch of semiological (and semi-illogical) studies. "I've always been interested in the close reading of any text," . Murphy says. "We just get a lot closer -- inside the movie."

After a decade of smart people playing dumb (the David Letterman syndrome), it's a tonic to watch a show whose creators are unafraid to parade their erudition. MST3K, which is incorporated under the apt moniker Best Brains, Inc., is for snobs and slackers -- a crash course in popular culture, high and low. Pay attention, for without warning or footnoting you may hear allusions to Thomas Pynchon, Susan Faludi, Joseph Campbell, Jenny Holzer, Andrew Sarris or Anna Kisselgoff. A starlet bathing in a lake suggests "Fanne Foxe in a Maxfield Parrish painting." And don't worry if some of the names are obscure to you. Nobody, including the writers, gets every reference.

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 the screen into big sweaty guys pushin' girls around." Or Mike, on the chorus line of prancing red devils in Santa Claus: "Oh, I suppose Hell got an NEA grant."

They also engage in that most honorable and despised form of wordsmanship, the pun. The gooey remains of an ancient Egyptian are "guaca-mummy." A vampirish hospital worker is called "Nurse Feratu." Acolytes cavorting in worship to a Japanese monster are "the Mothra Graham Dance Troupe."

And so it goes, 600 or more gags per show, in 104 episodes aired incessantly (24 hours a week). The staff has weathered its flourishing cult status, the challenge of devising new jokes about the same old sorts of films, flirtations with Hollywood to make an MST3K feature and, last year, the departure of creator and host Joel Hodgson. His sleepy-voiced charisma was replaced by the flummoxed gentility of the baby-faced Nelson, who also composes many of the delicious song parodies (collected on two Play MST for Me videocassettes). At the convention, Conniff asked impishly, "Would now be the time to tell them we're replacing Mike with Jimmy Smits?"

The actor-writers answered questions about their favorite MST3K movie (Manos -- the Hands of Fate) or about the off-camera relationship of Murphy and Beaulieu to their puppets Tom and Crow (Murphy: "We have a little place up in the Poconos"; Beaulieu: "Crow and I are not on speaking terms"). The creative staff, led by producer Jim Mallon, signed autographs for hours. At another panel, Beverly Garland, plucky star of three Roger Corman dramas savaged by MST3K, said, "My God, I wish we had had that dialogue when we were doing the picture!" The convention moved to Minneapolis' State Theater for a hilarious deconstruction of the '50s sci-fi film This Island Earth before returning for the costume ball.

At the ball, co-host Conniff admitted that the prize judging was "not fair. But, hey, we didn't win an Emmy." By then, though, they all looked liked winners -- the cast and crew, exhilarated by their fans' feedback, and the faithful msties, all those doughy guys and fire maidens from outer space who share some ingenious joy every time the Mystery Science Theater 3000 gang yells, "Movie sign!"