What is Mystery Science Theater? Sure, it's a bunch of old movies with some guys sitting in a theater making snide jokes and comments about it. Actually, two of those guys are robots. And they're being forced to watch these awful movie as part of an evil science experiment. If you look at a screenshot of this show, most of the time you'll see the same silhouette of Joel, Tom Servo, and Crow in front of some old movie. You'd wonder why anyone would rave about this stuff. But I tell you, these guys are hilarious. They really pick the worst movies and make them hilarious. They're the kind of people you want talking in the theater next to you. It's hard to describe the humor, however, since you have to describe the context of the movie, the actors, and the timing. I can say, it's all of the following: irreverent, sarcastic, pun-filled, dry, and just plain funny.
This DVD set may not be in any sort of order, but it is a good selection of episodes. For your cheesy special effects and stock footage abuse, you've got King Dinosaur. Dinosaurs are literally live iguanas (and a few other lizards), with one of the main characters even snapping a photo of one, describing it as a T-Rex. Your low-budget 70's spy movie is covered by Code Name: Diamond Head, a movie that may have been filmed in Hawaii, but hilariously looks to be filmed in the slummiest parts of the state. Last of the Wild Horses covers your old time Western, and the catch-all for pretty much everything else is in The Castle of Fu Manchu. There are lots of little short films that you might have seen in theaters before these films like A Day at the Fair and the cautionary tale of X Marks The Spot, a film that showed the danger of driving like a jackass. It all, of course, gets equally ripped apart by the movie-watching human and robot group.
The special features are quite interesting, as well. As much time is spent making fun of the movies, there's some interesting history behind them. The feature Code Name: Quinn Martin details the career of the writer of the movie Code Name: Diamond Head. It's quite interesting to know how movies like these fit into the time in which they were released. Another feature, Life After MST3K: Kevin Murphy, is an interview with one of the actors that did the voice of Tom Servo. It's been about 20 years since the show started, so a lot has happened since then. Kevin wrote a book, worked on some animation, and was around for the internet boom. He did a feature for Sci-Fi channel's website when they first started getting content just for the web. He also goes into the RiffTrax (voice overs that you sync with your own copy of a movie) business that he's still currently involved in. What's great is that his story touches on how technology has changed in that time period. It's great to hear him talk so excitedly about being able to make fun of any movie, even newly released movies, since the tracks are simply synced up with a movie that the consumer supplies themselves. If you think about it, man, this is pretty awesome technology! It's certainly miles away from MST3K's humble roots, but it still pays homage to the original concept.
Look, it's not easy to sell the idea of watching people watch a movie. It wouldn't work if the actors weren't comedians, it wouldn't work for a lot of reasons. But it works for MST3K. Really, nothing like it had come along before, and even the genius of RiffTrax doesn't quite have that same warm, fuzzy, side-splitting feeling as the original low budget series. This is a great set to test run the series with, and great alternative to what might have been a bad movie rental/Netflix night, anyway.
