Kevin and Mike talk back

So why are folks gonna pay good money to see the same thing they can get for free every night (2 a.m. in Boston)? "Well, the whole genesis of the thing stems from a very simple principle," says Nelson. "We noticed whenever you get a bunch of people together to watch the show, it's more fun. So we realized that if we also tailor the whole thing to a movie crowd, it could work really well. It's cinematic, so we can move the camera wherever we want. We can see the inside of the ship."

Which to the average moviegoer may seem pointless. But as MST3K blossomed from the lead-in to a local wrestling show at Minneapolis's failing KTMA to explosive cult hit on Comedy Central, the show's ever-widening fan base has become rather smitten with the characters themselves. "We see Servo's room, which is an insufferable mess," says Murphy. "He collects things. You should really see the movie to find out what he collects. It's a lovely surprise. He's a chunky little fellow, and he acts that way too. He's a little brother, and so am I. All the writers write for all the characters, so everybody has created Tom in their own mind's eye. So you get a lot of different bizarre angles on the guy."

Talking back to the screen has become increasingly popular these days -- Beavis and Butt-head talk back to videos, Talk Soup talks back to the talk shows, even the guys who talk back to sports highlights on ESPN's Sports Center admit to being MST3K junkies. "When we first started," says Murphy, "Joel [Hodgson, the show's creator and Nelson's predecessor] was inspired by two things. One was the old Warner Bros. cartoons, when they were originally shown in theaters -- the old Bugs Bunny and things like that. Every now and again a silhouette of a person would get up and yell back at Bugs Bunny, and he'd yell back at the person. Joel also came in with a drawing, a bunch of theater seats and a guy looking at the screen. Which was inspired by Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, the cover, just sitting at the bottom of the album cover looking up. We've just added a few more words to the vocabulary. It's a different way of looking at TV, another way of looking at a movie, a different kind of filter."

For the movie, the MST3K team looked to the Universal Studios vaults -- home to some of the best horror movies ever made, and some of the worst -- where they rediscovered new frontiers in cinematic pain. "We saw great movies like Killdozer," says Nelson. "A meteorite hits a bulldozer and it goes crazy. How does that work? And Angry Red Planet, which Kevin says gives him a headache."

"Have you seen it in a theater?" frowns Murphy. "There's this red monochrome effect? It gives you a headache! It's a great movie, but it hurts to watch on the big screen."

"So This Island Earth was an obvious choice," continues Nelson, "because it's a great color sci-fi movie from the '50s, hittin' all those beefs that we like -- the funny monsters, the big-voiced hero with a huge jaw and face. He's sort of a Doc Savage type. He's a scientist and he's muscley, he's a jet pilot, and there's aliens with huge foreheads and no one even notices they're aliens. It's got all the things we needed, and it looks great too."

Hoping to capitalize on the publicity for the movie and book, Comedy Central promptly, uh, canceled the TV show (that is, no new episodes and a gradual phase-out) -- despite a voluminous write-in campaign by fans, and a full-page ad in Variety signed by 200 of the show's supporters. Okay, so it's odd timing, to say the least. "But who are we to guess the inner workings of a major cable television network?" asks Murphy. Currently they're shopping the show to the Sci-Fi Channel, but they're willing to produce new episodes themselves and market them direct to video, if that's what it takes. "If the show has encouraged people to not just be spoon-fed the stuff they're given," says Nelson, "then I guess I'm happy with it."

-- Carly Carioli