Mystery Science Theater 3000, Media Consciousness, and the Postmodern Allegory of the

Captive Audience
Author(s): JOHN KING
Source: Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 59, No. 4 (WINTER 2007), pp. 37-53
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the University Film & Video
Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20688575
Accessed: 08-04-2020 00:07 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Illinois Press, University Film & Video Association are collaborating with
JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Film and Video

This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Mystery Science Theater 3000, Med?a Consciousness, and the
Postmodern Allegory of the Captive Audience
JOHN KING
in 1985, one year after the projected time of
George Orwell's dystopian vision of totalitarian
ism, communications theorist Neil Postman
surveyed the effect of television on American
culture and concluded, in his not-so-subtly
titled study of popular media, that we were
Amusing Ourselves to Death.1 Postman argued
that in the twentieth century, American dis
course had experienced a "great media-meta
phor shift" (16) in which the epistemological
metaphor of the book (as an image of how best
to understand things) has yielded to the epis
temological metaphor of television. Because
television does not (and essentially, due to its
discontinuous, visual form, cannot) emphasize
depth of knowledge or sustained reasoning,
Postman demonstrated that this superficial
epistemology trivializes newsgathering, reli
gion, statesmanship, and education across the
entirety of American culture. By its ubiquity and
influence, television "has made entertainment
itself the natural format for the representation
of all experience" (87). Such knowledge as
television fosters?and more importantly, the
model of knowing that television makes one
accustomed to?is "dangerous and absurdist"
(27), even if that model has become the status
quo of American culture.
When, in his conclusion, the time comes to
recommend solutions to the problems outlined
John king earned a PhD in English from Purdue
University in 2003. His scholarly work has ap
peared in the Journal of Modern Literature, Twen
tieth Century Literature, and English Language
Notes.
JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2007 37
?2007 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman is
predictably pessimistic. One solution, which
he regards as absurd, is that television could
somehow instruct its viewers on how to watch
television critically and reject the passivity
fostered by its incessant flow of easy, context
free images. In short, he posits the immensely
remote and ultimately futile possibility that
a television program could actually promote
"media consciousness" (161) enough to get
people to (in former FCC Commissioner Nicho
las Johnson's words) "begin talking back at
their television sets" (160). This would seem
to require television programmers and market
ers to act against their professional interests,
by breaking the three commandments of ef
fortless (almost noncognitive) entertainment
that Postman sanctimoniously outlines: "thou
shalt have no prerequisites" (147), "thou shalt
induce no perplexity" (147), and "thou shalt
avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited
upon Egypt" (148).
By the mid-1980s, however, cable televi
sion had, according to television historian
Erik Barnouw, "suddenly changed the shape
of American television" (496). Viewers once
accustomed to perhaps ten channels now
experienced a superabundance of channels,
a forty-channel universe that included MTV,
Nickelodeon, ESPN, and eventually, Comedy
Central (n?e the Comedy Channel) and that
undermined the monopoly the three major
broadcast networks had exercised through
most of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. In those
relatively early days of basic cable television,
original programming for the fledgling chan
 neis was far less slick and mainstream than it is
now. Currently, most basic cable channels flex
corporate-strength muscle and are in fact over
whelmingly financially interdependent with the
now five major networks, which, for their part,
have copied the commercially viable elements
pioneered by the cable channels, so that now
basic cable and network television are often
practically indistinguishable. In 1982, though,
cable stations, needing to fill massive blocks
of programming and struggling with heavy
start-up and infrastructure debts, often relied
on reruns of syndicated network programs and
movies (Barnouw 513; Mullen 130); in one of
her chapter titles in The Rise of Cable Program
ming in the United States, Megan Mullen calls
cable "Broadcast Television's Resource-Starved
Imitator." So long as original programming was
cheap, cable networks could offer alternatives
to network television, alternatives that even
dared to break the commandments of enter
tainment.
For several years, Mystery Science Theater
3000 (MST3K) was just such an iconoclastic
alternative?one predicated to a surprisingly
effective degree on Postman's hopeless hope
of media consciousness. After an amateurish
season on UHF channel KTMA in Minnesota,
from 1988-1989, MST3K emerged nationally on
the content-hungry Comedy Channel in 1989,
where it aired through 1996. It then limped,
quite altered, over to the Sci-Fi Channel in 1997,
and reached its terminus in 1999.
Cable Television and Postmodernism
When the show debuted on Comedy Central, it
almost immediately became a cult hit, in part
because it was a television refuge for intelligent
members of the comic book and sci-fi crowd,
and in part because it could be taken for an
allegory of existence in a corporate-controlled
media-state. The premise: in the not-too-dis
tant future, mad scientists in the employ of
Gizmonic Institute?operating from the shad
owy, nuclear-waste-ridden depths of their Deep
13 headquarters?launch a good-natured jani
tor into outer space and force him to live on a
38 JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2007
?2007 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
satellite and watch the inept products of popu
lar culture, usually low-grade science fiction
from the crusty past. While the premise might
seem to be what Hollywood would call "high
concept"?i.e., simple and very catchy?in
practice the show represented a uniquely ab
stract experience. The format was that, joel (the
janitor) and his robots would first introduce
themselves, and then they and the mad scien
tists would present new concepts in what was
called an "invention exchange." Then joel and
his robots would retreat in a conditioned panic
to a movie theater, where, as silhouettes at the
bottom of the screen, they watched an entire
film, with three intermissions for sketches and
discussions.
This essay focuses on the seasons Joel Hodg
son portrayed the main character (episodes 1
24 on KTMA and episodes 101-512 on Comedy
Central). This is in the interests of space; a full
study of the program would be large indeed. In
part, however, this focus is also symbolic, for
Joel Hodgson created /WSTj/C, and after six full
years he could no longer continue to create it
with pleasure.2 Seven episodes after he left,
the invention-exchange segment disappeared
from the program (last appearance: "The
Atomic Brain"); gradually other major actors left
the program as well.3 These departures could
be the result of the show's dwindling popularity
in its later years, but they also seem to indicate
that the participants were burning out from the
strain of trying to counteract television's almost
monolithic dominance over media conscious
ness.
The timing for such a metashow was propi
tious, for in the postmodern condition, media
exhaustion seemed not just a real possibil
ity, but the equivalent of reality itself. In "The
Literature of Exhaustion" (1967), John Barth
explored the aesthetic consequences of the
then-growing belief that writing was no longer
capable of producing any original voice, style,
or form?in short, that writers could not out-in
novate modernism, but merely intensify and
ironize accomplishments of the past; all that
remained for the artist was to focus metaphysi
cally on the "exhaustion of certain possibility"
 (29) by endlessly recombining what already
exists.4 With much less ambivalence, Frederic
Jameson argued something similar in Post
modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capi
talism, looking far, far beyond literature. For
Jameson, the overwhelming speed and awful
scope of postmodern culture not only becomes
a quality in itself, but it actually eradicates all
notions of historical quality:
the frenzy whereby virtually anything in the
present is appealed to for testimony as to the
letter's uniqueness and radical difference
from earlier moments of human time does
indeed strike one sometimes as harboring
a pathology distinctively autoreferential, as
though our utter forgetfulness of the past ex
hausted itself in the vacant but mesmerized
contemplation of a schizophrenic present
that is incomparable by definition, (xii)
In this amnesiac world, the idea of a separation
between "high" and "low" art begins to close,
as everything and nothing becomes relevant
in its transformation into consumption, an
impulse Jameson often claims is derived from
multinational corporations maneuvering to
consistently increase their monolithic growth:
The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fas
cinated precisely by this whole "degraded"
landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series
and Reader's Digest culture, of advertising
and motels, of the late show and the grade-B
Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature,
with its airport paperback categories of the
gothic and the romance, the popular biog
raphy, the murder mystery, and the science
fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no
longer simply "quote," as a Joyce or a Mahler
might have done, but incorporate into their
very substance. (2-3)
Jameson might here be claiming too much
agency on behalf of artists, as most artists (or
at least second-generation postmodern authors
and younger) don't choose to "incorporate"
mass culture into their consciousnesses?mass
culture has been incorporated as a matter of
course, generally building up a huge store of
JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2007 39
?2007 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
mass-culture references before it occurs to
them that there is any alternative to watching
toxic quantities of television.
David Foster Wallace recounts being a stu
dent in a fiction workshop in which "transgen
erational discourse broke down" (167) between
the "earnest gray eminence" (167) of a profes
sor and his Generation-X students over the use
of pop culture references in fiction. The profes
sor indignantly protested that nothing of the
"frivolous Now" (167) should appear in fiction,
and the younger writers responded that they
could not write meaningfully about their world
without addressing the inundation of popular
culture?very little of contemporary life is not
somehow penetrated by the "f. N.," as Wallace
puts it. The truth is that unless you are reared
on the oldest of old money, in the archest of
intellectual circles, or among the Amish, your
cultural life as an American will almost certainly
not just contain but be overfilled with popular
culture. To anyone who somehow awakens with
a nostalgic longing for a psyche uncontami
nated by television?to embrace something
other than a frivolous Now?one might say, as
Tom Stoppard's Guildenstem says, in another
context, "There must have been a moment, at
the beginning, where we could have said?no.
But somehow we missed it" (125).
But as media critic Mark Crispin Miller has
pointed out, by at least the mid-1970s, one
could not exist in the public sphere without
being conscious of "the interminable text of
television, usually somewhere in view, and
never out of earshot" (Boxed In ).5 Miller tells
us, "Certainly you could choose not to own a
television set, but such a refusal would con
demn you to a life of touristic ignorance, for TV
had now become the native language" (10).
(This is also why David Foster Wallace implicitly
argues that an understanding of television and
its effects amounts to a moral imperative for
American writers.) To be Americans, we must
immerse ourselves in this "native element,"6
even though doing so seems to lead, as Miller
(along lines similar to Postman's) argues in The
Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National
Disorder, to an epidemic incapacity for even
moderately competent reasoning. At the very
least, American television legitimizes stupidity,
and its cumulative effects may be as dire as
Miller and Postman have argued. Dr. Forrester,
the chief mad scientist of MST3K, once likened
producing and broadcasting subrate, made-for
TV movies to giving cancer to lab rats, the rats
being analogous to human viewers ("City on
Fire"). Science fiction writer and popular-culture
theorist David J. Skal argues that typically in
popular culture "the mad scientist has served
as a lightning rod for the otherwise unbearable
anxieties about the meaning of scientific think
ing and the uses and consequences of modern
technology" (18). In this admirable study, Skal
focuses on television as one of those modern
technologies we might feel anxious about:
"The seeming explosion of multiple personal
ity disorder, and widespread acceptance of its
reality, may have less to do with a real clinical
state than with the accelerated fragmentation
of consciousness in recent decades. Every
American couch potato, after all, has instant
access to a multiplicity of viewpoint shifts at
the click of a button, the 500 Cable Options of
Eve" (201-202). Dr. Forrester is a mad scientist
who, with his shock of Einstein hair and neon
colored lab-coat, represents precisely this
fascination with technological innovation, a
fascination that manifests itself either as disen
gagement from the social consequences of the
innovation, or as outright sadistic glee at those
consequences. His fascination seems only
slightly more extreme than that of the corporate
owners and sponsors of television. If life has
increasingly been redefined as spectatorship,
then experience is a horrorfilm in which the
viewers are the victims.
By the late 1980s, television's ubiquity had
largely been enabled by its perfection of irony
its shameless ability to make fun not only of it
self but of almost any value, and thus to deflect
all criticism of itself as a witless redundancy,
even as its outrageousness continues to attract
viewers. As Miller warns, "TV seems to flatter
the inert skepticism of its own audience, assur
ing them that they can do no better than to stay
right where they are, rolling their eyes in feeble
40 JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2007
?2007 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
disbelief. And yet such apparent flattery of our
viewpoint is in fact a recurrent warning not to
rise above this slack, derisive gaping" (326).
This is what David Foster Wallace is referring to
when he writes, "Surely we all have friends we
just hate to hear talk about TV because they
so clearly loathe it?they sneer relentlessly at
the hackneyed plots, the unlikely dialogue, the
Cheez-Whiz resolutions, the bland condescen
sion of the news anchors, the shrill wheedling
of commercials?and yet are just as clearly ob
sessed with it, somehow need to hate their six
hours a day, day in and out" (156).
The late 1980s and early 1990s seemed to
take such irony to a new, almost existential
level. Consider Seinfeld (1989-98), a clever
but relatively plotless show that would by its
fourth season gleefully declare itself to be a
show about "nothing" ("The Pitch"), a maneu
ver that somehow seemed to imply that all of
television was about nothing. Former morning
talk-show host Kathie Lee Gifford half-jealously
said about Seinfeld, "Hey, we were nothing
before they were nothing, and you can quote
me on that. We own nothingness. Let's give
credit where it's due" (Tracy 185-86). And this
self-reflexivity obviated what had been the
severest criticism of Jerry Seinfeld's observa
tional humor, which in some ways structured
his brilliant sit-com?"insignificance" (Tracy
52). How do you critique a show that accepts its
own irrelevance to a meaningful life, and how
do you rhetorically defend your efforts to do so?
Or consider Beavis and Butthead (1993-97),
a cautionary narrative that taught viewers the
nihilism that would seem to be the inevitable
result of a life entirely centered on television?
the madness of an exaggerated, arrested
adolescence that is now, according to Douglas
Rushkoff, one of the most sought-after demo
graphics in television viewership, "corporate
America's $150 billion dream" (Merchants).
The Postmodern Allegory
Like Beavis and Butthead, MST3K featured
heavy doses of us watching people watch
media. Each MST3K episode is mostly devoted
to the host's silhouette watching and comment
ing on movies. Here was someone talking
back at his theater screen, if not his television.
The janitor was trapped and manipulated, just
as many Americans feel trapped and manipu
lated by corporations and media conglomer
ates. Interestingly, the name of the janitor is
Joel Robinson, whose name (follow the semi
otic chain here) recalls the stranded Robinson
family from the vintage sci-fi television series
Lost in Space (1965-68), which in turn recalls
the stranded family from Swiss Family Robinson
(novel, 1812; film, i960), which in turn, in an
inversion of first and last names, ever so faintly
recalls (to the especially literate) the stranded
protagonist of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719).7
Ultimately, the idea of an originary text be
comes irrelevant. This allusion to an allusion
to an allusion seems to indicate the show's
awareness of the exhausting exhaustion of
postmodern popular culture.8
Joel, as the theme song tells us, is "not too
different from you and me." Just as the Robin
son families are supposed to be archetypal,
so, on some sort of level, is Joel, although he
isn't initially stranded with his family, and his
solitude could have resembled that of Dave
Bowman at the close of 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968)?with a theater of execrable pop culture
instead of a monolith. Joel's solution simulta
neously rescues him from loneliness and traps
him in the purgatorial control of the scientists.
The theme song informs us, "Keep in mind, Joel
can't control when the movies begin or end /
Because he used those special parts to make
his robot friends." Joel, we soon learn, is an
amateur inventor particularly good at creating,
programming, and maintaining highly intelli
gent, if perversely willful, robots. So perhaps he
is not entirely just like you or me (or maybe just
me).9 But Joel is likeable, his proletariat status
as janitor marks him as some sort of Everyman,
and we are meant to identify with him,10 just as
we are meant to identify with the extraordinary
Robinson families. And with his 'bots (Crow
T. Robot, Tom Servo, Gypsy [Rose], Ca m bot,
and Magic Voice) to accompany him, Joel does
live something resembling a family life, with
JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2OO7 41
?2 7 ?Y THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
himself as the father figure and Crow and Servo
often behaving like spoiled Wunderkind. On
this level, MST3K is an allegory for the dena
tured postmodern American family held captive
by television.
joel and his robots, then, are like living foot
notes on the bottom of the television screen,
commenting on whatever film or television
show we are watching them watch. This meta
theater of television?metatelevision?indeed
fosters "media consciousness," makes us
aware of how the very form of popular films
and television tends to trivialize everything it
touches. And in doing so, MST3K broke two
of Postman's three commandments of enter
tainment: "thou shalt have no prerequisites"
and "thou shalt induce no perplexity" (147).
Initially, this low-budget show seemed similar
to other puppet-related shows of the past (an
ever-so-slightly more subversive Kukla, Fran,
and Ollie, perhaps), and despite its at times
erudite (and adult-oriented) tone, it garnered a
large following among children, many of whom
wrote letters to the show, often accompanied
by crayon renderings of the cast. Despite this
semblance of simplicity and almost indiscrimi
nate openness, however, the show could be
said to have prerequisites, as it relied (probably
more heavily than any other show in televi
sion history) on references for the humor of its
commentary?and the range of commentary
was staggering. A viewer needs an encyclope
dic knowledge of world history, current events,
science, sociology, literature, art, art criticism,
film, and television, to name a few, in order to
grasp most of the content of every program. I
doubt any single viewer can understand most
of a program in a single viewing. While each
episode includes gobs of slapstick and low
brow humor, these crude qualities appear in
a highly referential context that, like Joyce in
Ulysses and Eliot in The Waste Land, includes
the full spectrum of our cultural present and
past.
And in time, these references included
the content of MST3K itself, as a memorably
bad scene in a particular film often became
archetypal for that kind of scene in other bad
 films?bad films often gravitating toward
similar inanities. One prominent example ap
peared in the "Rocketmen from the Moon"
serials, in which thugs enter a laboratory, guns
at the ready, while a scientist is stooped over.
When the thugs pause, joel and the robots
say, as ifin a tone of admiration, "I'd hate
to shoot a butt like that" ("Robot Monster").
Amazingly, this catch phrase turned out to be
appropriate for later episodes as well (such
as "Rocket Attack U.S.A." and "The Hellcats").
Or another example, the banality of this com
ment by a woman stranded in Africa during
World War II: "What I wouldn't give for a ham
burger and some nice french-fried potatoes"
("The Jungle Goddess"). Joel and the robots
repeated this line whenever any feckless
character felt any privation whatsoever (as in
"Lost Continent" and "Gamera vs. Baruon").
And whenever a film featured an even slightly
desolated landscape ("Fugitive Alien," "City
Limits") Tom Servo would mimic the preten
tious, halting voice-over that offered exposi
tion about the suddenness of the "Robot Holo
caust."11 The most famous catchphrase of the
show?"Hikeeba!"?used whenever any hero
or villain made any sort of action maneuver,
referred back to a moment in "Women of the
Prehistoric Planet," when a spaceship engi
neer (Wendell Corey, playing the excruciatingly
unfunny comic relief) screams this phrase to
punctuate an inept kung fu move that leads to
a forward flip that leaves him flat on his back.
The force of these reflexive in-jokes is in recalling
the history of watching these programs?a joy in
mnemonic play not dissimilar to the joys Harold
Bloom finds in contemplating the literary canon
(39), only with the idea of cultural excellence
taken out?and killed.
As for ywSr3/Cs complexity, most main
stream television viewers bypassed this show
because of the slow-paced oddness implicit
in watching other people watch entire movies.
(By comparison, Beavis and Butthead featured
much briefer metatelevisual segments than did
MST3K, music videos are more frenetic than the
movies of yore, and Beavis and Butthead's
adolescent commentary was generally not
42 JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2007
?2007 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
complicated.)12 For many mainstream viewers,
/WS7"3/Cwas incomprehensibly boring. Because
the show eschewed traditional narrative, most
viewers could not cope with the extreme brico
lage aesthetics the show depended on. Unlike
most dramas and sitcoms, viewers could not
half-consciously tune in to this program at
almost any point and still grasp its story arc.
And the elementary cinematography of MST3K
required patience: when the movie experiment
was not underway the show employed only one
camera, thus relatively under-stimulating the
eyes of American audiences, with no cuts what
soever except for the introductory and conclud
ing segments, when the camera shifts between
Deep 13 and the satellite.
Postmodern Exhaustion on the Satellite
of Love
Joel and his roboticai cohorts have dubbed their
prison in the sky "the Satellite of Love." On one
level, this is an empowering moniker that cheers
the industrial gloom of a generic satellite in
outer space, and signifies something human in
a way that the terms "Deep 13" and "Gizmonic
Institute" clearly do not. At the same time, the
"Satellite of Love" is a sly allusion to the dreamy
1972 Lou Reed song of the same name. Reed's
lyrics are the hazy musings of a lovesick man
whose vision of outer space?a metaphor for the
expansive, imaginative possibilities of love?is
mediated entirely through the numbingly rep
etitious, virtual space of television, while the
realities of his terrestrial, three-dimensional love
are less promising, fraught with the likelihood of
sexual and romantic betrayal:
Satellite's gone
up to the skies
Things like that drive me
out of my mind
I watched it for a little while
I like to watch things on TV
Satellite of love
satellite of love
Satellite of love
satellite of
 Satellite's gone on television: for if one culturally valuable show
way up to Mars can be exploited in the media cycle, then any
Soon it will be filled
show, no matter how original or superior, can
with parking cars
be; its own exhaustion and obsolescence are
I watch it fora little while waiting to be realized,13 its own coolness wait
I love to watch things on TV ing to be killed by overexposure, or mocked by
the ironic viewers of the future. Even the new
Satellite of love
satellite of love est of frontiers must someday "be filled / with
Satellite of love parking cars."
satellite of
Media Consciousness
I've been told that you've been bold
with Harry, Mark and John
Partly what made television viewing so deplet
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday to Thursday
ing, what gave it the power to fatally overex
with Harry, Mark and John pose anything unique or authentic or new,
Satellite's gone was the (eventual) perfection of television
up to the skies advertising. As Mark Crispin Miller notices in
Things like that drive me "Deride and Conquer," the nature of television
out of my mind advertising and programming were in the 1980s

I watched it for a little while nearing a "mutual approximation" that "works

to the distinct advantage of advertisers, whose
I love to watch things on TV
messages are today no longer overshadowed,
Satellite of love [repeat ad nauseam] contradicted, or otherwise threatened by pro
gramming that is too noticeably different from
By calling his orbital domicile the "Satellite
the ads" (190). Mystery Science Theater3000
of Love," Joel Robinson suggests that he and
was a rare example of a program in the 1980s
his robots might be inspirational to frustrated
and 1990s that deliberately tried to distinguish
earth-dwellers who "love to watch things on
itself from commercials as it tried to resist (or
TV," yet ironically he himself is someone who
parodically embrace) its own exploitation and
watches things on TV. Most of Mystery Science
the exploitation of its viewers. For example,
Theater3000 entails the mise en abyme of
often in season one, and occasionally later,
watching someone on television watching a either Joel or the robots would offer a snide
movie. There is theoretically no end to the me transition that drew attention to the fact that
diation of the media?occasionally an MST3K
the entertainment was switching over to com
movie will even feature someone watching a
mercials. When the robots, behaving like
television monitor, so that at that moment we
bright, mischievous children, ask about con
are watching someone on television watch a
fusing figures of speech, Tom Servo asks Joel,
movie of someone watching television. Media
"How do you explain head cheese?" To which
tion of mediation of mediation: this suggests
Joel responds, "Well, uh, I don't explain head
something of a metaphysical plenitude, but in
cheese, but, uh, here are some people who
practical terms it stretches authentic meaning
do," just before going to commercials ("The
across more and more space, ultimately into
Crawling Eye"). I note sixteen such instances
obscurity. (In Reed's song, the phrase "satellite
of broadcast differentiation during the first five
of love" is pleonastically replicated until the
seasons on cable television.14 These segues
words become meaningless.) If such metatele
accomplish the contextualized nesting of the
visual moments threaten us with an infinite
advertising in the content of the show, so that
regress, however, this is only a heightened ver
the commercials in a sense become part of
sion of what normally happens to significance
what is critiqued, become what Megan Mullen

JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 200J 43

?2 7 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 calls "an integral part of the program texts"
(170), even as they attempt to exploit the show
and its viewers.
More explicit than these segues, however,
are Joel and the robots' parody sketches of com
mercials. For example, in "Project Moonbase,"
they pretend to hawk some blubbery, flubbery
goo called Spacom (after the graceless name
of a space station in Project Moonbase)?"the
miracle home product you thought you'd never
need!"?in a mockery of those breathless, exclu
sive TV offers for merchandise that were so com
mon before the advent of the infomercial. Like
the announcer of the Ginsu-knife commercials
of old, Crow giddily proclaims, "It cuts through
this tomato like it was a tin can!" The rhetorical
ploys used by infomercials themselves were
mocked in a sketch to sell Phantom Creeps, a
pointless pyrotechnical device using disks and
spiders, an idea derived from the intensely bor
ing Phantom Creeps serial starring Bela Legosi
("Jungle Goddess"). Another breathless com
mercial (using frenetic cuts of close-up stills
rather than action photography) was concocted
fora quite deranged five-thousand-piece fight
ing-men-and-monsters set, a commercial nar
rated by Servo, who is clearly over-stimulated
by all of this excess and finally devolves into the
homicidal villain of David Lynch's Blue Velvet,
Frank Booth ("Gamera vs. Barugon").1* Other
parodies included an alarming array of edibles
(sort of) from an alternative company called
Klack ("First Spaceship on Venus"); Mighty Jack
Dog Food ("Mighty Jack"); the Captain Joe ac
tion figure ("Star Force: Fugitive Alien II"); Basil
Rathbone dog biscuits ("The Magic Sword");
a Hercules nonaction figure ("Hercules and
the Captive Women"); and John Banner-grams
("The Crash of the Moons"). In one of the most
memorable commercial parodies, Crow and
Tom Servo portray Orville Redenbacher and
his grandson ("Godzilla vs. Megalon"), stars of
the sentimental popcorn commercials of the
early 1990s. In the stunningly accurate words
of The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing
Colossal Episode Guide, written by the cast and
writers of the show, "Tom and Crow enact a very
strange scene in which Orville Redenbacher and
44 JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2007
?2007 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OFTHE UNIVERSITY OFILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
his grandson do something in the tone of Long
Day's Journey into Nighf (29).
Even more satirical than the Orville Reden
bacher bit were two sketches directly address
ing the dark consequences of the marketplace.
While the mad scientists often featured evil
versions of commercial phenomena, such as
Tragic Moments figurines ("Being from Another
Planet"), Unhappy Meals ("The Day the Earth
Froze"), or nasty baseball-promotion nights
("The Girl in Lover's Lane"), they took their evil
to a new level when they manufactured Johnny
Longtorso, a bland-looking component doll
"who is himself sold separately," so that each
doll costs over three hundred dollars. In the
other sketch, which resembles a kitschy public
service announcement, Crow dresses up as
Willy the Waffle (don't ask) to defend advertis
ing when Tom Servo, sitting before a televi
sion, declares, "Boy, do I have a headache. I
have a head full of bad ideas. You know, I am
beginning to think the world would be a better
place with no advertising" ("The Bride of the
Monster"). While initially Crow succeeds at de
fending advertising, eventually Willy the Waffle
must concede that without it, pretentious Gap
ads featuring British poets would disappear,
our brains would not be cluttered with the
knowledge of where John Madden shops for
hardware, the price of sneakers would be only
a fraction of what it is today, and the rain forest
would probably not be threatened (presumably
by the need for paper for catalogs). After this
list of concessions, he groans and, just before
the show goes to a commercial, inauspiciously
says, "Advertising?enjoy some now."
Libido, Loneliness, Disappearance of
Authentic Self
While Mystery Science Theater 3000 perhaps
succeeds at undermining its own exploitation
by the very medium and marketplace that gave
birth to it, these small victories do not make
life on the Satellite of Love idyllic. Joel, forced
to watch inept pop culture in the isolation of
outer space, can only long for authentic human
experience. Much is made of how the letters
from viewers, read aloud at the end of every
episode, help to cheer him up (such as during
"Star Force: Fugitive Alien II"), and he can be
inspirited for a short while by the semiorganic
flora of vacuum-flowers ("The Crawling Hand").
Moreover, although Tom Servo and Crow are
often willful, they, too, provide him an essential
form of companionship. Nevertheless, Joel's
life is not altogether fulfilling, as we see in
"Hercules against the Moon Men," when, gaz
ing at the ample-bosomed Princess of Samara
as she discusses her wedding hopes with a
girlfriend, Joel confides to the robots, "Guys,
I am so homesick right now."16 Perhaps what
is surprising is how seldom Joel, the solitary
bachelor on his Satellite of Love, expresses
anything like an aching libido.
Perhaps part of what makes him differ
ent from other males his age is that he only
watches the equivalent for ninety minutes
of television a week, two and one-half hours
less than the national daily average for men.17
Psychologically, across American culture, what
television promises is the allure of fitting in, of
belonging; ironically, what it asks them to do is
to stay passively isolated at home. This in turn
generates more anxiety about fitting in, anxiety
that can be conveniently, temporarily assuaged
by more ultimately unsatisfying television, thus
perhaps hollowing out the very notion of a self,
if Mark Crispin Miller is correct in "Deride and
Conquer" (223). David Foster Wallace suggests
that this tendency at least borders on the cycle
of addictive behavior:
If it's true that many Americans are lonely,
and if it's true that many lonely people are
prodigious TV-watchers, and if it's true that
lonely people find in television's 2D images
relief from the pain of their reluctance to be
around real humans, then it's also obvious
that the more time spent watching TV, the
less time spent in the real human world, and
the less time spent in the real human world,
the harder it becomes not to feel alienated
from real humans, solipsistic, lonely. (163)
Ironically, more of an Everyman than Joel
Robinson is the character named TV's Frank,
JOURNAL OF FILM AND V?DEO 59-4 / WINTER 2007 45
?2007 BY THE BOARO OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
who?despite his celebrity's having worked its
way into his very name?is, from a corporate
perspective, the perfect television viewer, one
for whom television is necessary. When Dr.
Forrester gloats over the dreck that Joel must
watch ("Monster a Go-Go") while he and Frank
are free to do as they please, Frank earnestly
notes that a Matlock marathon is coming on.
Or when Dr. Forrester wants to twit Crow about
having to watch movies instead of fine foreign
films and invites Frank to see a Kurosawa fes
tival, Frank is too wowed by Joel's immensely
silly demonstration of the theremin?the whiny,
warbly electronic instrument that uses low
power, high-frequency electromagnetic fields to
produce that clich?d sci-fi sound?to be inter
ested in anything else. In fact, Frank's commit
ment to callow entertainment over self-growth
or authentic interpersonal relationships is
made absolutely clear by the invention of the U
View, a television that depicts what one would
have been doing if one weren't watching tele
vision ("Swamp Diamonds"). On the U-View,
Frank is enjoying the company of Michelle Pfei
ffer,18 who seductively invites him inside for the
night, but the U-View version of himself refuses
in order to scurry home to the famously vapid
Bay watch?a particularly postmodern moment
in which the only imaginable alternative to tele
vision is ... television. There is no ontological
escape from artificiality and mediation.19
Scylla of Camp, Charybdis of Cheese
Lest we sink into pseudo-Platonic or straightfor
wardly Baudrillardian condemnation of simula
tions in themselves, we must come to terms
with the nature of the mediations featured
on MST3K. According to The Mystery Science
Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide,
among the films watched were "several truly
awful, a few horrifying, and a small handful that
can serve as the maw of Hell itself" (vii). For
example, there was The Castle of Fu Manchu,
a racist film with washed-out color, continu
ally out of focus and with a plot that is equally
indistinct. Or there was the legendary Manos:
The Hands of Fate, a poorly dubbed film with
washed-out color, continually out of focus and
with a plot that, at its best, is equally indistinct
but that proves, when it can be made out, sexu
ally revolting. This film features an establishing
shot of a family driving on vacation that lasted
several minutes, a deranged amount of pad
ding that made Crow inquire if they were some
how watching a snuff film.
Aesthetically, then, these films are almost
empirically bad in their inception, by any
standards one could choose: writing, acting,
editing, directing, lighting. Even the work of key
grips must be suspect. The ways the MST3K
audience receives these atrocious movies are
variously complex, however. Often, they are
watched on the level of camp, demonstrating,
as Susan Sontag put it in her famous essay on
the subject, "the sensibility of failed serious
ness, of the theatricalization of experience"
(286). The exaggerated styles of antique sci
ence fiction can be delightful in their oddity;
the ham-fisted acting of yesteryear's leading
men is ironically compelling in its self-assur
ance in overstated gender-roles; the absolute
credence of vintage educational films is star
tling in its emotional and political naivety.
Camp involves an ironic distance on the part of
the viewer, a detachment from which he or she
can marvel at "a contrast between silly or ex
travagant content and rich form'" (278). As the
new privileged aestheticism of the 1960s, camp
was what Sontag, after Genet, calls "a good
taste of bad taste" (291).
More often than often, though, the films
of Mystery Science Theater 3000 lack the
style necessary to be campy?films that have
impoverished forms and very often silly and
extravagant content as well. Camp, according to
Sontag, generally refers to works that implicitly
aspire to serious art, and it is difficult to gauge
how seriously filmmakers were committed to
making, say, Monster a Go-Go. Simultaneously,
then, these films are consumed on the similarly
ironic level of cheese. Cheese theorist Annalee
Newitz sees cheese as the 1990s successor to
camp, the newest incarnation of parodie con
sumption of art. Cheesy movies are not only ex
travagant in content, but are ineptly envisioned
46 JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2007
?2007 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
or produced as well. The moralizing monologue
that serves as the pretentious coda to Roger
Corman's It Conquered the World, in which Dr.
Paul Nelson (Peter Graves) laments that Dr. Tom
Anderson (Lee Van Cleef) "learned almost too
late that Man is a feeling creature, and because
of it, the greatest in the universe,"20 is pure
camp, except that Tom Anderson had seconds
before he perished in an internecine melee
with a six-foot anthropomorphic pickle, which
is pure Velveeta. These two fluid sensibilities
sometimes overlap into cheesy camp.
More often than camp, though, the sensibil
ity of cheese is essential to MST3K, since its
subject is mostly cheap science fiction and
horror movies. On a conceptual level, in its vi
sion and production values, the program even
displayed the underground spirit of cheese
spectatorship. Instead of compelling, state-of
the-art special effects or a gleaming, polished
style, the program generally aspired to low
tech (if sometimes clever) visual effects and a
haphazard style. As Frank Coniff, a writer and
actor for MST3K, once revealed, the show "was
supposed to look cheap, so once our budget
went up, we still kept the show looking very
low-budget, and all of the extra money went
into food" (Coniff 29). For example, the stars of
outer space are clearly lights on a black back
ground, and the walls of the Satellite of Love
are a mosaic of found items, such as the Mil
lennium Falcon toy made by Kenner. The robots
are similarly made of the plastic detritus of yes
terday's everyday life. Crow's beak-like mouth,
for example, is made of an Empire Toys bowling
pin cut in half and painted gold, the back of his
head is the gilded grillwork of a hockey helmet,
and his torso is constructed of descending gold
Tupperware floraliers. Tom's head is a red Car
ousel Snack Dispenser, and his torso a Money
Lover's Barrel bank painted red with the block
of model car engine attached to it. In "Robot
vs. the Aztec Mummy," in which the Satellite
of Love is invaded by demon dogs, the critters
in question are slightly modified versions of
the skeletal, quadruped action-figure caddy in
the Masters of the Universe toy line, an item
my brother used to play with growing up. The
show's design calls to mind a Radio Shack, a
Home Depot, and a garage sale ingeniously
used, rather than George Lucas's Industrial
Light and Magic. Furthermore, the acting (espe
cially sleepy-voiced Joel Hodgson) was substan
dard, with flubs and imperfectly delivered lines
regularly cluttering the performances?and not
retaken or cut out, as surely they would have
been on most mainstream programs.
While this cheesy aesthetic helps to dif
ferentiate MST3K from shows that conspicu
ously tried to look hip, it also suggests that
the cheesy past is contiguous with the cheesy
present. If, as Newitz argues, "cheesy humor
is one way U.S. audiences try to laugh off the
social and economic differences that continue
to hurt and divide us" (79), then the humor of
Mystery Science Theater 3000, generally speak
ing,21 serves a higher satirical purpose, as it
tends to regard camp and cheese as timeless,
or at least as historically related to the present.
In "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians," for
example, Santa Claus smugly tells a television
reporter that he has never let children down
yet, and Joel adds, "Except for the poor ones."
In that same astoundingly campy episode, Joel
notes that Mrs. Claus is a dead ringer for the
atavistic Barbara Bush, and Tom suggests that
the elves are threatening to unionize. In "Jungle
Goddess," the racial condescension of the
white explorers and the White Goddess stirs
Joel's ire; when the White Goddess quizzes
the suspiciously light-skinned Zambezi native
Wanama on the orthography of beautiful, Joel
spells out "s-l-a-v-e-r-y." In spite of the arch
revelations of Jessica A. Royer's error-prone
polemic on MST3K,22 this program, while mired
in the degraded landscape of movies, went
far out of its way to critique the politics of the
films it watched, so much so that some viewers
regarded the show as "preachy."23
Television's Inevitable Victory
In spite of the mirth that skewering outmoded
and contemporary values can produce, these
mediocre films nevertheless take their mental
toll on the subjects who must watch them.
JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2007 47
?2007 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The robots often complain about the quality of
films that are inflicted upon them. When they
must view back-to-back episodes of the plod
ding 1950s serial Radar Men from the Moon,
Tom Servo asks exasperatedly, "Doesn't the
Geneva Convention have rules against this sort
ofthing?" ("Robot Monster"), and in "Eegah,"
when a cute teenage girl with a beehive hairdo
is encouraged by her grotesquely tanned father
to make a big, singing production out of shav
ing the grunting seven-foot giant Richard Kiel,
Tom cries, "Joel, joel, I'm being punished for
something, I know I am. I didn't askto see this
movie!" The metaphor of atrocious, inescap
able television as torture was made explicit
in the KTMA era of the program. Although the
robots cannot feel neural pain, Joel once tried
to help Tom simulate the experience of pain by
electrically shocking him. When lower voltages
made absolutely no impression, he gave Tom
an incredible electric shock that he claimed
was the equivalent to watching an especially
inane hour of Arsenio ("Superdonne"). Because,
like children, Tom and Crow are to some degree
tabulae rasae, their reactions to these anti
quated products of popular culture are gener
ally fresh (although some knowledge of popular
culture has been conveniently programmed
into them by Joel) and their judgment severe.
Joel, on the other hand, who has expe
rienced American pop culture for several
decades, is less surprised by these horrors
of taste and intelligence. For example, when
outdoorsman Ross Allen (accompanied by a
faithful, anonymous, conveniently silent noble
savage) rather cruelly extracts animals from
the Florida Everglades in the 1950 short film
Catching Trouble, Joel isn't surprised and im
mediately feels shame at his own culture's
past ("Teenage Caveman"). Considering this
adversarial attitude toward the legacy of his
own culture, one would think that Joel would
avoid the movie theater, but he is not free to do
so, as he has been conditioned to respond to
two stimuli controlled by Deep 13: the flashing
siren lights of Commercial Sign and Movie Sign
on the bridge of the Satellite of Love. These
indicators signal segues between commercials,
Sketches, and the movie-watching experiment.
When Movie Sign comes on, the swirling siren
light is accompanied by a loud buzzer and the
dimming of the other lights, causing a state
of panic in Joel and?surely in sympathetic
response?his robots as well; they rush to the
theater. There is negative reinforcement as
well: if Joel refuses to begin the film-watching
experiment, he receives an electric shock to his
posterior ("Lost Continent").24 When Joel makes
the mistake of thanking the mad scientists for
sending a movie that was not so terrible as
the others ("Garriera"), they again deliver "a
shock to the shammies," for the very nature of
the MST3K experiments is cruel, if not outright
sadistic, as the denizens of Deep 13 do their
best to test Joel's ability to watch whatever they
send him.
While this is perhaps a dark science fiction
scenario, the premise is rooted in real-life
capitalist imperatives. David Foster Wallace
reminds us, "Because of the economics of
nationally broadcast, advertiser-subsidized
entertainment, television's one goal?never
denied by anybody in or around TV since RCA
first authorized field tests in 1936?is to ensure
as much watching as possible" (162). Deep 13
is in some sense an almost Foucauldian exten
sion ofthat corporate media goal.
If Joel is less surprised than his robots by
the emptiness and shoddiness of American
popular culture, having witnessed so much
of it already, being forced to watch so much
more badness nevertheless has its enervat
ing effect on him. While Joel and his robots
occasionally independently go insane during
the worst movies?all of the host segments of
the mind-kinking The Castle of Fu Mancha, for
example, or the soul-suckingly dreadful Manos:
The Hands of Fate?Joel, as our human stand-in,
seems especially prone to fits, such as when he
makes a slew of incompetent models of great
architecture while obsessing over Ayn Rand's
The Fountainhead ("Godzilla vs. the Sea Mon
ster"), or when he loses his mind doing lame
film pitches ("Mighty Jack"), or when his tribute
to Will Rogers deteriorates into a lunacy of non
48 JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2007
?2007 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
sequitur allusions to speeches by others, all
done in the same homespun voice ("The Killer
Shrews"). In these telling moments?when Joel
is in each of them hysterically attempting to as
sert an independence and agency for his erod
ing identity?we sense the existential tremors
from our own compromised selves, the selves
we have lost from being unable to imagine a
world free of the stupefaction and trivialization
caused by the popular media.
We can also sense in these moments the
ultimate futility of this show's form of textual
resistance. One can talk back at one's televi
sion set, but one cannot alter the agency of the
media, or ultimately one's complicity in it. (As
a postmodern allegory, to reject television is to
reject a huge portion of experience as defined
by [and for] our peers?unless one can find
peers who don't watch television. I have two:
one lives in Utah, the other in Iowa. We are not
really a quorum.) The media, which is to say the
nexus of corporations that own and profit from
it, is too infinitely exhaustive to be outlasted,
indefinitely outwitted even by fantabulous wits.
With its incessant repetitions and general
imperviousness to critique?that is, when
television makes critical thought so foreign
and self-mockery so ubiquitous that critique
becomes popularly irrelevant?television can
not be overcome with more television, no mat
ter how subversive. And while the writers of
A/IST3K can claim, as they explicitly do in their
theme song, "It's just a show," the aesthetic
force of the show derived in large part from its
polemic against television as a form, and when
that polemical edge dulled, the show did as
well. The show began to be enervated by its
own accumulating cultural weight, as allusions
to previous episodes became stock-responses
to current episodes (and thus became "filled
with parking cars," that is, became its own
numbingly repetitious form of popular culture).
The show continued to weaken when its slowly
rising popularity began to exert its own pres
sure upon popular culture. After Joel Hodgson's
departure as host (replaced by chief writer
Mike J. Nelson) in 1993, the MST3K cast and
crew yielded to consumerist temptation and
held a fan convention called, with predictable,
hyperbolic irony, Conventio-Com Fest-O-Rama;
it wasn't quite ironic enough in its realiza
tion (basking in the adoration of its fans) to
maintain the acerbic, critical integrity the show
began with. After this convention, the cast and
crew participated in an even more obvious and
frankly gratuitous exploitation of MST3K as a
brand: a Hollywood motion picture called Mys
tery Science Theater: The Movie (1996).
In an example of acute situational irony, one
first-season episode I have on tape?recorded
as a syndicated rerun?features a segue to
Commercial Sign by Tom Servo mocking the
influence of commercials: and the commercial
that subsequently appears is for a sixth-season
episode of MST3K. Each week Mike Nelson,
Tom Servo, and CrowT. Robot faced the theater
of our accumulated bad culture, but the sense
that these cheesy movies revealed anything
about the media-saturated world we live in
diminished. If Mystery Science Theater 3000
exhausted itself, however, the process by which
it promulgated media consciousness is still
viable, and is used quite effectively in half-hour
doses by The Daily Show, the metashow that as
a news program critiques the very way news is
presented by television. Like Mystery Science
Theater 3000, The Daily Show does not stop
television from dominating American culture,
but it does complicate that dominance, and
at least temporarily seems to offer viewers a
sense of aeencv in their great cultural caDtivitv.
NOTES
. Postman claims that if we try to read with the
attention span fostered by television we would never
get beyond the distractions of language's symbolic
nature?how curious all these black squiggles and
lines look on the page (25). Melissa Jacoby, who
designed the cover of Amusing Ourselves to Death,
wittily made the tail of the g in amusing wrap into the
aperture of the d in death, a subtle allusion to the
idea that Americans are increasingly unable to foster
an epistemology of reading.
2. Incidentally, Joel Hodgson's successor as host,
Mike Nelson, was a talented replacement. Nelson
had been the head writer since season two. He had
JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2OO7 49
?2 7 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
performed innumerable guest roles and written many
witty songs for the show, and he was a much better
actor and singer than Hodgson. But the media con
sciousness of the show he hosted was more ironical
and ambivalent (that is, less conscious) than critical.
3. The mad scientists' side-kick, TV's Frank (Frank
Conniff), is killed off in episode 624 ("Sampson vs.
the Vampire Women"); the mad scientist Dr. Forrester
(Trace Beaulieau, also the voice of Crow T. Robot) is
metaphysically done away with in episode 706 ("Las
erblast").
4. Barth returned to this subject in "The Literature
of Replenishment," where the term postmodernism
allowed him to distinguish which of the "certain pos
sibilities" of literature were exhausted, namely "the
aesthetic of high Modernism" (71). He also reminds
"misreaders" (71) of the qualifications with which he
approached "The Literature of Exhaustion": he was
not dogmatically asserting a nihilistic or decadent
program, and did not agree with those who felt that
fiction could never again be vital, even if he was will
ing to listen to people who thought so. Contrary to his
intention, Barth is remembered as a champion of this
pessimistic view, the unfortunate cost of coining this
evocative, memorable phrase.
5. The ubiquity of television?in bars, gyms, air
ports, waiting-rooms of all descriptions, and even
at gas-station pumps?has now, almost counter
intuitively, reached the cinema, once a haven from
the tawdry cheapness of television. While working
on this essay, I went to see Walk on Water, an Israeli
film about a Mossad agent whose work, spying on
innocent Germans to track down an immensely old
Nazi, leads him to an understandably acute moral
crisis. The cinema in Boca Raton that shows art films
is owned by Regal, so this narrative about the shadow
of the holocaust was prefaced by twenty minutes of
NBC programming (cleverly called "The Twenty") that
included a cartoon of a monstrous demon being swirl
ingly schlurped down a toilet and a surreal Skittles
commercial featuring kvetchy sheep-men rendered
with nightmarish CGI precision?all presented at an
ear-ringing one hundred five decibels, as if the audi
ence were being assaulted, or punished for some
thing.
6. In David Sedaris's memoir-essay "Us and Them,"
the divide between those who watch television and
those who do not is mapped. He depicts with deft
irony the condescension he felt as a child for the Tom
keys, a family that "didn't believe in television" (4), a
phrase he explicates for us: "Belief implied that tele
vision had a master plan and that you were against it.
It also suggested that you thought too much" (4). This
difference made the Tomkeys both fascinating and
disappointing, as he learned while walking around
the neighborhood; theirs was ironically the only
household that was worth watching since they weren't
watching television, yet their lives seemed dull be
cause they were content to talk with one another, and
not behave as if they were on television. While spying
on them, Sedaris thought judgmentally, "They had no
idea how puny their lives were, and so they were not
ashamed that a camera would have found them un
interesting" (5). When the Tomkeys leave for a week
end trip, Sedaris says, "I felt as if my favorite show
had been cancelled" (7). For him as a child, human
relationships were defined by the epistemological
metaphor of television, to an alarming, almost crimi
nal extent (what he really wanted to see while walking
about his neighborhood was a murder [4]).
An even larger statement is also being made,
however, one that personalizes Postman's argument
about the disjunctive and stupefying nature of televi
sion. When his parents discussed the Tomkeys, both
his father and mother said that Mr. Tomkey might
be right about television. "Then," Sedaris says, "my
parents watched the news, and whatever came on
after the news" (4). When the Tomkeys make a be
lated Halloween visit to the Sedaris household, thus
making the Sedaris children dip into their own candy
booty to give to the children of this abnormal family,
Sedaris binges on as much candy as he can, to hoard
up his chocolate bars so that the Tomkey children
cannot have them. His mother barges into his room
and indignantly tells him to look at what he had done
to himself. Television comes to his rescue in this mo
ment of self-disgust:
[l]t was hard to shake the mental picture snapped
by her suggestion: here is a boy sitting on a
bed, his mouth smeared with chocolate. He's a
human being, but also he's a pig, surrounded by
trash and gorging himself so that others may be
denied. Were this the only in the world, you'd be
forced to give it your full attention, but fortunately
there were others. This stagecoach, for instance,
coming around the bend with a cargo of gold. This
shiny new Mustang convertible. This teenage girl,
her hair a beautiful mane, sipping Pepsi through
a straw, one picture after another, on and on
until the news, and whatever came on after the
news. (12)
Thus television saves us from thinking too much.
7. In the same postmodern vein, Disney (which
made Swiss Family Robinson in i960) has recently
recast the name, using it this time for the gleaming,
ideal family of the future in the sci-fi cartoon Meet the
Robinsons (2007).
8. Examples of MST3ICS awareness of this cultural
exhaustion are abundant, but one example?either
prescient or perhaps just arising from a keen reading
of Variety? seems to foreshadow much of the empti
ness of American cinema today. In "Mighty Jack," Joel,
in the middle of an emotional breakdown, proposes
different ideas for movies based on trends at the
50 JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2007
?2007 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
box office. His pitches are derivative non-sequiturs,
suggesting that the machinery of Hollywood is utterly
haphazard. Joel notes that Steven Spielberg is plan
ning to make movies based on old cartoons, such as
The Flintstones (released in 1994, almost three years
after this MST3K episode). Tom Servo mocks him
by saying, "What's he going to do next, Casper the
Friendly Ghost?" Joel responds, "Oh, don't be that
ridiculous." Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment
was that ridiculous, however, releasing a feature
film based on the numbingly cheap 1960s cartoon
in 1995. (As The Flintstones was generally reviled as
one of the worst movies in cinema history, Amblin
had no alternative but to make The Flintstones in
Viva Rock Vegas [2000], a prequel meant in part to
parody Elvis Presley's Viva Las Vegas [1964]. One
wonders, if one is forced to think about it, where the
Flintstones franchise got the nerve to parody anyone.)
Joel also suggests that the subinane cartoon Josie
and the Pussycats could be a viable film project. This
is supposed to show how far his mental powers have
deteriorated?yet Josie and the Pussycats hit cinemas
in 2001.
9. Joel is, however, capable of so much oddity that
Dr. Forester at one point whines, "Could we have sent
a stranger person into space?" ("The Robot Monster").
10. In "The Black Scorpion," Joel tells us, "I'm ma
rooned in outer space, and now you're trapped in the
vacuum with me." He makes similar opening remarks
in "The Crawling Hand," "Robot Monster," "The Slime
People," and "Moon Zero Two."
11. The story of Robot Holocaust is worth noting:
in a postapocalyptic world, machines have enslaved
human beings because the machines need someone
to provide them with energy. A wise man and a clever,
sexy woman know the secret behind the power of the
machines, and a handsome, not-especially-emotive
young hero arrives to lead them to epic victory. The
name of this young hero: Neo. Really. Am I the only
one who sees this film as a precursor to The Matrix
(1999)? In the earlier film, a simmering rock-video
goddess, Valeria (Angelika Jagger), menaces our
heroes in an unreasonably bad lisp; in the later film,
the besuited Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) menaces
our heroes in a halting voice: these major differences
aside, the similarities verge on plagiarism. The Wa
chowski brothers ought to toast the hapless writer
of this agglomeration of sci-fi excrement, Tim Kin
caid, for writing The Matrix a dozen years before The
Matrix-very, very badly.
12. A notable exception occurred in "Whiplash,"
when Beavis, to spice up their commentary on Korn's
video for "Blind," deliberately disorients himself and
produces this rather elevated discourse: "I think that
the problem of this video is it is highly derivative of
many popular bands within the genre. Although when
viewed on its own merits, it does have a deep groove;
however, what it has in groove, it lacks in originality.
One can't help but be reminded of Pearl Jam, White
Zombie, and Suicidal Tendencies, and other bands
that bear the mantle of so-called alternative rock. One
is even reminded of Laurie Anderson when she wore
curlers. This video speaks less to the heart and more
to the sphincter." Thus pop music critics are likened
to light-headed teens.
13. An aging term that arose to signify the exhaus
tion of pop culture artifacts is jumping the shark.
The expression alludes to the infamous Happy Days
(1974-84) episode in which the leather-clad biker,
Fonzie, water-skies over a shark?a ludicrous attempt
to revive the show's waning popularity. John Hein
coined of the term and devotes a Web site to the phe
nomenon. Not surprising in a postmodern context,
however, jumping the shark itself jumped the shark at
about the time Hein overexposed the idea in a book
entitled Jump the Shark.
14. Cf. "The Crawling Eye," four instances; "Robot
Versus the Aztec Mummy," one; "Women of the Pre
historic Planet," one; "The Corpse Vanishes," two;
"Robot Monster," one; "The Slime People," one;
"Robot Holocaust," one; "Rocket Attack U.S.A.," two;
"Mighty Jack," two; "Gamera vs. Zigra," one; "The
Crash of the Moons," one.
15. TV's Frank, one of the mad scientists, also
channels Frank Booth in the invention exchanges for
"Catalina Caper" and "Ring of Terror," semiotically
suggesting that those who help control the media and
advertising are creatures that might have crept out of
the darker realms of David Lynch's imagination.
16. Eyeing the futuristic go-go dancers of Moon Zero
Two, Joel similarly says, "You know, I kind of miss the
moon, you guys," thus significantly confusing the me
diated world he is watching with the relatively actual
populated world he had once inhabited.
17. Wallace, in the early 1990s, claimed, "Statisti
cians report that television is watched over six hours
a day in the average American household" (151). This
fact, of undisclosed origin, is slightly problematic,
especially as Wallace suggests often that this aver
age applies to each person; in examining the term
"American household" (151), he suggests that many
American households are comprised of solitary peo
ple, "the average U.S. lonely person" (152). For the
purposes of his essay, this carries powerful rhetori
cal force, and perhaps some American households
in studies are comprised of the average U.S. lonely
person. According to a media comparisons study in
2000 by Bruskins/Audits & Surveys Worldwide, the
average daily viewing per American household was
seven hours and twenty-six minutes, meaning that
such activity is increasing, if Wallace's statisticians
are correct. But the study also breaks down view
ing by gender and age, and adult men and women
watched over four hours of television every day. With
eight hours (probably) required for sleeping, an ad
ditional eight hours (probably) required for working,
JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2OO7 5I
?2 7 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
most people have eight discretionary hours at their
disposal, and on average they spend more than half
of it watching television. Taking into account time
spent grooming and commuting to work, four hours
might be significantly more than half. It is not ironic
that this data was found on a Web site devoted to
garnering advertising for a television station {The Size
and Scope of TV).
18. In fact, besides Dr. Forrester and Frank, all of
the people in the U-View are celebrities, which raises
the question, Is not watching television, but instead
going out into the real world (as Michelle Pfeiffer
does, to act in movies), supposed to make one worthy
of being on television? Or is it that "rear life (hypo
thetical in Frank's case) can only be depicted with
materials garnered from the media (an unmediated
real life being thus even more unimaginable)?
19. In this, Frank is similar to Cypher, in The Matrix,
who knowingly chooses a simulated life over the pain
ful, prosaic complexities of the real world. This is also
similar to "Tired," a Beavis and Butthead episode in
which the protagonists watch a music video so lame
that they actually turn the television off for a minute;
in their discomfort they soon return to the very same
video, thankful that television, however lame, at least
mediates their experience of one another. Few televi
sion viewers would consciously make that choice, I
think, but few television viewers ever have to make it
consciously, explicitly.
20. The writers of MST3K were so thrilled by this
epitaph that, after hearing it in the movie, they had
joel and the robots listen to it once more on the SOL,
then had the mad scientists listen to it in Deep 13,
and then played it for a fourth time over the show's
closing credits. I myself am bravely resisting the
temptation to reproduce the speech here.
21. Newitz mentions MST3K but does not investi
gate its importance to cheese because her primary
texts are blaxploitation films and Godzilla movies.
Because MST3?CS cultural commentary is so hetero
geneous and because so many of its films are white
oriented, moments of cheese as Newitz defines the
term (cheap, non-white depictions of Pacific Rim eth
nicity, nationalism, and race) are hard to find in the
show. Exceptions include the string of Japanese films,
including two Godzilla and four of Gamera, the giant,
mutated turtle; the sci-fi action-dramas Fugitive Alien
I and II; and the almost inexplicable espionage narra
tive Mighty lack. If MST3K has a particular weakness,
it is for Asian clich?s. In "Gamera vs. Barugon," for
example, they ridicule white imperialism when a heli
copter lands on a Polynesian island and Joel yells over
the whirring blades, "Hi, we're from America. We've
come to decimate your jungle, convert your youth,
and make you feel inferior." Yet despite this outrage,
their sympathy for Asian and Pacific Rim cultures is
largely abstract, as many of their jokes demonstrate.
For example, when someone speaks of cargo, Tom
says, "Crutch Cargo," referingto the cheap 1959 car impulses, becomes, in MST3K, literally the end. The
toon series (in which moving lips are superimposed social, moral good that was the "higher purpose" of
on still cartoons, an effect popular today on Late depriving people of their psychological and physi
Night with Conan O'Brien), but he speaks the words ological sovereignty has yielded to the amorality of
as if mispronounced by a Japanese person. When the capitalist incentives to put "meat in the seats"
traditional koto music is playing, Tom says, "I never (17), as HunterS. Thompson put it. Thus, television,
knew a cheese-cutter could sound that good." When and so very much else of popular culture, appeals to
a strange, somewhat realistic fight between two men our collective cultural ass rather than to any other,
breaks out, Joel asks, "Shouldn't one of them know perhaps more elevated, portion of our anatomy.
kung fu?" And Crow, in the opening credits, says of a
Japanese name, "Hey, I think I see my laundry," thus REFERENCES
confusing Chinese and Japanese clich?s. In "Mighty
Jack," when one character is in Paris, Joel, Tom, and Barnouw, Erik. Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of Ameri
can Television. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Oxford UP,
Crow imitate the distinctive notes of the koto playing
the melody of "An American in Paris"?and Joel guilt
1990.
Barth, John. "The Literature of Exhaustion." Atlantic
ily asks if doing so is "kind of racist." Tom Servo an
swers no, and in the sense that no culture on MST3K
Monthly bug. 1967: 29-34.
-. "The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodern
is regarded as superior, including our own, Japan is
ist Fiction." Atlantic Monthly Jan. 1980: 65-71.
not singled out. But this approach to cheese does
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. New York: Har
invite charge of social insensitivity, even in a context
court, 1994.
of provisional cultural Judgments.
Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. New York:
22. Royer offers a sweeping, scathing attack on
what was one of the most liberal shows on televi Norton, 1987.
"Coniff, Frank, and Mike Nelson. "Mystery Science
sion because the answer to the question "Does this
Theater3000 Talks Back." With Jesse Levy. Rubber
program's humor live up to its highest political po
tential?" (117) is no, even though the leftist political
Chicken 1.3 (1993): 29-31.
Hein, John. Jump the Shark. New York: Dutton, 2002.
edge of the show at times bordered on overbearing
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
for many viewers. While Royer is not only critiquing
Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
MST3ICS gender politics, but also extrapolating from
"The Merchants of Cool." Narr. Douglas Rushkoff.
that to the gender politics of our national culture,
her argument, I think, is undermined both by factual
Frontline. PBS. 27 Sept. 2001.
Miller, Mark Crispin. Boxed In: The Culture of TV. Evan
mistakes?she claims, for example, that the host and
ston: Northwestern UP, 1988.
the robots don't know their experiments are being
-. The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a Na
watched (119,120), and that veteran writer Mary Jo
tional Disorder. New York: Norton, 2001.
Pehl Joined the staff of the show in season seven
(118), when she had been working on that staff since
-. "Deride and Conquer." Watching Television. Ed.
Todd Gitlin. New York: Pantheon, 1986.183-228.
season four?and by her plodding, heavy-handed
Mullen, Megan. The Rise of Cable Programming in the
tone, such as when she salaciously calls the host and
United States: Revolution or Evolution? Austin: U of
his two robot sidekicks "three masculine voyeurs"
Texas P, 2003.
(115)?cinema being somehow an invasion of an
The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal
actor's privacy, apparently. Her cultural critique, inci
Episode Guide. New York: Bantam, 1996.
dentally, is founded upon an exhaustive study of two
Newitz, Annalee. "What Makes Things Cheesy? Satire,
whole episodes.
Multinationalism, and B-Movies." Social Text 63
23. While watching "Lost Continent," made by Lip
pert Productions, the same company that made "Jun
(2000): 59-82.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public
gle Goddess," the reluctant Crow and Tom behave like
Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York:
stand-ins for such viewers when Joel incorporates the
Penguin, 1986.
imperialist attitudes of both films into the context of
Reed, Lou. "Satellite of Love." Transformer. RCA, 1972.
a television drama produced by the formulaic Quinn
Royer, Jessica A. "What's Happening on Earth? Mys
Martin, who brought us The Fugitive, The Streets of
tery Science Theater 3000 as Reflection of Gender
San Francisco, and BarnabyJones, among others.
Roles and Attitudes toward Women." Fantasy Girls:
Implicitly, the smug, cornball world-view of those
Gender in the New Universe of Science Fiction and
programs is equated with that of the Lippert films.
Fantasy Television. Ed. Elyce Rae Helford. Lanham,
24. Thus the enforced watching of films, which
MD: Rowman, 2000.115-33.
was, in the Ludivico technique of Anthony Burgess's
Sedaris, David. "Us and Them." Dress Your Family in
A Clockwork Orange, a means by which subjects
could be conditioned to feel revulsion at destructive Corduroy and Denim. New York: Little Brown, 2004.
3-12.

52 JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59-4 / WINTER 2007

?2007 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Size and Scope of TV. Advertising on WTAJ-TV
10. Advertisement, <http://wtajtv.com/sales_size
scope.html>.
Sontag, Susan. "Notes on Camp." Against Interpreta
tion. New York: Picador, 1996. 275-92.
Thompson, Hunter S. Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush
Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness.
New York: Simon, 2004.
Tracy, Kathleen. Seinfeld: The Entire Domain. Seacau
cus, N.J.: Birch Lane, 1998.
Wallace, David Foster. "E Unibus Pluram: Television
and U. S. Fiction." Review of Contemporary Fiction
13 (1993): 151-94.
MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER JOOO
EPISODES CITED
"The Atomic Brain." Ep. 518. Comedy Central. 4 Dec.
1993.
"Being from Another Planet." Ep. 405. Comedy Cen
tral. 7 Apr. 1992.
"The Black Scorpion." Ep. 113. Comedy Channel. 13
Feb. 1990.
"The Castle of Fu Manchu." Ep. 323. Comedy Central.
18 Jan. 1992.
"Catalina Caper." Ep. 204. Comedy Channel. 13 Oct.
1990.
"City Limits." Ep. 403. Comedy Central. 20 June 1992.
"City on Fire." Ep. K16. KTMA. 19 Mar. 1989.
"The Corpse Vanishes." Ep. 105. Comedy Channel.
Dec. 1989.
"The Crash of the Moons." Ep. 417. Comedy Central.
28 Nov. 1992.
"The Crawling Eye." Ep. 101. Comedy Channel. Nov.
1989.
"The Crawling Hand." Ep. 106. Comedy Channel. Dec.
1989.
"The Day the Earth Froze." Ep. 422. Comedy Central.
16 Jan. 1993.
"Eegah." Ep. 506. Comedy Central. 28 Aug. 1993.
"First Spaceship on Venus." Ep. 211. Comedy Channel.
29 Dec. 1990.
"Fugitive Alien." Ep. 310. Comedy Central. 17 Aug.
1991.
"Gamera." Ep. 302. Comedy Central. 8 June 1991.
"Gamera vs. Barugon." Ep. 304. Comedy Central. 22
June 1991.
"Gamera vs. Zigra." Ep. 316. Comedy Central. 19 Oct.
1991.
JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 59?4 / WINTER 2007 53
?2007 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
This content downloaded from 24.179.37.122 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:07:04 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
"The Girl in Lover's Lane." Ep. 509. Comedy Central.
18 Sept. 1993.
"Godzilla vs. Megalon." Ep. 212. Comedy Channel. 19
Jan. 1991.
"Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster." Ep. 213. Comedy
Channel. 2 Feb. 1991.
"The Hellcats." Ep. 209. Comedy Central. 8 Dec. 1990.
"Hercules and the Captive Women." Ep. 412. Comedy
Central. 12 Sept. 1992.
"Jungle Goddess." Ep. 203. Comedy Channel. 6 Oct.
1990.
"Laserblast." Ep. 706. Comedy Central. 18 May 1996.
"Lost Continent." Ep. 208. Comedy Channel. 24 Nov.
1990.
"The Magic Sword." Ep. 411. Comedy Central. 29 Aug.
1992.
"Manos: The Hand of Fate." Ep. 424. Comedy Central.
30 Jan. 1993.
"Mighty Jack." Ep. 314. Comedy Central. 21 Sept. 1991.
"Monster A Go-Go." Ep. 421. Comedy Central. 9 Jan.
1993?
"Moon Zero Two." Ep. 111. Comedy Channel. Jan.
1990.
"Project Moonbase." Ep. 108. Comedy Channel. Jan.
1990.
"Ring of Terror." Ep. 206. Comedy Channel. 3 Nov.
1990.
"Robot Holocaust." Ep. 110. Comedy Channel. Jan.
1990.
"Robot Monster." Ep. 107. Comedy Channel. Jan. 1990.
"Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy." Ep. 102. Comedy Chan
nel. Dec. 1989.
"Rocket Attack U.S.A." Ep. 205. Comedy Channel. 27
Oct. 1990.
"Sampson vs. the Vampire Women." Ep. 624. Comedy
Central. 25 Mar. 1995.
"The Slime People." Ep. 108. Comedy Channel. Jan.
1990.
"Star Force: Fugitive Alien II." Ep. 318. Comedy Cen
tral. 16 Nov. 1991.
"Superdome." Ep. K15. KTMA. 12 Mar. 1989.
"Swamp Diamonds." Ep. 503. Comedy Central. 31 July
1993.
"Teenage Caveman." Ep. 315. Comedy Central. 9 Nov.
1991.
"Women of the Prehistoric Planet." Ep. 104. Comedy
Channel. Dec. 1989.