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DVD: MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER
3000 COLLECTION VOL 1
Box set - 4 discs, 4 movies - Rhino Home Video
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
Rhino has done a lot with the Mystery Science 3000 series, and we, the fans, are grateful. This 4 DVD box set is great fun, from the box (hey, it's interactive, with turn-wheel quotes and a pull-tab rocket ship) to the content. Each DVD is double-sided, with an MST3K side and "straight" side, meaning that if you're a complete masochist you can watch the movie the way the director originally intended, sans hecklers. Warning: these movies are as bad it gets, which is why it's so much fun watching the bots and whichever human occupies the Satellite of Love slap the hell out of every line.
Now to the issue of which human occupies the Satellite Of Love. Joel Hodgeson originated the role of the laid-back castaway, marooned on a satellite by two evil scientists who force him to watch terrible movies so they can monitor his brain and chart the effects. To fight loneliness, Joel built robots, but some the parts he scavenged from the ship came from the film department. The parts that allowed Joel to stop and start the films, to be precise. This leaves him at the mercy of random start and stop times. During film time, Joel and the bots, Tom Servo (basically a gum ball machine with a great singing voice) and Crow (essentially a... well, he's a... one of those metal... aw screw it, I don't know what Crow is) get in literally hundreds and hundreds of jokes and cultural references. So many, in fact, that nobody could possibly understand all of it. If you get 70%, congratulations, Hoss, you know way too much shit. It doesn't matter if you don't get a joke because you're still laughing from the last one. The aforementioned "issue" is going to be between the fans of Joel, who "escaped" the Satellite Of Love to go on to a lucrative career in films that never materialized and the fans of Mike Nelson, the head writer of the show who replaced Joel as the experimental human in the satellite. Joel's fans are probably greater in number than Mike's, as is usually the case with the originator of a role, but there are three Mike episodes to one Joel here. Granted, the Joel ep is a special treat. Catalina Caper, a 60s teen beach flick that ran once or twice and was pulled from circulation for legal reasons, is definitely the most entertaining episode of the four, not necessarily because it's Joel's, but because of its long absence and the fact that the entire genre of campy teen-on-the-beach movies gets thoroughly perforated. It's so cliche in so many ways that every jab taken by Joel, Crow and Servo is a jab at three dozen other bad flicks. Plus... perky young women in teensy bikinis.
The Mike Nelson episodes are Bloodlust (a young Robert Reed/Papa Brady and his friends are hunted by a mad millionaire with a crossbow on an island, and like Mike and the bots, you just want him to improve his aim!), The Creeping Terror (a movie so bad Ed Wood probably would have walked out of the theater and demanded his money back), and The Skydivers (a formless revenge flick with lots of skydiving in black and white yet, somehow, very little action. So little, in fact, that Mike and the bots get bored and turn the little airplane into the main character, and one or all three occasionally yell out "C'mon already, make with the dyin'!"). My advice: Do NOT watch Skydivers on the flipside without Mike and the Bots. Your brain will rot in minutes.
I have to admit I enjoyed every second of this box set. Big confession, huh, MiSTies? I will admit to being partial to the Joel era, but I think Mike Nelson did a pretty fine job as well. I think things went downhill after the Mads (scientists Dr. Forrester and TV's Frank) left the show, but hey... they're on all four of these, so party on. Rhino did a fine job putting this package together, top to bottom, so the party's just a play button away.
© 2002 - DJ Johnson