MST3K Version 2.1

I’ve commented before on my generation, Generation Y. We are the late twenty-somethings to mid thirty-whatevers who grew up in the nineties. We spent our most formative years with Clinton in the White House, but not the one in the pants suit. Well, she was there but she mostly kept out of the headlines. She changed her hairstyle a lot. Most actors of the nineties did. The cast of Friends went through sixty five different haircuts, but I digress. Every generation has it’s cult followings. Not actual cults, mind you, like David Koresh’s in Waco (‘90s reference). I rather refer to obsessions with underground pop culture sources, often in the form of a movie. For some it’s Monty Python. Others like Rocky Horror Picture Show. Mine isn’t a movie, per se. It’s a television series that made fun of movies. Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a sarcastic and witty riffing session played over B movies. You know all those funny comments you think of when you watch a movie ? These guys got paid to say them.

MST3K went through many incarnations as cast members departed and were replaced, networks changed and the writers endeavored to reinvent the show. The basic story remained the same: a mad scientist forced an unsuspecting guy to watch bad movie after bad movie to monitor how this torture affected his mind. The hero was played first by show co-creator Joel Hodgson (his character was named ‘Joel’) and later by Mike Nelson (they called him ‘Mike’). Joel/Mike is trapped on a dog bone shaped space ship called The Satellite of Love, in a parked orbit over Earth. Joel/Mike only has the companionship of his homemade robots to preserve his sanity. The ‘Bots are made of parts of the ship (a.k.a. sports equipment, washer and dryer parts and a gumball machine). Gypsy, who looked like a robot pirana plant with a headlight for an eye, operated the Satellite of Love. Crow and Tom Servo assisted Joel/Mike in heckling. Every episode had a plot of some antic with the ’Bots, usually an escape attempt.

When movie time came, the Satellite rocked violently as klaxons blared and warning sirens wailed. The camera raced through a series of gates that counted down to the movie. Passing through the exotically themed doors leads to the darkened theater. Barely visible are the silhouettes of the front row of chairs. Joel/Mike makes his way to the front row from the right. He’s carrying one of the ‘Bots as the other made its way behind him. Now the show begins in earnest.

The B movies they watch would be unbearable without the commenting, but that’s the point. Heckling the screen, Joel/Mike, Crow and Tom Servo made scatological silliness and sarcastic needling a staple of their show. Complex wordplay and obscure references were intertwined with their riotously funny commentary. The series lasted eleven years and moved from Comedy Central to the SciFi network before ending its run in 1999.

Ten years later, the cult following for the show is still growing. Despite protests and innumerable campaigns to return the show to the air, it is now only available on DVD or VHS, or through downloadable sources to those who can find it. Most of the cast has reunited since to create a reincarnated version of MST3K, in two forms.

Rifftrax.com is the brainchild of Mike Nelson (his character was ‘Mike’) Kevin Murphy (a MST3K writer and voice of Tom Servo), and Bill Corbett (Crow during the SciFi channel years). Rifftrax does what MST3K could never do– make fun of blockbuster movies. The crew critiques and ‘riff’ on every epic movie, from Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings. To get by copyright concerns the website only offers the downloadable audio tracks of the riffs– you must provide the movie. The riff track synchronized to your own copy of Willy Wonka provides you with all the Oompa Loompa jokes you can stand.

As a MST3K fan I’m more impressed with Cinematic Titanic. Almost everyone who wrote for the show came back to do what they do best: make fun of bad movies. The premise is simple: the crew is brought into a screening room to help ‘save’ a bad movie– a sinking ship, as it was– with their heckling. Thus the title. The old crew still has their magic, even after ten years of mothballing their wit. I’ve watched the first movie they tackled, a Roger Corman flicked called Wasp Woman. Without the riffing, agonizing to watch. With the color commentary, hilarious. Cinematictitanic.com has many movies available, all horrible, all funny.

The Watchmen

I was one of the geeks who went to the midnight premier of The Watchmen. If you ever wanted to hack someone’s computer, that night would have been perfect– every nerd in the city was at the movie theater. I read the graphic novel when I was nine, in 1989. My best friend Lucas loaned me his copy and as was tradition I wrote my favorite line from the book on the inside cover. Before me Lucas had written ‘This city is afraid of me. I’ve seen it’s true face.” I think I tried to write a profoundly Buddhist Dr. Manhattan line. What I like most about the graphic novel is captured well in the movie: a story of superheroes that are human– they make mistakes, take sides, have mental disorders, are rapists, psychopaths and ordinary guys.

The first scene, set in the mid eighties, is of a late middle-aged man sitting in his recliner. A masked assassin breaks in and, after a valiant effort by the victim, tosses him through the pane glass window to his death tens of stories below. It turns out the victim is an aged hero called The Comedian. Vigilante Rorschach discovers the crime scene and puts together a conspiracy theory: someone is killing The Watchmen, a group of heroes that fought crime together à la The Justice League or The Avengers.

The film focuses on each member of the Watchmen in turn, filling the viewer in on each hero’s past by way of flashbacks and dramatic monologues. As is the case in the graphic novel, the movie shows the events of each time period believably, be it the Golden Age (read: original) Watchmen, the team’s Viet Nam and cold war era rosters or the vigilante Watchmen during the capitalist cultural revolution. We learn how each Watchman joins and how each ultimately quits the crime fighting gig, including inevitably Rorschach. Dr. Manhattan’s scenes drive the nuclear arms race storyline as he moves back and forth through time to tell us of his origins. Eventually the ‘someone’s killing Watchmen’ subplot unravels and the heroes are pitted against each other. The final Watchman’s death is the coup de gras of the work, the final unexpected blow in a work that delivers unexpected blows more reliably than a drunken boxer. If you haven’t read the graphic novel you won’t miss the giant squids who were replaced in the movie with a more logical plot device. Superfans will complain that the final confrontation’s meaning changes without the squids in the plot.

The movie adheres rather well to the graphic novel storyline, contrary to the indignant over reaction of superfans. As with any adaptation to the screen some of the story had to be compressed or altered for time and ease of understanding. A story simply has to be more action based in a movie, where a graphic novel is more dialog driven. The movie in this case does a very good job of driving the action while ensuring nothing the characters say seems cheesy or overly comic like, a transgression Spider-Man and Superman are guilty of. The Dr. Manhattan television interview ambush, for example, is spliced with Night Owl II and Silk Spectre II’s alter egos fighting would be muggers, signaling the first major crest in action. The scene is action packed, moves the story, and reveals a great deal of plot.

Above all the movie is cinematic. Each scene is detail rich– watch for messages on walls and billboards behind the action. As near as possible, the detailed panels of the graphic novel have been well translated to the screen. For example, where the novel uses black and white photos during the Golden era scenes, in the film these scenes are flashbulbs set to sepia toned flashbacks of the heroes in their yester-years. Even the soundtrack is crafted to reflect the tone and era of each scene– Viet Nam opens with “Ride of the Valkyries” playing in an homage to Apocalypse Now. And you’ll never hear Nat King Cole’s Unforgetable without thinking of the Comedian’s death scene.

The costumes don’t come off as corny as other campy comic film franchises (the pre-Dark Knight Batman series comes to mind). Overall it’s easy to see each hero as a human, with the obvious exception of Dr. Manhattan, the scientist-turned-nuclear-powered-demigod played by Billy Crudup, the only actor of note in the film. The Comedian’s 30’s era uniform is pure Robin Hood: The Broadway Musical costuming, but during ‘Nam he dons fatigues and combat gear. Masks are necessary in that each hero is a celebrity. If Micheal Jackson can get away with wearing a mask in public The Night Owl should be able to. The heroes’ secret identities is one of the central plot devices, so masks are essential for the story to work and thus not as obtrusive as in other hero stories.

A warning to parents, there is full frontal male nudity– Dr. Manhattan’s glowing blue pipe is shown throughout the movie. If you were a nuclear powered superbeing you’d freeball, too. The screenplay is written by David Hayter, who wrote the X-Men screenplay and is the voice of Snake in the Metal Gear Solid video games.

Donald Trump's Million Dollar Comb Over

Secret Reality Show Obsession: The Celebrity Apprentice

In the past I’ve torn relentlessly into people who watched reality shows. I would never admit to those mindless ‘sheeple’ (people who act like sheep) that for all my shouts to the contrary, I find myself secretly liking a random reality show here or there. A few weeks ago I couldn’t stop watching Kitchen Nightmares. Before that it was Project Runway. I feel secure enough in my sexuality to admit that publicly: I watch Project Runway. At various times in the past I have been enamored with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Big Brother, and Trading Spaces. I even have the behind the scenes book for the latter. Not to say that I approve of people watching only reality television, but I admit I am watching one right now. In my diet of couch potato television, sitcoms are my chips– my staple snack. Then comes cartoons, my M&M’s, if you will. Celeb-reality is like my oversized tin of three flavor popcorn. It’s corny, cheesey, super-buttery over-the-top empty calories. My current fave flavor: The Celebrity Apprentice.
If you’re not familiar with the Apprentice premise, here’s a primer. Donald Trump is the world’s dorkiest egomaniac billionaire and owner of lots of high price real estate in New York (Trump Tower) and Las Vegas (Trump Taj Mahal). This guy puts his name on everything and SNL enjoys making fun of him and his million-dollar comb over. It’s also interesting to note that he lists Rosie O’Donnell amongst his arch nemeses. FOX owner Rupert Murdoch is undoubtedly near the top of the list as well.

Airing on NBC, The Apprentice places people from various professions on teams competing in business and marketing competitions a la Survivor. Survivor creator Mark Burnett is behind this show as well, but unlike on that show, the reward here is not food and bug spray but dollars and cents. Teams pick synergistic names like 'Paragon' or 'Hera' or anything that sounds like a model of car or deity. The Trumpster eliminates one member of the losing team at the end of each episode. The Trumpmeister even has a trademarked catch phrase, “You’re fired!” Try to picture it as Emeril Lagasse’s ‘BAM!’ but with a cheesy Travolta-esque hand gesture. SNL makes very much fun of that, too. In the end the winner gets a PR job for Trump’s company, a nice salary and a two cool titles: Executive Vice President of Public Relations and Owner’s Representative. In reality, the job is little more than a glorified poster child, officiating the grand opening of Trump Mall of America. But if the Don-minator wants to pay a million dolllars in bogus salary as a prize for his show that has earned him and NBC hundreds of kajillions of dollars then more power to him. The formula works, but it gets better. The Celebrity Apprentice takes D list actors, comics, athletes and models and make them the dancing puppets for your, my and the Donald’s entertainment.

I caught most of the first season of The Celebrity Apprentice last year but until I discovered Hulu.com. I couldn’t watch any show regularly– as a server, I work through television prime time most nights. Season two is available streaming free of charge on Hulu. New episodes usually show up there the day after airing on NBC, Sundays at 9 PM EST. I know, I’m supposed to list eastern and central times, so if you’re reading this and you’re in the central time zone, please send me an email and I’ll tell you what time the show is on where you live. That seems to me the simplest way to rectify the matter.

This season features a lot of really awful talent. On the ladies’ side, Team ATHENA, we have human exoskeleton Joan Rivers and plastic daughter Melissa. We also have the prerequisite Playboy bunny, Brande Roderick. No, she isn’t an important bunny. She’s not dating Hef and she doesn’t have her own show on E! She is blond and has decent jugs, and that’s what she’s there for. Someone who is on E! (the network, not the drug) is Kim Kardashian, playboy model, star of a notorious sex video and serial celebrity hook-up. But she’s not on this show– her chubbier sister Khloe is. She’s like Rob Lowe’s brother Brad, or Sylvester Stallone’s brother Frank. More useless than a Playboy bunny who you’ve at least seen naked or the sister of a celebrity you saw naked is a game show model you haven’t. Claudia Jordon is one of the random briefcase holding bimbos on Deal Or No Deal. I assume Donald Trump wanted host Howie Mandel but reconsidered. The Don doesn’t trust bald guys. It’s like they’re not hiding something. Barking commands through most of the show is some female poker champion, which on the celebrity food pyramid appears between female billiards champion and professional female bowler. Rounding out ATHENA’s all-star team is a female golf champion (see: female poker champion) and TLC member Tionne ‘T-Boz’ Watkins. So far T-Boz has been the quiet one, kind of like how Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes has been the quiet one in TLC ever since she died.

The men’s team is just as stellar. Team Kings of the Universe (KOTU) features nearly retarded Heisman trophy winner Hershel Walker, over the hill tough guy comedian Andrew Dice Clay, and male figure skating champion (see: female poker champion) Scott Hamilton. And those are your headliners. Severly mentally ill characters Dennis Rodman and Tom Green add alcoholism and aberrant behavior to the mix, while singers Clint Black and Brian McKnight perform a cross-genre duet in trying to manage their team of madmen. Not to be without a reality show entrepreneur of their own, KOTU has Jesse James, founder of West Coast Choppers and star of eleventy four History Channel shows.

I’ve seen through episode three. Here is a brief recap of each episode to catch you up so you can obsess over the show with me. I play a drinking game when I watch, and you should too! Try to come up with one.

Episode one begins with the celebs on the deck of the USS Intrepid in Manhattan. Donald of course arrives dramatically by helicopter. He would prefer to arrive by jet pack, but he can’t find a flame retardant hair spray. The Don sets the teams to a standard Apprentice task– being street vendors. The D Listers must use their industry contacts to raise as much money as possible in a sidewalk cupcake sale. Dennis Rodman’s social anxiety disorder manifests itself early in the show. He isn’t comfortable interacting with the public and stays in the van while the other celebrities use their fame to sell pastries. The Playboy bunny gets her sugar daddy Hef to make a generous contribution and Team ATHENA easily pummels the men. The Dice Man is eliminated so painfully that he will need Preparation H for years to come. Then again, Andrew Dice Clay is so old that hemorrhoids are an occupational hazard for him, a professional asshole.

Episode two gives the teams an advertising challenge. The CEO of Zappos.com, an online shoe store, asks the celebrities (and the golfer and poker player) to create a super hero to promote the company’s focus on customer service. The ladies divvy up responsibility well and get into zero cat fights– how mundane. The men give quality performances as they quibble and bicker through the task. Best moment of the episode is Hershel Walker telling Tom Green to shut up. The Don says ‘You’re Fired! ™’ to KOTU Project manager Scott ‘straight male figure skating champion’ Hamilton. His idea of naming their heroine ‘EEE’ doesn't make sense to anyone. If Zappos were called EEE.com, however, Hamilton would have been heralded as a genius.

Episode three sees Tom Green stepping up as KOTU leader after two failed challenges. The teams will this time sell wedding dresses. It may seem like the event is stacked in the women’s favor, but don’t forget that Dennis Rodman is known for, amongst other filthier things, wearing a wedding dress. And Tom Green got famous for wearing a tutu and sucking milk from a cow’s teat. Those two have more experience with dresses than the female poker champion and golf pro combined. Unfortunately, Rodman fails to pull his weight and gets plastered throughout the episode. He misses the day of the wedding dress sale, calling in sick with a BS eye infection. Project leader Green shows up late as well and teammates suspect he and Rodman were out drinking rather late the night before.

The girls win again, sans hair pulling. Sadly, we’re not even treated to a trampling of bridal gown shoppers. In the boardroom Hershel and Clint throw both bad boys Green and Rodman under the bus. They have contradicting tales of why Dennis was MIA on day two. Dennis claimed to have had an allergic reaction to a cat, Tom said he had a reaction to a dog. Best line of the episode is when the Don questions them on this contradiction. The ladies, watching via closed circuit TV in another room, know better than to believe Dennis’ cat/dog caca. “It was a girl named Kitty,” says Melissa Rivers, Skeletor’s daughter. “Or some bitch,” retorts the Deal Or No Deal bimbo. Unfortunately Tom Green is off’ed before he can do anything truly bizarre. Like rap, which he does very well. Find the youtube video of him and Xzibit. You’re in for a treat.

To see previous The Celebrity Apprentice episodes, watch NBC Saturdays at 8 PM EST (email me for central time). NBC is airing encore showings of the previous two episodes that night before a new episode every Sunday. Hulu.com has the aired episodes as well as the SNL skits starring Darrelll Hammond as the Trump, or Trumpmaster D as I never actually call him. The one with Dwayne ‘don’t call me the Rock’ Johnson is genius. His Dennis Rodman impersonation is spot on. Little wonder Rodman had a semi-successful crossover into professional wrestling a few years back, teaming up with Hulk Hogan for a few publicity matches. Find a video of that and you’ll spew whatever you’re drinking at the time out your nose, so don’t drink when watching it, for your safety’s sake. Speaking of drinking, don’t forget to work on the drinking game ideas. My game I’m either gonna call Donald Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice: Drink Til You Drop or Million Dollar Comb Over. You drink every time there’s a product placement, celebrity name drop or someone says Trump. Waterfall when the Don’s on screen. Yaegerbomb when he says ‘you’re fired.’ She’s a harsh mistress, that game.

Nothing Trivial

I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m a dork. No, not your average, run-of-the-mill dork. I’m your atypical überdork. The kind of dork who doesn’t write “überdork” without the two dots over the ‘u’. The type of dork that also knows those dots are called ümlauts, from the German word meaning ‘two dots’. The kind of dork who knows that the word dork originally referred to a whale’s penis. As a self-professed überdork, I admit freely that I like no bar game better than trivia. I’m a lousy shot at beer pong, darts, and beer darts– it’s the coolest new game that’s sweeping all the fictitious bars I frequent! I know obscure facts and I like to drink, so trivia is my sport of choice.

Needless to say I take it seriously. Well, I guess it was needful to say. Every wrong answer is an excruciating blemish on my quizzical record. That’s one of the reasons I have issues with certain trivia practices. I get my trivia fix at Charley O’s on Tuesdays. Hell, I even went through the effort of ensuring I am scheduled off on Tuesdays so I can hit O’ Corley’s for trivia and karaoke, the dynamic duo of drinking. Jamie has been the host of trivia for a while now. His cohost shifts often but for now it’s Antonio and they are a great team. Any gripe I have with trivia is not host related, let me say that from the start.

One of my biggest peeves, coming from a man with peeves visible from space, is a certain team that plays at O’Corley’s. See, some of you don’t realize how seriously competitive trivia can get. I’ve seen people loose their thumbs for cheating. Actually, that was an old Charles Bronson movie, but trivia is competitive, and many teams come back week after week. The truly hardcore teams have matching shirts. In particular, the Chopstick Mafia is a team that, like me, takes bar trivia very seriously. So seriously that sometimes they may occasionally use a piece of technology to acquire the answer to a question that is stumping them. They use their phones to cheat. Hey, Mafia, don’t get all riled up. Everyone knows you cheat! We’re at the bar playing trivia so don’t assume we’re ignorant. But in your defense, Chopstick Mafia, you are not the only team that cheats. The only reason I don’t is because I don’t have an internet phone. I could take the moral high ground and say even if I had an IPhone I wouldn’t use it to cheat, but I would. I take it that seriously, too.

The problem comes when a team of twenty with IPhones answer questions that no other team got because they are cheating, errr, I mean, using advanced data access techniques. So to level the playing field I have devised a few suggested rule changes and additions. I hope every bar that hosts trivia will read this and reconsider their practices.

Rule 1: Team size may be no more than ten to fifteen people, or a tenth of the total bar crowd that night. So if your team has twenty members and there are only fifty people in the joint, you should maybe split into two teams. Why? You tell me– is it really fair for a school of dolphins to swarm three or four tiny mackerel? I’m tired of being the mackerel! I’m nobody’s fish!

Rule 2: Each question has a one minute time limit. If you know the question, that’s plenty of time. If you don’t, it gives your team ample time to compare ideas and brainstorm. It’s also a short enough time limit to kill the ‘google effect.’ That’s what I’m trademarking as the use of internet technology in trivia cheating. Look for the term in Wikipedia any day now.

Rule 3: The Equalizer. Just to make it more sporting, why not give the last place team a chance to catch up? Before the final question, let any team in last place chug against the first place team or teams. If a team in last place beats a first place team in the chug-off, the last place team gets moved up to first place. No one loses any points. This helps teams that are completely out-gunned have a chance, all be it a slim one, to win. The leading team still has an advantage– they’ve proved they know a lot, so they should have no problem answering the last question. Okay, maybe this rule is trivia communism, but I stand behind it, just like I stood behind Marx. Groucho, not Karl. Besides being a great comedian, he’s one hell of a trivia host. He used to host What’s My Line back in the golden years of television.

Rule 4: The Tie Breaker. This method ends the chug-off approach for deciding who wins in a tie. Instead, a question with multiple parts may be used, like asking the teams to name all the signs of the zodiac. Or all the Golden Girls. Still, a few teams may be able to name off Blanche (Rue McClanahan), Dorothy (Bea Arthur), Rose (Betty White) and Sophia (Estelle Getty, RIP). So a tie breaker question doesn’t preclude a final chug off, but it definitively decides which teams watch Lifetime: Television For Women.

I don’t really expect all (or any) of these rules to be adopted. I know that as a group people are resistant to change. So maybe trivia is fine the way it is. Or maybe I’m just a bitter überdork with no IPhone.

The DNA of REM

There was a time when what defined my first impression about a person was the answer to this question: what kind of music do you like? Elitist did not begin to describe how seriously I took that question. Snob was more on the nose. If your answer was “everything,” you were dead to me. I instantly forgot you were even standing there and would often accidentally bump into people who answered “everything.” I sat on a girl once for the same reason. Many months later and after weeks in court we settled it like gentlemen. We Jell-O wrestled. I lost the match and my appetite for Jell-O forever.

Only slightly less egregious than “everything” was “everything but rap and country.” To me that said “I have taste, but very little.” I also thought those people must be the ones who ordered their steaks well done and considered katsup a steak sauce.

Coming up next in my countdown of bad answers, in a two way tie for third, you guessed it, “rap” or “country.” The reason I only slightly disliked people with these responses was that I gave them points for sticking to a genre. At least they knew what they liked. They didn’t like “everything,” just bad music.

My answer? I’d rattle off a few bands that I liked at the time, or I’d try to classify my tastes: I’d say alternative, grunge, emo… whatever genre I thought represented artists I liked. This method was archaic at best. What did alternative mean? If it was the alternative to mainstream rock then it shouldn’t have been on MTV or the radio, but it was. Was grunge limited to only mid-nineties Seattle artists, or was there a sound that any band could create to be considered grunge? Was Weezer emo? Could emo bands have female singers? Does Ann Coulter have an Adam’s apple? What it boiled down to was that this method didn’t describe what I liked about a song, a band or a style of music.

Thank the maker for the internet, whose mysterious artificial intelligence has decoded man’s emotional response to music. Soon the robots will assimilate this program and will try to create music. It will be the most beautiful music any mortal will have ever heard. Until then we have the Music Genome Project. It may sound like a secret government program to genetically engineer a boy band/ superhero team, but I assure you it is probably not that. I’m seventy four percent sure it is not. The project began in 2000 as an attempt to dissect the DNA of music.

Every song has a “vector,” a list of its genes. Things like the singer’s gender, the level of distortion on the guitar and type of background vocals make up the approximately 150 “genes” of a song. There are over four hundred possible genes, though some genres have more than others. Rock songs deal with only around 150 genes but rap uses over 300. Jazz has 400 different genes because, well, jazz is chaotic crap. Listening to jazz makes me want to puncture my eardrums with a yellow number two pencil. It’s like when your alarm clock goes while you’re still asleep, so the alarm is making everything in your dream go crazy and start having a panic attack. That’s what jazz sounds like to me– a panic attack in my dream.

But back to vectors. A complex algorithm called the distance function compares vectors to generate a list of similar songs. (Pay attention, there will be a quiz on this Monday.) The Music Genome Project’s music player application, Pandora (Pandora.com) is free and lets you create custom playlists based on an artist or song. I have a few for my favorite artists, but most interesting are the stations I made based on a single song. I usually like one song by an artist and nothing else they’ve made, but Pandora never fails to pull a rabbit out of her hat.

So now ask me what kind of music I like and I’ll answer with a more scientific and most importantly more accurate response: I like songs that feature basic rock song structure, major key tonality, a distinctive male lead vocal and mild rhythmic syncopation. I also don’t mind string section beds, subtle use of acoustic piano or vocal-centric aesthetics. How about you? Oh… rap and country. That’s cool.