There’s been a fair amount of press around the crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000 of late, as it is their 20th anniversary and a DVD box-set is out to celebrate it. Creators Joel Hodgson and Jim Mallon are chatting up the press. Joel left the show in the 5th season, mainly due to creative differences with Mallon, from what I can glean from bits and pieces of the recent interviews.
For those of you who don’t know MST3K, essentially Mr Hodgson sat in the front row of a theatre onscreen with two puppet robots and the three of them heckled bad movies. Simple and as funny as that.
What I didn’t know is that after he left, one of the side projects Joel pursued with his brother Jim was:
“…Jollyfilter, which is kind of the third way to re-purpose a movie.
So that was kind of our side project…we did that for like seven years…we got a development deal and tried to make it into a feature, we did a game show with it, and just test, trying to develop it.â€Â(from the Onion AV Club interview)
In the end it didn’t get picked up, maybe because to really appreciate the humour and effort you have to watch the original piece before seeing the “improvements”. Which is how they presented this demo:
Joel and many of his MST3K compatriots are now doing a show very similar to MST3K direct to DVD, called Cinematic Titanic.