The Sting of Life

It's finally here, the first episode of the new Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episodes hosted by Mike Nelson, with Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy voicing the robots, Crow and Tom Servo. You can purchase the episode, which features a Creature from the Black Lagoon knock-off movie called Sting of Death, on the Rifftrax website. Is it better than Joel Hodgson's attempt to relaunch the series? No, but it's no worse, and it is nice to see it back in the hands of Mike Nelson, who truly was the primary creative force throughout the vast majority of the show's original run, and was the host when the series was finally cancelled, after over a decade, in 1999. I've repeatedly expressed my thoughts regarding the mistakes Hodgson made in reviving the series in 2017. You can read them here, as well as read my thoughts on Mike Nelson's strategy in funding his revival.

While I do think Mike is the most important creative voice on the series, I wish the writer's room had hewed closer to the original series' format. Rifftrax, which Mike launched as a successor series to MST3k decades ago, has managed to sustain itself financially all this time (unlike Hodgson's big budget catastrophe), and is typically written by the same people whom you hear delivering the jokes. Initially only Mike himself and then, eventually, joined by his final MST3k co-stars, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy. MST3k traditionally included virtually everyone who worked on the show which led to the show's reputation for having an extraordinarily broad range of topics for its jokes. In particular, I've suspected Mary Jo Pehl was more responsible for some of the show's better riffs than is generally acknowledged, because her videos with Bridget Jones on the Rifftrax site tend to be even funnier than the boys'.

The subject for riffing in this premiere episode of the new relaunch is Sting of Death, a 1966 movie which swaps out the Black Lagoon Creature for a jellyfish man whose costume is basically a wet suit draped with what, as one of the riffers observes, appear to be Mardi Gras beads. The monster, in Scooby Do fashion, turns out to be a creepy local in a mask. His primary targets are girls who rejected him and guys who talked down to him. The most absurd scene is when a girl is killed in a swimming pool at a party and somehow no-one notices the six foot tall weirdo in the wet suit. Mike wonders if he was hiding in the filter.

As I said, the humour lacks the wonderful breadth of knowledge of all things from sports to science to pop culture that it used to have. Even the nerdy stuff feels stale, as in a musical number Mike and the bots put together about tardigrades. When Star Trek: Discovery had an episode about tardigrades over a decade ago, it already felt like a stale internet meme. You can see Hodgon's wisdom in casting a new, younger cast. Yet you can't argue with the success of Rifftrax. It's not like MST3k was ever especially mainstream, maybe it just needs to settle into being more niche than it ever was before.