{"id":16299,"date":"2021-04-14T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-14T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=16299"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:14:44","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:14:44","slug":"when-two-cult-cable-comedies-stormed-the-cineplex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/when-two-cult-cable-comedies-stormed-the-cineplex\/","title":{"rendered":"When Two Cult Cable Comedies Stormed the Cineplex"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In spite of the show\u2019s out-of-this-world premise \u2013 a man in space forced to watch bad movies alongside two wisecracking robots \u2013 the inspiration for many a host segment on Mystery Science Theater 3000<\/em> was decidedly down to Earth. Take the 1996 episode where they tackled \u201970s schlockfest The Incredible Melting Man<\/em>, during which budding filmmaker Crow T. Robot gets the chance to realize his dream project, Earth vs. Soup<\/em>, which a major studio has bankrolled to the tune of $30 million. The catch? Mad scientist Dr. Forrester and his mother Pearl have siphoned off most of the budget, leaving Crow with a measly $800 and an absurd mandate that it star Kevin Bacon. This culminates in a chaotic shoot that yields no usable footage, a brutal test-screening focus group, and the indignity of having his grand vision reduced to the length of a trailer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not hard to imagine the show\u2019s writers channeling their frustrations with the process of making their maiden big-screen outing \u2013 which went into limited release on April 19, 1996 \u2013 into these sketches. Best Brains wasn\u2019t alone, though, since Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie<\/em> was preceded by one week by Brain Candy<\/em>, the theatrical bow of Canadian sketch comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall, who similarly experienced rough sledding on the journey to the big screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFirst and foremost, we had gone and done probably the stupidest thing we could do for our feature-film debut \u2013 a comedy about depression.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So says Kevin McDonald in The Kids in the Hall: One Dumb Guy<\/em>, Paul Myers\u2019s biography of the troupe, which had barely wrapped production on its fifth and final season when producer Lorne Michaels got them a development deal at Paramount. Various ideas were kicked around until the five Kids plus head writer Norm Hiscock landed on The Drug<\/em>, about a powerful antidepressant with the unfortunate side effect of causing some people to become comatose. During the scripting process, Dave Foley had a falling out with the others and removed himself from the writing room, eventually agreeing to act in the film on the condition his shooting days be limited and he wouldn\u2019t appear in drag. Accordingly, the largely straight leading role of Dr. Chris Cooper went to McDonald, limiting the number of other parts he could play. This left Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson to pick up the slack, taking between seven and nine roles each. Among them are a handful of recurring characters from the show (chief among them McKinney\u2019s cranky Croatian cabbie, who acts as the film\u2019s narrator), but the focus is on the pharmaceutical company plot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This in itself isn\u2019t a bad thing since the film\u2019s sharpest jabs are aimed squarely at the drug industry, represented by pharma magnate Don Roritor, played by McKinney doing a Lorne Michaels impression one year before Mike Myers did the same in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery<\/em>. Roritor\u2019s push to rush Cooper\u2019s miracle drug \u2013 dubbed Gleemonex \u2013 to market before it can be thoroughly tested found its parallel in the Kids\u2019 clashes with studio executives demanding cuts (among them McCulloch\u2019s Cancer Boy, which he fought tooth-and-nail to keep in), a title change, and a new third act when the original ending was deemed too downbeat. (Never mind that they were following the story to its logical conclusion and wound up losing one of Foley\u2019s few characters in the process.) The subsequent loss of confidence on Paramount\u2019s part led the studio to dump Brain Candy<\/em> into theaters with minimal marketing support. While it eventually found an audience on home video, little effort had been made to cater to it; the film\u2019s bare-bones (and out-of-print) DVD, for example, has yet to be upgraded to Blu-ray. Only a bootleg of the work print that\u2019s floating around gives any indication of what might have been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBiggest problem ended up being that we were working with a big studio, and I think that was the biggest flaw in the whole process.\u201d \u2013Kevin Murphy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MST3K: The Movie <\/em>is better off in this regard since Shout! Factory released it on Blu-ray complete with 23 minutes of deleted and extended scenes plus two featurettes: one made during production and one with the benefit of 17 years of hindsight. The latter, subtitled \u201cThe Motion Picture Odyssey,\u201d gives performers Trace Beaulieu, Kevin Murphy, and Michael J. Nelson, and director Jim Mallon the floor to air their grievances and recount the obtuse notes from culturally illiterate studio execs they were compelled to address at the script stage when it was still possible for the plug to be pulled. The meddling really kicked into high gear, though, after the movie was shot and edited. Mildly esoteric pop-culture references were changed to topical jokes that have aged poorly. Long sequences were cut, including whole swaths of The Island Earth<\/em>, the movie they were riffing, which got whittled down to 56 largely incomprehensible minutes. Also axed: an entire host segment and the original ending, which was completely reshot. (Sound familiar?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, the version seen by the public ran a scant 74 minutes, making it significantly shorter than a regular episode of the show and 13 minutes shorter than the uncut The Island Earth<\/em>. Even worse, its release was limited to just 26 screens so the studio\u2019s marketing machine could concentrate on Pamela Anderson\u2019s Barb Wire<\/em>, which stiffed when it came out two weeks later. When you consider MST3K: The Movie<\/em> had the highest per-screen average its opening weekend<\/a>, Gramercy\u2019s failure to get behind it looks as shortsighted as can be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Best Brains, The Movie<\/em>\u2019s lack of crossover success sent them back to the small screen and a jump from Comedy Central to the Sci-Fi Channel, which gave them three more seasons to play around. For the Kids in the Hall, Brain Candy<\/em> was the final nail in the coffin, at least in the short term. Within a few years, however, they reunited and returned to their stage roots, booking tours across the US playing to sellout crowds first exposed to their unique brand of sketch comedy on Comedy Central. Maybe not the happy ending they were originally hoping for, but it\u2019s better than oblivion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie\u201d is on Hoopla and is available to rent on most streaming platforms. \u201cBrain Candy\u201d is not.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With only one week between them, the film adaptations of \u2018Mystery Science Theater 3000\u2019 and \u2018The Kids in the Hall\u2019 hit theaters 25 years ago. It didn\u2019t go so well for either of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":463,"featured_media":16304,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1428],"tags":[1429,1422],"class_list":["post-16299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-happy-birthday","tag-happy-birthday","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22327,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16299\/revisions\/22327"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}