Mystery Science Theater 3000 — a show about a human and bric-a-brac robot puppets who watch cinematic dreck while slinging high and lowbrow quips — is perhaps TV’s longest, strangest trip.
Like a beloved B-movie monster, the show refuses to die. Since 1988, MST3K has found on-and-off life via public access television, cable TV, streaming services and fan-funded episodes, all thanks to a loyal cult audience that celebrates its willfully obscure, proudly niche comedy. (MST3K is now owned by Radial Entertainment, which purchased it from creator Joel Hodgson earlier this year.)
So strong is the ongoing hunger for the show’s offbeat humor that when RiffTrax — a 20-year-old movie-mocking franchise featuring MST3K alumni Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett — announced a crossover MST3K comeback, the Kickstarter for Mystery Science Theater 3000: The RiffTrax Experiments exploded.
In February, Nelson (who hosted the show from 1993-1999), Murphy (Tom Servo from 1990-1999) and Corbett (Crow from 1997-1999, 2020) asked for $20,000 to fund a four-episode return to the Satellite of Love using practical effects; a month later, they got $2.7 million. (That’s some serious sampo.)
Ahead of the first episode hitting movie theaters on Sept. 9 and Sept. 13 (via Fathom Entertainment and RiffTrax) and backers’ accounts in October, Billboard spoke to Nelson, Murphy and Corbett about the show’s musical history and what the tuneful troika is bringing to these four new episodes. We delve into song scribe Nelson’s creative process back in the day (his Minnesota digs were slightly less spacious than Prince’s Paisley Park complex six miles away); what to expect from Jonathan Coulton’s new version of the theme song; fresh music moments in the upcoming experiments; and beating South Park to the Canada-roasting punch by one year with their “eh”-plus anthem back in the ’90s.
Congrats on blowing past that Kickstarter goal. That must have been insanely gratifying.
Kevin Murphy: It was a big vote of confidence for what we’re doing, and it was very encouraging. It inspired us to have as much fun with this as we could.
Mike, you’ve written a lot of songs for the show’s host segments. How does that happen? Does someone say, “A song would be nice in this sketch?” Are you like, “oh, I have this girl group parody that makes sense for a werewolf episode”?
Michael J. Nelson: When I was doing the music, my keyboard and I were in a closet. It was the phone closet — the phone, not foam closet — where the switching would happen for the phones. It was just like, “Hey, that’s big enough for you.” So my keyboard was in a closet on the side of the stage, and people would just go, “Hey, we need a song.” And look, I’m not Neil Diamond, guys.Bill Corbett: Come on. You’re forever in blue jeans.
Nelson: I would sit at a keyboard, and people would be like, “Hey, we need a song about this.” I’d be in the writing room, but I would go into this closet, and people would open the closet door and go, “How’s it going with that song?”
Corbett: And you would be in there, nude.
Mike: Why were my pants constantly off? I don’t know. Weird. No, it was just funny. It wasn’t like this, but it felt like someone would yell in, “Hey, song boy!” But anyway, that’s where I wrote it. It was a 3 x 3 closet.
How much time does it take you playing around on a keyboard to come up with something?
Nelson: Well, it’s like the old cliché: “What is your motivation?” Like, my paycheck. I have to do that today; I have to get this done. We’re gonna do the read-through at three or whatever, so it has to be done by now. So I have to present this song to the people, and then they would all crowd around my little closet, and I would play the little song. And literally that happened many, many times.
Murphy: Oh, yeah.
And thunderous applause after that?
Nelson: Dead silence, mostly. But I don’t care. It’s like, “Look, we got to put it up tomorrow. What are you going to do? You’re going to write a different song?”
How do you decide who writes the lyrics? Bill, when you wrote the lyrics for “The Canada Song,” was it like, “I’ve got some grievances about Canada to get off my chest”?
Corbett: Well, when we would do the ideas for sketches on our classic whiteboard — actually, we had a corkboard then, with index cards — some of them were just like, “maybe we should do a thing where we unreasonably — unreasonably — hate Canada, and then Servo comes on to defend it.” So that could have been a sketch, but it just felt like it would be funnier as a song. I don’t even remember enough to know how we decided that. But I knew that if I wrote something that was kind of anthemic like that, then I’d say, “Mike, this needs to be kind of like an anthem, kind of jaunty.”
Murphy: [Starts humming jaunty tune.]
Corbett: He’s just a master of going between genres. And luckily, it didn’t need to be Sondheim-sophisticated in terms of music — although Mike often delivered that too, and so did Kevin. That’s the process as I remember it. We have a funny idea first, and then maybe sometimes there’s something in the movie that just says “song” right away to somebody, and they come in: I really want to write a song about Patrick Swayze at Christmas. But mostly comedy first, and then, “Hey, we haven’t done a song in a while. Let’s try that. Do we have the time? Do we have the resources? Would it make a good song?” But I’m glad we did it. It’s some of my favorite stuff to sing and write and watch.
So many of them are fan favorites. I don’t know how much you can tease, but can we expect some host musical moments in these upcoming episodes?
Murphy: Oh yeah, definitely.
How did you approach those? Was there pressure to deliver?
Corbett: There’s really no pressure, because it’s all us. I think we have an instinct for mixing it up a little. If we have some wordy sketches or some prop-heavy sketches, maybe we do a song for the next one — and maybe we combine prop-heavy and song, which is one of the songs we did. It’s just an instinct to entertain and be amusing. Vaudeville, my young friend!
Murphy: I was going to say, it’s sort of Tin Pan Alley. But the movie inspires the song quite often. Watching the movie, we used to do it writing-room style, and suddenly you’d see this scene and you’d say, “I feel a song coming on.” I mean, just that corny. And you say, “What they’re talking about right now would be the subject for a great song.”
I did want to ask you specifically, Kevin — first off, you have a great voice.
Murphy: Thank you.
Corbett: Like an angel! Like a freakin’ angel!
A lot of the moments when Servo starts singing feel organic, like the spirit of song seized you. Is that really what it was like in the writers’ room? You’re watching and you start singing along?
Murphy: Sometimes, I can’t recall how many times, there’s some corny little ditty going on in the movie, and we just start singing to it, because the ditty is caught in your ear, and you just reflexively start singing to it.
Nelson: I will say, a little preview here: there’s at least one movie in our four [episodes] where that is very much the impetus for the song. I’ll add one thing. Once — this is back in the ’90s — we went to the movie studios and we’re like, “Hey, all these puppets, how about we sing a lot?” And they’re like, “We do not like singing or songs at all. We just tested a movie — we hate music.” And it’s like, “Oh, we kind of thought that the script would be filled with songs.”
Murphy: Yep. Our pitch was all singing, all dancing.
Nelson: Yeah, we’re like, “hey, we sing, we dance, we’re puppets. We’re kind of like the Muppets, and we sing.” And they’re like, “We hate you. Get the hell out of our office.” I’ll never forget that moment where they were all like, “Get the hell out of here.”
Murphy: It was like we had introduced cancer into the room.
Nelson: “You sons of bitches.” There was like guns pulled on us. [Laughs]
There could have been a different world where the [Mystery Science Theater] movie had songs in it?
Nelson: I think that was the original script, yeah.
Murphy: What happened was, James L. Brooks had come out with a movie, a musical, and it sucked so bad they took all the music out of the movie, and it still was a disaster.
Corbett: Was it the Nick Nolte one?
Murphy: Yes! [I’ll Do Anything.]
Nelson: Well, there was also — they were not fond of an Adam Sandler movie that had music in it.
Corbett: That’s the real story. [Studios are] chasing the last trend or fearing the last flop. Because the South Park movie came out and those [guys] love doing music, and the whole story changed there.
Murphy: Bobby Lopez [of Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon] did tell me he grew up watching Mystery Science Theater. It’s not like we inspired his career, but he always liked the dumb songs we did.
When you’re making new lyrics for existing music, do you ever get permission from publishers or whoever owns the rights, or does it all just come with the film?
Corbett: That’s considered fair use. I know “Weird Al” [Yankovic] has played with that for years. He — because he’s a gentleman and the best person in the world — does ask everybody. He informs the artist that he’s thinking about doing it, and mostly it’s an honor. People say, “By all means,” because it’s not even a parody of the song, usually. It’s just, “I’m going to use your musical structure and write about bugs or something.” But I don’t think, if it came to it, somebody could say, “No, you cannot use that.” It’s very much a fair-use thing.
Murphy: Yep, it’s parody.
Nelson: Yeah, I think for us it comes from — if we buy the rights to the movie, which we always make sure we clear the rights from the movie, then the song comes with it. I think it all releases at once, as I understand it. So if the song is available, we do it. And I do think it’s fair use, especially since we often hum like three seconds of a tune or whatever.
Corbett: It’s not that common — unless I’m totally misremembering — for us to take a song that’s in a movie and just put new lyrics to it. We do it in the style of, or a variation on it, but we don’t really Weird Al it out as a rule.
There’s a song called “Do the Jellyfish” in the 1966 film Sting of Death, which is one of the films you feature in The RiffTrax Experiments. Apparently Neil Sedaka wrote it, which is bizarre. It reminds me that one of Burt Bacharach’s first songs was “The Blob” for the old Blob movie.
Murphy: That’s right.
When you’re watching these B-movies and a cheesy song comes up, you must think, “What a gift.”
Corbett: It definitely was for the Neil Sedaka song. For people our age, he’s actually known more for his revival in the ’70s and ’80s, when he came back onto the charts with the Captain & Tennille and Elton John and all that. But he had a whole life when we were little toddlers, or even not born yet, when he was writing songs as a teenager and occasionally having a little hit. [“Do the Jellyfish”] wasn’t a hit. It was early, early Neil Sedaka. So it did feel like, in this silly jellyfish movie where we don’t know any of the actors — Neil Sedaka is there.
Do you have any favorite weird in-movie music moments? Like the guy singing in Eegah or whatever.
Nelson: I will have to say this, and I do apologize — there were a couple of times where we didn’t recognize that Elmer Bernstein did scores [for B-movies on the show] because he was blacklisted [from scoring mainstream movies]. So he did the score for like Robot Monster — we’re like, “Who’s this piece of crap?” To be fair to us, it was like 1989 or whatever, so we didn’t know. But I’m just saying, I do kind of regret it. Then I grew and I knew that he’s a great, great guy.
Corbett: And when you listen to it now — because we did Robot Monster again for RiffTrax — it’s like, wow, there is real sophistication and an attempt there to make something out of this absolutely silly movie.
Murphy: Orchestral music, with a theremin involved too. That’s pretty cool. Conversely, there are things like — I always remember Daddy-O. We just lifted a song from Daddy-O, because Dick Contino was actually famous around here. He used to play at Mancini’s nightclub in St. Paul [Minnesota]. You could go down and see him. We were still doing Mystery Science Theater, and you could go see Dick Contino at Mancini’s playing accordion with a band.
Corbett: Full entertainment spectrum there.
Murphy: So here you have Dick Contino, and he’s a young stud, and he’s wearing his pants up to his nipples. So the song came out of hearing him sing, and then we’re saying, you know, his pants are really high — and it just becomes a song called “Hike My Pants Up.”
Corbett: You asked about in-movie music that we kind of liked. For some reason there was music in The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. I found a lot of that music — a lot of it was just go-go dancing music or chorus music — compelling in its weird way. I always love when there’s a nice musical bed for us to just supply lyrics to. I remember enjoying that a lot in that movie. There was one where we couldn’t hear anything except “get your Schick out of shape,” and we went into a big extended riff about different razor blade types after the movie. It was such a great setup for us, but I remember enjoying it as it was, too.
Murphy: We made a whole mini-musical out of the music from Fugitive Alien, the Japanese movie, with its very dramatic, heroic score. The lyrics just started coming to us as we’re sitting there singing the incidental music — people start singing a dumb song along with the incidental music while we’re writing the movie. That was always very inspiring.
“He Tried to Kill Me With a Forklift,” yes. Did you ever get upset feedback? For instance, Mike, when you parodied Adam Duritz of Counting Crows, did you get a strongly worded letter from his people?
Nelson: I didn’t. Although one time I was kind of upset. I don’t think I’m talking out of school when I say this, because Crist Ballas just did our makeup for the new thing — he’s a wonderful guy. We did a parody of that [“Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”] song [in 1994] and he did the makeup for the Crash Test Dummies, and he [told them], “Oh, those [MST3K] guys just did a parody of you. They hate you.” And so he came back to me and was like, “Yeah, so I just told them that.” I was like, “What? We don’t hate them!” He was like, “He seemed pretty upset.” I’m like, “Why did you” — anyway, just because you do a parody of someone doesn’t mean you hate them. But that was kind of funny.
Murphy: I will point out that when you did that, you’re pretending to be the lead singer, and Crow and Servo were writhing in pain because of the way you’re singing. So it is a little bit of a judgment — it is a little bit of a dick-slap, you know. Just a little bit.
Nelson: Maybe. I could see that.
Corbett: Bridget [Jones Nelson] did Lisa Loeb, too. I didn’t get any hate mail that I know of. But I do know that my mom had a Canadian friend at the time — a nice lady. She was a doctor who split her time between the U.S. and Canada. My mom showed it to her because they thought it was funny — they were proud, I guess, in their own way. And her friend was a really nice lady but had no sense of humor. And she’s like, “I don’t think that’s fair to Canada.” But that’s the worst I got from that. What did bother me, though, is later on people were reversing the order — saying, “’Blame Canada,’ that’s why you wrote that Canada song.” Like, no, no, we were there first. I want to say I was the first anti-Canada songwriter.
A year before South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Trailblazing.
Corbett: But the ’90s are a blur to everyone, including me.
The new experiments have the original theme song reimagined with some new lyrics, and Jonathan Coulton’s performing it. I know he worked with you on RiffTrax. Was it a simple matter of, “Hey, you want to redo the Mystery Science Theater theme?”
Corbett: Yeah. We know him pretty well, and we’ve been on his cruises a couple of times, and he’s a fan. That’s how we got to know him to begin with, and he quickly became his own gigantic Jonathan Coulton enterprise. [Laughs] With boat! But he was happy to do it. He had to get through a busy period. He said, “I will lay aside these couple of weeks, and I’ll do it.” And I just retooled the lyrics slightly for him. He asked for parameters, and he’s such a great musician, because he knew just what to ask — “like, how much do you want to preserve? Do you want the same vibe? Do you want a totally original take? My inclination is to not be too precious with it but also respect the basic beats and the classic things, like the twang.” So it was a fun conversation. And he also does the ending theme — I don’t think we want to go into it too much, but he does a whole take on that, and it’s really cool.
Murphy: It’s really beautiful.
Corbett: We let him run with that one more.
Murphy: He just has this profound pop music sensibility. His music is so terribly catchy. So him doing our song, when Bill suggested it, I thought, “Yeah, that’s an absolutely perfect fit.”
Courtesy RiffTraxWhen you got the final product — you listened to his song along with the reshot opener — what was it like watching that, 25 years after saying goodbye to the show?
Corbett: It was really thrilling. Because I always thought our theme song was pretty good, and it set the table nicely. Kudos to Charlie Erickson for finding that great, simple but silly tune back in the day. But it was a really good fit with Jonathan, because he knows how to take one of those things and not really fancy it up at all, but just dive into it and have fun with it. It was the moment where I felt like, “OK, we are well and truly back here.” And I texted Jonathan and said, “We just played your theme song, and everybody was kind of jumping for joy. So, well done.” We did that instead of paying him.
[Laughs] Applause instead of payment.
Corbett: [Joking.] Right — for exposure.
We’ve mentioned Weird Al. Beyond him, do you have any favorite song parody singers? Or even people who aren’t comic musicians but who have informed your tastes.
Murphy: Well, I know for Mike and me, Loudon Wainwright, especially mid-career — he was so good at what he did, and so good at articulating his misery and what a despicable human being he was at the same time. Self-admittedly, he thought he’d write about what an awful person he is, and he did it so well and so adroitly. It’s inspiring to see how he did what he did with a folk sort of tradition behind him. He’s one of mine. John Prine, another one for me — I just love the way he does what he does. And of late, again, Bobby Lopez. It’s uncanny how good those guys are, that team. Just fun to listen to, and I love to see what they come up with next.
Nelson: For me, I would say — I grew up kind of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and then all of a sudden, “Oh wow, Marshall Crenshaw, I like that.” I like Loudon Wainwright’s stuff. I still like Mozart. I just go, “Come on? Are you kidding me? This was hundreds of years ago, and he wrote this — this is bizarre.” And Beethoven too. I just go, you cannot — the start of Beethoven and the end of Beethoven, that can’t be possible. He is a Martian. He is someone from another world.
Corbett: Just in terms of not necessarily parody music, but music with wit at least, I think Coulton is actually underrated if anything.
Murphy: Yeah, absolutely.
Corbett: I mean, he’s very content with where he is, because he started out as the geek troubadour guy, but he really writes a good hook. And he’s very, very funny. He writes sophisticated music, which is hard to do. You recognize it when you’re in the middle of it. It’s like, “Oh wow, he just changed tempo there and did something so great.” I would say also Richard Thompson — Richard and Linda Thompson. They have a lot of serious stuff, and Richard is a guitar virtuoso, but when he’s funny, he is so darkly funny. It’s kind of unbelievable. And I think he and Loudon are buddies, aren’t they? I think you guys introduced me to Loudon Wainwright, and he’s phenomenal too. He’s a scary person, but… [laughs]
Murphy: Lyrically, for me, Tom Lehrer was always an inspiration. I grew up listening to Tom Lehrer.
Corbett: Oh hell yes.
Murphy: Everyone in my family plays instruments, and we would hang out and sing songs by guys like Tom Lehrer. And Steve Goodman is another one — just loved the guy. He could write a great song, a very funny song, and was really good with lyrics.
Corbett: When I was a kid, I just thought Allan Sherman was the funniest thing in the world.
Murphy: Oh, it’s great stuff. And he did it with an orchestra.
One of the bestselling comedy albums of all time.
Murphy: My Son, the Folk Singer, yes, it was.
A final, nonmusical question: Will there be any sense of continuity between where the characters left off at the end of the Sci-Fi Channel run with these new episodes?
Murphy: Rest easy, my friend.
Nelson: We were very conscious of, “OK, where were we, where are we now?” I think very much so.
Corbett: All the while determining not to get too mired in lore, because it is a puppet show and proudly proclaims that it’s not going to be taken seriously in the song. So we nod to it, we keep it moving, and it’s sort of like a parallel universe from the stuff that the other guys did a couple of years ago. So we’re not trying to knit all that together. We couldn’t do that and be funny, I don’t think, or satisfy anybody. So — slight continuity from where we left off, and then we’re off to the races.
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