Bizarrely, Though, it Comes Back: The MST3K “Pop Between Realities”, Two Years On
Seth Aaron Hershman revisits his TARDIS Eruditorum guest post in the wake of new events.
A formal announcement that Mystery Science Theater 3000 was coming back was a long time coming. Joel Hodgson had prodded at the topic in April 2014 at the end of a WIRED oral history of the program, a mere five months after my article on what was then PhilSandifer.com.
Ah, remember that article? I was so naïve then, saying things like MST3K was “some sort of bizarre mirror-world version of [Doctor Who]”.
“If MST3K hadn’t gotten canceled fifteen years ago, it’s possible we could have had 4 or 5 hosts by now, and it would be just like Doctor Who…” –Joel Hodgson
Ridiculous, right? I even had this whole section on how the show was about the ability or lack thereof to fight back against a preconceived narrative.
“The story of MST3K has been going for almost thirty years, but now – thanks to you – we’re finally getting to throw out the ending that we’ve been stuck with for fifteen years, and start writing the next big chapter.” –Joel Hodgson
I mean clearly I was just plain wrong about everything. Nineteen-year-old me was kinda dumb, wasn’t he?
In all seriousness, I’m not here to brag, I’m here because I feel like Joel repeatedly comparing the program to Doctor Who and framing its return in terms of narrative give me an interesting launchpad to expand on some of those ideas I haphazardly tossed onto someone else’s website two years ago.
Let’s quickly reexamine my claim that the period from 1999 up through now do not, in fact, constitute a sort of “Wilderness Years”. A Wilderness Years, I decided back then, requires a certain tethering to the source material in terms of intellectual properties in a way that post-MST3K material rejects. You can’t write a Doctor Who story without associated characters and such but you can write an MST3K story so long as you’re making fun of things. I’m not entirely sure how well that logic holds up, but I think ultimately what I was getting at is that MST3K‘s central conceits travel a lot better than Who‘s do by virtue of their relative simplicity.
It’s a harder argument to make now that MST3K is actually coming back. But ultimately “Wilderness” implies a sense of loss and distress that none of these spin-off projects have. RiffTrax has been more than successful with its DVDs and cinema showings. Trace Bealieu and Frank Conniff appear to be having a lot of fun with The Mads Are Back. The motley of fan projects that’ve sprung up have always been more fun things to do than a grappling at an absence. They all seem to be, as Joel might put it, “New Beginnings”.
So having rejected one sense in which MST3K might operate with Who, let’s examine what Joel does mean when he makes this comparison. It’s possible he means just in terms of the general conceit of replacing the cast and upgrading the set every few years, and his other parallel—to Saturday Night Live—seems to back this up.…
Monday’s regularly scheduled post will be up at noon EST.
It is January, 1988. Alan Moore is thirty-three, and writing the introduction to the collected edition of Watchmen. His relationship with the publisher is in tatters, a fact he alludes to only vaguely when he notes that it is “the very last work that I expect to be doing upon Watchmen for the foreseeable future.” He looks back to 1984, when the idea originated, and the giddy enthusiasm of it all. And yet there is something he cannot quite locate in this. He notes that at the start “we wanted to do a novel and unusual super-hero comic that allowed us the opportunity to try out a few new storytelling ideas along the way. What we ended up with was substantially more than that.” But he cannot pin down the transition. Instead he describes a growing realization of the story’s complexity and scale, but without a sense that the realization had an end point. Instead, “there was the mounting suspicion (at least on my part) that we might have bitten off more than we could chew, that we might not be able to resolve all these momentous strands of narrative and meaning that seemed to be springing up wherever we looked, that we might be left at the end of the day with a big, messy, steaming bowl of semiotic spaghetti.” But even when the project ended. But even now, in 1988, Moore is lost in the process, saying that it is only now, in writing the introduction, that he realizes “how dazed a state I’d spent that year in, as if I’d been slam dancing with a bunch of rhinos and the concussion was only just starting to clear up,” a claim that oddly undercuts itself; the daze clearly extending beyond the year, simultaneously located “now, twelve months after” he finished the final script and in the past, as indicated by the past tense in the concussion metaphor.
A similar temporal ambivalence exists in the previously discussed description of how his “nostalgia for the [superhero] genre cracked and shattered somewhere along the way and all the sweet old musk inside just leaked out and evaporated,” a statement in which Moore is clearly lying, albeit as much to himself as the reader, the description of the “sweet old musk” evoking precisely what he says he has lost, so that the sentence offers the very experience it exists to reject. Moore casts superheroes away, but in doing so only draws them back in, a tension implicit in the very idea of nostalgia, which is of course an intense feeling for a thing that one is not actually experiencing at the time. He is nostalgic for his nostalgia, relishing in the scent of its memory even as he pushes the genre away, grimly certain in the necessity of all his burnt bridges.…
I’m joined for this by Jon Blum, the other half of the legendary Ormanblum from whence the best Doctor Who novels emerge. We talk Sherlock, then do a nice career-spanning interview that includes the sordid tale of the fourth-best Zygon story ever filmed. It’s good stuff, and 
First off, and unrelated to comics, I guested on this week’s installment of Oi! Spaceman, where I talk Moffat and feminism, Mawdryn Undead, and Vox Day. It was great fun, and 
With The Player of Games, Banks’s series immediately becomes the legend of science fiction that it is. Simply put, it’s one of the most compelling premises in science fiction, on par with A Canticle for Leibowitz or The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: a post-scarcity utopia that conducts warfare via a board game.
Well that was odd.
In Warren Ellis’s 2013 novella Dead Pig Collector the protagonist, Mister Sun, describes his job in terms of the title phrase, explaining that in China (“a place rife with pollution and disease”) pig farmers often face large-scale deaths of pigs due to the aforementioned pollution and disease, which presents a major challenge. “A small farm – and, in places like Shanghai, they’re all small farms – cannot spend what little time they have disposing of tons of dead pigs instead of maintaining their remaining assets.” And since the penalties for selling such pigs into the market are steep, “there are people who have learned to effectively and safely dispose of swine carcasses. If you have a stack of dead pigs, and you don’t want to go to prison, then you pay for a dead pig collector.” As Mister Sun explains all of this, he is pouring bleach through a pair of holes cut into a plastic sheet laid over a bathtub in order to break down the blood within. Mr. Sun, see, is a hit man specializing in the efficient and untraceable disposal of the resulting corpse. 
A surprising Marvel-free week.