Once upon a time there was a show called Mystery Science Theater 3000. It was created by a few local Minneapolis comedians and, I’d argue, remains about the best thing to have ever been exported from Minnesota. A man named Joel watched bad movies with his robot sidekicks. They made fun of the movies. They were forced to watch the bad movies by evil scientists who were monitoring his reactions to the movies.

Now, all of this took place quite a long time ago – I was in eighth grade when the show began airing on Channel 23 in Minneapolis. And there were quite a few cast changes and even network changes along the way. So let me try to briefly map all of that out, because in a couple paragraphs, it’s going to matter.

Joel Hodgson was the original host who came up with the show idea.
Jim Mallon was the executive producer of the show, and also voiced the robot named Gypsy.
Trace Beaulieu was the original voice of the robot named Crow and also played the head mad scientist.
J. Elvis Weinstein was the original voice of the robot named Tom Servo and played the assistant to the mad scientist.
Mike Nelson came onboard early as a writer.
Paul Chaplin was also a writer.
Mary Jo Pehl was another writer.

J Elvis only lasted a season or two, depending on how you count them. He was replaced by Kevin Murphy as Tom Servo. Frank Conniff came on the show as the new assistant to the evil Dr. Forrester.

A few seasons later, Joel left to move on to bigger and better things that never panned out. So too did Frank Conniff. After seven seasons on Comedy Central, the show was canceled and Trace left to go work on (shudder) America’s Funniest Home Videos. The Sci-Fi channel resurrected the show, now featuring Mary Jo as the main villain and Bill Corbett as the new voice of Crow. The show lasted an additional three seasons before closing up shop.

Last year, Mike Nelson launched Rifftrax. It began as a solo affair, but soon Kevin Murphy began appearing, and now there have been several episodes that also feature Bill Corbett. Mary Jo Pehl has also done one appearance. Rifftrax is awesome. It brings the funny back to the today’s terrible movies, and that’s part of the appeal. Where MST3K was stuck with old movies, Rifftrax offers MP3 riffs for today’s big budget bad movies.

But strange things are afoot. Joel is reuniting with J. Elvis, Trace, Frank and Mary Jo to create Cinematic Titanic, in which they will all appear as silhouettes and riff on movies – it looks right now like they’re riffing on old movies again, but I don’t know if that’s how it’s always going to go. They’ve done a live launch show at Lucasfilm, and are promising that show and others will soon be available for purchase.

Why not just use the characters from MST3K? Neither of these camps own the characters – they belong to Jim Mallon, who, along with Paul Chaplin, has relaunched MST3K.com, which features old clips from the original show, which Jim also owns, and crappy (and I mean really, really crappy) Flash animated Tom Servo and Crow cartoons where those two now voice the characters. These are so bad that users have uploaded the cartoons to Mike Nelson’s Cuts.com website that lets you take a video clip and put in audio clips of Mike, Kevin and Bill. So, in effect, you have the voices of Servo and Crow ripping animated Servo and Crow a much-deserved new one.

As for Cinematic Titanic, I have mixed thoughts. I prefer Mike to Joel, and think there’s a small bit of a pathetic air to the guys who wanted to go have big careers now crawling back to making fun of bad movies. That said, I’ll always think of Trace as being Crow. But then again, the weakest part of the early MST3K episodes was J. Elvis. I’m looking forward to watching the first episode, but am not sure how it’s going to touch some of the better Rifftrax I’ve listened to.

I’m hoping that Cinematic Titanic will simply stick to the classics, Mike Nelson and his group will stick to more recent fodder, and the MST3K website animated toons will quietly die.