Hello and welcome to another 80s all over patron episode. My name is Scott Weinberg. I am the co-host co-creator and Coatway I had nothing funny there. Sorry. I lost there. Yeah, I know I thought I had something funny to add on the third But I had nothing. I would like to as always introduce my co-host the illustrious Droomik Weenie. Thank. I had not been called illustrious until today,

and I feel very, very good about it. illustrious means you're shiny and silver, right? Exactly. Exactly. And I've been working on that. So thank you, man. I am so excited because I spent a good chunk of the 90s watching this gentleman's work. You and I were medley in love with Mr. Rescience Theater. Thanks in large part to Mr. Kevin Murphy.

Gentlemen, how did that get started? How did you madman get together and create a beloved icon that people just love to this day? I know I do. I think the broadest answer to that is that the bunch of us lived in a town with not a lot of attention drawn to it as far as TV goes. We worked at a very low rated TV station. We had a thriving comedy community in Minneapolis at the time. And all those things connected. And Joel Hodgson got hooked up with Jim Malin and I and Trace Bullew and Josh Weinstein. And there was no reason why we couldn't do a TV show. That nobody was watching our station and we did it. And this is the thing a lot, just a little side story. We put an answering machine on from the first episode. Say, you guys, if you're actually watching the show, why don't you leave us a message? Well, it was after the second show, we came back after it had aired, and the answering machine at the station was full. So we knew something was going on. The first way I heard about you guys in 1990 when I moved to LA, and I ended up living with this couple who was in town, they moved from Minneapolis. And so he had that hometown pride about mystery science eater and was telling me about it before it got picked up nationally and before it sort of had broken. And it was that that feeling of this is this local thing. I swear to God, it's the greatest thing of all time. And then when I actually saw it, he was right. It was that, oh, yes, it exactly what he described to me. And I feel like because you guys started locally and because you were sort of under the radar, you were able to grow this thing organically and find your, and there was not the pressure at the beginning for it to perform a certain way, you get to figure it out. Oh, absolutely. We have very high expectations of failure. And yeah, we were able to just simply lab test the thing, however we wanted to. And I mean, Joel had already had a history with HBO and had, you know, he'd been, it's had it in it live and he'd been in a data letterman and then he came back home because I think it was all a bit too much for him. So he had a taste of that. And so none of us really had the hunger to do that again at that time. We just wanted to do something that was fun and sort of like fuck around, because we worked at, like I said, the lowest rate of UHF station in the city. And I had come up there in order to do subversive television. And this seemed like the perfect model for subversive television. It was like an old hosted movie show where the hosts actually take

over everything. What was the process of acquiring the rights? Was it actually like tracking down like a 90 year old producer and going, Hey, you have the rights to this film we'd like to use it and here's a couple bucks. What was the whole, how did that work? We didn't, we didn't care. I mean, the TV station had all these films in our library and we just rated the library. We didn't see if we had any rights or not.

And that's one of the reasons why none of those episodes from KTMA have ever seen the light of day again. But as you went on and you had to get the rights from your own production company, was that a tough process? That was when we were at Comedy Central, which was part of HBO Comedy channel way back when. And that was when having their lawyer and their agents helping us out there because they had to clear the rights. We didn't have to care about that. They just, we said, just start sending us every shitty film that you can get your hands on. And we started getting boxes and boxes. Oh, so it was more of like, here is a large stack of what you have that we can give to you for the show.

We had a wish list which came out of the library, the KTMA head, which was a pretty crappy film library. You know, the thing at the time is that a local TV station, you know, could only afford so much programming and they buy it from these distributors that just kind of gave it to you as like a happy meal. If you take this, you also have to take this. and so we took all the movies that they really didn't want to screen very much

and said well this is going to be great you know it's a David T was like a happy meal. If you take this, you also have to take this. And so we took all the movies that they really didn't want

to screen very much and said, well, this is gonna be great. You know, it's an all-star airplane disaster film, SST Death Flight, which is still one of my favorites, and I'd love to revisit that sometime. But did you ever get a situation where a producer or someone said, hey, hey, hey, This film was licensed to be screened on UHF channels, not chopped up and made fun of.

And that one we're going to our KTMA when we got to the network. I don't know how we did this, but we did all these films that were distributed by Sandy Frank. You know, Sandy Frank? Oh, yes. So, Sandy Frank is, he is, you could dedicate an entire podcast to Sandy Frank. He is a piece of to work. think when he realized what we were exactly doing, he went into lawsuit mode. And that's why now when a shot factory releases all the videos from Mystery Science Theater, you don't see a single Sandy Frank film in that collection. I know there are some people, and this is a real fracture. There are some people who look at Mystery Science Theater and they think what you guys are doing is you're mocking the movies and you're just tearing them apart. I've always looked at it as you're taking one piece of art and you're turning it into another piece of art. And maybe that first piece of art is of questionable merit, but you are doing something with it that is given at a second life. I honestly believe nobody would even remember Manos exists if you guys hadn't done the thing. And now Manos has this life and has been restored. And the real film is still out there. You guys didn't ruin it. I think if anything, you spotlight it. No, it's true. We've never broken a film. You can always go back and watch the original film and it's original form. And the film is not damaged for our doing what we have done to it. Except maybe in your own perception of it.

So that's the whole thing we had to it.

There's this wonderful,

and I don't remember what the podcast is, but Jonah Ray, who I love, did a podcast with Joe Dante. Who long ago, he originally said, yeah, I like what these guys do. It's kind of great. It looks kind of fun. does make it fun of all these movies.

Then we made fun of a movie he loved,

which was new group, which was directed by Frank Capred Jr.

Sure.

And from then on, he was just like, I hate these guys. I hope they all die. I can't say. But he, you know, I cast with Jonah and Jonah really what you just articulated is exactly what Jonah articulated to you. It's like the, we're like the Aristophanies of this. We are pointing out the fun flaws in these things and we're having fun with it. We constantly had debate over what we might want to include in a script, whether it was just being too cruel either to the person who was playing the role, make fun of the role, don't make fun of the person, was generally our rule. It always felt like you guys had fun with tropes, you had fun with. It wasn't punching down. We didn't use that phrase back then, but it never felt like you guys were punching down to movies. What's going to be funnier is what it always came down to, and that was the great thing about being in a room full of stand up comedians and comedy writers is go for what's funny not for what's easy. You know, in any sort of TV show, I think that's always a huge tension. My very favorite moments are when you guys would create a full counter narrative and their narrative and your narrative would start to feed off of each other in ways that it would just make me howl. Like there was another movie that had somehow created around this original film. And I think those are the moments where it really sings. And one of the host segments or one of the episodes with host segments that I've always held dear is when you guys did the incredible melting man and that entire episode feels like you venting about universal and about making a feature film. and it's the funniest host segment stuff, even if you don't know any of that. And if you do, it's exponentially weirder and crazier. That's true. The times that we get really angry at a film is when you could tell that the filmmakers just simply didn't care. Yeah. And then we lay into the way. I had no problem with that. You know, like I have a real affection for the James Wendt films You know for Bird Dome. Yeah, he had such high expectations and I hopes and his model for making films is Alfred Hitchcock for Christ's sake I'm a film critic for 20 years and I learned a lot watching your show when I was 19 this line right here ready That's right shoot it all That's why I'm like, yeah, why wouldn't you cut here? Why would you can't across the lake for 80 seconds? That's one of our favorites. You know, somebody has, somebody has flopped the line. I can we go back? No, keep rolling. Listen to both you and Joe Bob. Joe Bob was another example of that where you can just take Joe Bob Briggs's early driving work as comedy. But I think he's a sharp film critic and I think I learned a lot from his attitude towards film and same thing with you guys. I love Joe Bob. I think he is actually a very perceptive consumer of of the kind of movies he consumes. If our listeners out there are duped by his good old boy routine,

Joe Bob Briggs would make a brilliant film professor in any college.

He's absolutely, he's like, he's like, well, Rogers in that respect. What's there, were there ever any films in that early stages in the 90s, where you're like, oh, we would love to do something from the 80s, but it's just we're not gonna we can't we don't have the right to it we wouldn't be able to get them anyway

when rift tracks came along it was ended up being sort of a magical thing because we'd always wanted

to be able to get them anyway. When RiftTracks came along,

it was ended up being sort of a magical thing because we had always wanted to be able to do studio films. It was just impossible for us to do because with very few exceptions, we couldn't afford the rights to do those films because most of the people who were in the films were still alive. And so studios wouldn't allow us to do that. So when we came up with the way of doing an MP3

essentially a commentary track,

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