Things have been far too quiet on the MST3K front lately. It has been over a year since Mystery Science Theater 3000 season 12 hit Netflix, and since then, we’ve heard nary a peep about production on new episodes. Sure, series creator Joel Hodgson has been busy with the live tour and various other efforts, but you would think that after a year, and with Thanksgiving looming (an all important date on the MST3K calendar) Netflix would get the ball rolling again. You would be wrong. It’s time to find another home for the Satellite of Love.
Hodgson sends out regular email updates to an MST3K mailing list, and today’s email blast brought the news fans have dreaded. Mystery Science Theater 3000 season 13 isn’t happening. At least not on Netflix.
“As some of you might have guessed, we won’t be making new seasons of the show for Netflix,” Hodgson wrote. “However, I want you to know that we’ve had a wonderful time working with the Netflix team, and will always be grateful to them. After all, they gave us the opportunity to spend the past few years aboard the Satellite of Love, and made it possible for new generations to discover the joys of riffing cheesy movies with your friends.”
This is sad news, but not unexpected, since rumors had been flying that another deal was not forthcoming from Netflix for months.
Hopefully they’ll be able to land on their feet and find another channel or service willing to continue the show. (Disney? It’s pretty family friendly and relatively inoffensive…)
Before the Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV show came the original TV movie The Night Stalker, which first introduced dogged yet deeply-irritating reporter Carl Kolchak, brilliantly and unforgettably played by Darrin McGavin. Our grizzled, disheveled hero starts listening to his own notes on a tape recorder, about a very strange murder case. We see a Vegas girl get killed by an incredibly powerful man, then cut to an autopsy performed by a pre-M*A*S*H Larry Linville (who would go on to play a Police Captain of The Week Who’s Annoyed With Kolchak’s Shenanigans in the TV series), who discovers that a body has been completely drained of blood. So three minutes in, any viewer is going to figure a vampire is stalking Las Vegas. (And it was obviously filmed in Vegas; everyone looks believably hot and sweaty.) It takes the Vegas police a whole lot longer to figure things out.
Enter our intrepid seersucker-clad hero.
Kolchak is pretty much fully formed the moment he walks into the news office, a smart, cynical, sarcastic reporter with authority issues. You quickly see how he would get on just about anyone’s nerves. (Later he recites all the cities he’s been fired from newspapers in. “Wasn’t it twice in Boston?” his much too young and pretty girlfriend (played by the recently deceased Carol Lynley) asks, to which he holds up three fingers.) He doesn’t think much of being assigned the first murder, but when a second one shows up, also drained of blood, with no tracks leading to her final sandy resting place, he realizes something is up, and tenaciously goes digging into the story, despite staunch opposition from both the police chief (Claude Aikens) and his own editor Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland, in a role he’d reprise in The Night Strangler sequel and the TV show).
The plot moves along at a quick pace, police procedural fashion, as it quickly becomes apparent to Kolchak that an actual vampire is killing young women in Las Vegas. The “vampire police procedural” has been done plenty of times since, but this was pretty much the first media instance (though Leslie H. Whitten’s novel The Progeny of the Adder preceded by seven years), and even today, despite the obvious budgetary constraints of a TV movie, it has a compelling intensity to it that later examples have never duplicated.
But McGavin’s Kolchak is what holds the entire thing together. He was a great, underrated actor, and in the scene where the police finally break down and promise to follow his lead and give him the exclusive, he’s so wonderfully, unbearably smug that you know exactly why he keeps getting fired. The movie has a panoply of solid TV character actors, tight direction, and plenty of tension when (inevitably) Kolchak tracks the vampire back to his lair…
There are a few extras on the Blu-Ray, including with producer Dan Curtis and director John Llewellyn Moxey, who said it was much easier to get a TV movie made in the early 70s. You had an idea (comedy, drama, horror, whatever), and if someone at the network liked it, you got a greenlight to do it. He said that now there are too many people involved in the process to get anything approved anymore. Wikipedia says that it was made for $450,000 and earned “a 33.2 rating and 48 share,” which is absolutely unheard of for a TV movie in today’s media landscape.
You may never have heard of Thurl Ravenscroft, but you’re almost certainly heard him many, many times in your life. He was Tony the Tiger, the voice behind “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” and about a hundred Disney characters.
Since the Joel era already did Cave Dwellers, does that make ATOR the first movie they’re riffed twice? Edited to add: People on Facebook are telling me that Cave Dwellers is actually the second Ator movie, not the first.
Jonah should go on Conan, promise to show a clip from them riffing Atlantic Rim…and then it be a clip of them riffing the wheelchair falling scene from Mac and Me…
Only theme here is that these are the last books I bought at Armadillocon:
Adams, Scott. Fugitive From the Cubicle Police: A Dilbert Book. Andrews & McMeel, 1996. First edition? (no additional printings listed) trade paperback original, a Fine- copy with touches of edgewear. Cartoon collection. Bought for $2.50.
Beatts, Anne and John Head. Saturday Night Live: Host, Francisco Franco. Avon, 1977. First edition trade paperback original, a Near Fine+ copy with wear at point. Collages sort of mock scrapbook with pictures, scripts, jokes, etc. from the first few seasons of Saturday Night Live (you know, back when it was funny). The price sticker on the cover is actually part of the design. Bought for $2.50.
Dozois, Gardner, editor. The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty Fifth Annual Collection. St. Martin’s, 2018. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. The last Dozois annual, alas. Obtained for trade credit.
Here’s a nice book that may have two different fandoms scrambling to grab a copy:
Gaiman, Neil. Doctor Who: Nothing O’Clock. Borderlands Press/Gauntlet, 2018. First edition hardback, #109 of 500 signed, numbered copies, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket, still in publisher’s shrinkwrap. Bought from the publishers at the usual dealer discount.
Please note that I’ll have copies of this for sale in the next Lame Excuse Books catalog (currently in preparation).
Comedian, actor and director Jerry Lewis has died at age 91.
It’s hard to evaluate the work of someone who absolutely dominated their field for an extended period of time and then almost immediately went out of fashion. Lewis was far and away the most successful comic actor of mid-century America, appearing in an extremely successful series of movies with Dean Martin, then having a successful solo career as both a actor and director.
But after The Nutty Professor, it was a long, long slide. Between 1963 and 1980, you had Rowen & Martins Laugh-In, Lenny Bruce, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Richard Pryor, Saturday Night Live and Robin Williams, yet in Hardly Working (intended as a “comeback” film), Lewis was doing the same tried physical shtick. (Roger Ebert called it “one of the worst movies ever to achieve commercial release in this country.”) In between he directed the amazingly ill-conceived and incomplete The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown (Lewis) entertaining children on the way to the gas chamber in Auschwitz. Surviving footage suggests it is every bit as awful and cringe-worthy as you’d imagine.
In the meantime, he taught an acclaimed directing class at USC attended by (among others) George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and was a familiar face for decades of television viewers for his Muscular Dystrophy Labor Day Telethon. And he turned in the occasional fine dramatic performance, such as in The King of Comedy.
For someone who smoked as much as he did, had as many health issues, and battled prescription drug abuse, 91 is a very rip old age indeed.
Here’s a very early footage of Lewis and Martin from what I think may be the very first MDA telethon:
Here he is making his appearance as nutty professor alter ego Buddy Love:
