Mystery Science Theater 3000 and The African Queen come back to haunt me
A student and the event planner where I work have put together a Mystery Science Theater 3000 retrospective at MIT next Saturday, featuring creators Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu.
Superfriend Patrick and I used to watch MST3K a little obsessively and to this day quote lines from awful movies like “Manos, the Hands of Fate” to each other. So I’m a wee bit excited.
But I’m also scared, because Patrick and I once tried to film our own episode, with his family’s camcorder set up in front of their downstairs television—our only problem was that we were 13 or 14 and had no idea what old movies at the video store were actually bad enough to make fun of. We searched and searched the drama and classics aisle. Then we finally we saw it! Some stupid movie where two characters spend the entire film stuck together on a jalopy of a boat making its way down the Ulanga river. A missionary and a drunk boat captain. Something about fighting Germans.
But we couldn’t pull it off. As hard as we tried, we just stunk at making fun of movies.
Then we got to school on Monday. We told our better-informed friend Jon how we tried and failed. We told him we tried to use MST3K’s humor on some movie called “The African Queen”.
“‘The African Queen‘ ?” Jon asked. “You realize that’s pretty much a classic? Bogart? Hepburn? Like, four or five Oscar nominations?”
So, yeah, I haven’t watched that damn movie to this day, 14 years later. And Patrick and I didn’t try do replicate MST3K again.
But I’m definitely going next Saturday to see Hodgson and Beaulieu!
