FRIDAY NIGHT MOVIE: MST3K The HUMAN DUPLICATORS George Nader Richard Kiel MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATRE 3000

 

Mystery Science Theater 3000, often abbreviated MST3K, is an American cult television comedy series created by Joel Hodgson and produced by Best Brains, Inc. The show premiered on KTMA in Minneapolis, Minnesota on November 24, 1988. It later aired on The Comedy Channel/Comedy Central for another six seasons until its cancellation in 1997. The show was then picked up by the Sci-Fi Channel and aired for another three seasons until its final cancellation in August 1999.

 

The show mainly features a man and his robot sidekicks who are imprisoned on a space station by an evil scientist and forced to watch a selection of bad movies, as part of a psychological experiment, and frequently preceded by short public-domain non-educational films. To stay sane, the man and his robots provide a running commentary on each film, making fun of its flaws, and wisecracking their way through each reel in the style of a movie-theater peanut gallery. Each film is presented with a superimposition of the man and robots' silhouettes along the bottom of the screen. The film is interspersed with skits tied into the theme of the film being watched or the episode as a whole.

Hodgson originally played the stranded man, Joel Robinson, for four and a half seasons. When Hodgson left in 1993, series head writer Michael J. Nelson replaced him as new victim Mike Nelson and continued in the role for the rest of the show's run. The robots, Crow T. Robot, Tom Servo, and Gypsy, are puppets created from a variety of household objects, manipulated and voiced by other cast members who rotated over the course of the show's run.

During its eleven years, which produced 197 episodes and one feature film, MST3K attained critical acclaim. The series won a Peabody Award in 1993, was nominated for two Emmy Awards (in the category of Outstanding Individual Achievement in Writing for a Variety or Music Program) in 1994 and 1995, and was nominated for a CableACE Award. In 2007, James Poniewozik listed Mystery Science Theater 3000 as one of Time magazine's "100 Best TV Shows of All-Time."

The Human Duplicators is an American science fiction film released in 1965 by independent company Woolner Brothers Pictures Inc.  The plot involves a giant alien named Dr. Kolos (Richard Kiel) who is dispatched to Earth from a faraway galaxy on orders to create android doppelgängers by employing the scientific services of hypnotized cyberneticist Prof. Vaughn Dornheimer (George Macready). This mission of colonization is thwarted not by the FBI agents sent to investigate but by him falling in love with the scientist's beautiful blind niece Lisa (Dolores Faith).  This film was also Hugh Beaumont's final film role before his retirement from acting.

An alien is dispatched from a faraway galaxy to take over the Earth by "duplicating" humans and creating a race of zombies resembling animated pottery in this low-budget sci-fi film.  Enjoy the opening and closing shots of the alien spacecraft resembling a Christmas tree bauble dancing in space, the faces of the "duplicated" humans shattering like a cheap vase when thrown to the floor, and the formative "duplicates" as they are cooked up in the lab in individual coffins.  The alien's heart is softened by the persevering goodness of a beautiful blind woman, deeply conflicting his motives as the film plods to its "climactic" confrontation between the humans and their counterfeit duplicates.

JOEL HODGSON (Joel Robinson)   MICHAEL J NELSON (Mike Nelson)   KEVIN MURPHY (Tom Servo; Professor Bobo)   TRACE BEAULIEU (Dr Clayton Forrester)   J ELVIS WEINSTEIN (Dr Laurence Erhardt)   FRANK CONNIFF (TV's Frank)   BILL CORBETT (Crow T Robot; Brain Guy)   MARY JO PEHL (Pearl Forrester)

COPYRIGHT 2007-2014 OH BOY! 3LAWNVIEWAGOGO / ALL RIGHTS RESERVED MR.E.

ED SPRINGSTEAD, JR.