DAVID BIANCULLI

Founder / Editor

ERIC GOULD

Associate Editor

LINDA DONOVAN

Assistant Editor

Contributors

ALEX STRACHAN

MIKE HUGHES

KIM AKASS

MONIQUE NAZARETH

ROGER CATLIN

GARY EDGERTON

TOM BRINKMOELLER

GERALD JORDAN

NOEL HOLSTON

 
 
 
 
 
MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000: THE RETURN
April 14, 2017  | By David Bianculli

Netflix, 3:00 a.m. ET

 

SERIES PREMIERE: This Netflix original series is a fully authorized remake of the 1988 low-budget cult hit, in which Joel Hodgson, then Mike Nelson, played futuristic space travelers forced by evil scientists to watch bad old movies – space travelers who maintained their sanity by heckling those films as they watched, with help from the equally vocal and sarcastic robots constructed for that very purpose: Crow, Tom Servo, and Gypsy. That often hilarious series, bounced around to several TV host locations, survived until 1999, and now, thanks to a fan-funded Kickstarter campaign, here it comes again, still overseen by original series creator Hodgson. Jonah Ray takes over the role of the main movie-watcher and inventor in this new 14-episode reboot, and Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt, lending additional genre cred, play the evil scientists. The opening bad film being shown, and ridiculed, is 1961’s Reptilicus, a film from Denmark with this English-language version made (poorly) for the American market. The new version of MST3K takes a while to find its footing, and its stride – but by the time the robots and Jonah were singing “Reptilicus 6-5000” together, I was having fun just like in the old days. And the line “Nobody mess with my invisible ice cream cone” also got me. Wait for it, in the battle scene when Reptilicus finally regenerates and shows up.

 
 
 
 
 
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