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How Were Joel’s Shows?An open thread for reports from Joel’s Minneapolis and South Dakota stops this weekend on his “How to Have a Job Like Mine” tour.
4 Replies to “How Were Joel’s Shows?”Commenting at Satellite News
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The show in MSP was awesome. I had never had the chance to meet any of the Brains before and Joel’s presentation was hilarious and, well…hilarious. Trace also showed up and helped Joel answer questions from the audience. It was great hearing about his early influences, especially those from local Wisconsin TV stations. I never made the connection between “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” and MST3k until last night.
The episode he showed was “I Accuse My Parents,” and I had the honor of being able to watch a part of it with Joel standing ten feet away from me. The DVD started having issues during the last host segment and Joel remarked that he would have filled in the lines, but he’d forgotten them all by now. But it was a very entertaining night despite the DVD issues.
Joel also gave a shout out to Jim Mallon asking for us all to give him a pat on the back if we ever see him. So, if you do see Jim, do that, won’t you?
I took my girlfriend to Joel Hodgson’s Minneapolis show. Our first treat was that we ended up sitting down right in front of Trace Beaulieu. My girlfriend kept asking if he was who she thought he was. After getting tired of me teasing her she finally asked “Excuse me. Could I ask you your name.” He said “Trace.” She said “That’s what I thought!” And he smirked and replied “Oh. Then why did you ask?” He was nice enough to sign an autograph and pose for a couple pictures.
The show took the form of a keynote speech. Joel showed all kinds of things from his old scrapbooks. From pictures of TV shows and magic catalogues that inspired him to a high school yearbook photo of him levitating a ball to a clip of a very young Joel Hodgson appearing on a comedy special hosted by John Candy.
The main theme of the presentation was the concept of “re-purposing”. There were all kinds of ideas that he kept handy and later found uses for in his entertainment career such as “kit-mashing”(the art of taking pieces from different modeling kits and combining them). The use of old toys and other junk became vital to his prop comedy act and later to Mystery Science Theater 3000. In that show he “re-purposed” quite a bit of toys and junk and also “re-purposed” the movies they used. The same can be said of all kinds of names and concepts that he ended up adapting to the show. There were some great pieces of trivia as Joel was sometimes very specific about things that helped inspire Mystery Science Theater 3000. Most of them were things I’d heard or read before, but there were some enlightening moments even for a big fan like me.(The “3000” does not refer to a year. It’s supposed to be a serial number as in 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000.) So basically, the big point was that Joel had gone to great lengths to take note of ideas that piqued his imagination and was able to use more than a few of those concepts to create things completely different than the source material.
There were a few pauses for Q&A from the audience. In one of them Trace joined in. Most of the questions were either about things that Joel isn’t really involved with like the Shout Factory DVDs or questions that have been answered many times before.(There were two separate times where audience members asked Joel if people involved with the movies that were riffed on MST3K got upset.) The only question that really figured into the creative process Joel was talking about was when an audience member asked about how the characters evolved. Trace took that question and explained that the characters were pretty vague, but the writers and performers really got to know them better and better over time.(He made a cute joke about Crow having a much more successful screenwriting career than him.) He really stressed that the amount of creative freedom that they got with MST3K was vital to the way the show worked and that over time he’s come to appreciate how rare it is to be able to write a show without a bunch of editors blocking any ideas they didn’t like.
The “Secret” Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode was “I Accuse My Parents”. Joel and Trace said that while some episodes like “Manos: Hands of Fate” were more famous, they’d chosen an episode that they found a lot less painful to watch. It was a lot of fun seeing an episode in a nearly sold out theater. Everyone really seemed to enjoy the running gags such as “Did I mention I won the essay contest?”, “Did I tell you it’s my birthday?”, and “LIAR, LIAR, LIAR!”. Although we got through the movie portion, the closing host segment ended up being the victim of a skipping DVD.(We didn’t make it to the classic line “I accuse YOU Joel!”) Joel made a joke about being happy we made it through the important part of the episode.
Afterwards, Joel sat down at a table and signed autographs. An assistant next to him was selling copies of his high school yearbook photo, a flyer he sent around to promote his early magic act, and a promotional poster for the “How To Have a Job Like Mine” show. Unfortunately, they didn’t take credit card. But my girlfriend and I did have him sign a glossy we’d printed out of the Mitchell DVD cover.
So it was a very fun evening. It was more of a presentation than a show, but it featured a very candid look into Joel Hodgson’s creative process. And for anyone who doesn’t read every single interview he gives, he shared some really great explanations of where he got most of the character names and ideas he used on MST3K complete with visual aids.(It really tickled me when he showed a piece of artwork picture for the Elton John song “I’ve Seen That Movie Too” with the silhouettes of a couple cuddling front of a movie screen.) I got autographs and some good photos. And afterwards, my girlfriend and I went home and skipped to the final host segment of “I Accuse My Parents” so we could pick up where the DVD left us hanging!
The best part of the whole show was Joel saying, “So it’s come to this, I’m riffing on my own life now.”
I told Joel that MST was one of the reasons I moved to Minnesota and he laughed. :)