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The evening at Columbia had its loopy moments. Murphy mentioned that Hodgson "has great calves" and Conniff added, "He's the 51st Sexiest Man in America." When moderator Liz Winstead (a stand-up comic and co-creator of "The Daily Show") told Joel he had a reputation for being unconventional, he replied, as if in '50s-hipster ecstasy, "I'm wild inside!" To prove that he had way too much of something inside, he announced that he was going offstage to pee. Murphy suggested that the sound technician keep Joel's body microphone on; the audience was then treated to the sound of spurting water. Murphy then walked offstage as well; when he returned, he said, "This is New York — you can do it in the street."
But most of the hour-plus evening offered an informal retelling of the show's creation and evolution. Master Builder Joel, who devised the "invention exchanges" that preceded each film in the 86 episodes he hosted before leaving in 1993, discussed his very first invention — "a cracker cracker" — which he did as a third grade project. It was a karate chop that cracked a Saltine. The teacher, he admitted, wasn't crazy about his invention. "Yeah, but I got to eat the cracker."
Hodgson and Weinstein discussed the first season on the Minneapolis UHF station KTMA. Mallon had given Hodgson the opportunity to fill a two-hour time slot, and Joel quickly proposed the format that, with surprisingly few modifications, held for the next decade. Hodgson, aided by Beaulieu as Crow T. Robot and Weinstein as Servo (they both also played the Mads), pieced the puppets together from gizmos found in a Salvation Army basement, built the satellite set and wrote the catchy theme song ("In the not too distant future..."). The young staff — Hodgson was 28, Beaulieu 29, Weinstein only 18 — didn't bother writing their riffs; mostly the three guys crouched before a wall and, watching a film for the first time, ad-libbed when ready. That often meant arid stretches of silence. As Weinstein recalled of "Untamed Youth," one early movie, "We just watched it with Mount Rushmore-like stares on our faces." The station paid them all of $2,400 for the show. (Trace earned $25.) It was fun, Joel said, "but we all had to sleep in the same room."
MSTies with the Check Spelling utility on their Apple computers know that, if the function is applied to "MST3K," it assumes the word is a typo and suggests, as a proper spelling, MISTOOK. Well, from the beginning, some people mistook MST3K for a kid's puppet show. (Which it is, in a way, but then so is "Chicken Run.") It's always been a challenge to explain the charm and sting of the show to people who haven't seen it. As Weinstein said, "It's kind of tough to pitch: "I got this thing where puppets mock movies. For two hours. " So at the end of the first season, they made a reel of their best bits and peddled it to New York. "We basically did a 40-hour pilot," Hodgson said. The channel that soon became Comedy Central picked up the show, and the Brains were off and percolating.
One bright idea was to replace Weinstein, who soon departed because of "creative differences" (or, as Hodgson explained at the time, "Let me put it this way: he's 18 years old"), with Murphy as Servo the robot and Conniff as one of the Mads; Conniff also acted as pre-screener of the films to be chosen for riffing. A second inspiration was to hire Nelson, first to do "some typing," then to head the writing staff; they decided that they did need scripts, and Mike had the organizational and social skills to harness a half-dozen people who were wild inside. (But, really, all the writers displayed great comedy taste: the creator's sense of what's funny, the smart editor's sense of what isn't.)
A third was for the Brains to create their own fan club — why wait for real viewers to do it? The show quickly connected with an audience of educated, pretty-hip, mostly-white viewers, and the club eventually mushroomed to some 64,000 members. Discussion of the show intensified with the blooming of the Internet. "MST3K" was one of the first pop-cultural artifacts to fill chat rooms with hot debate and divided loyalties: the Joel-vs.-Mike debates about the founding host and his successor escalated from rancor to death threats (some people were taking the show way too seriously).