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The typical MST3K show has perhaps 700 of these asides. There are fewer in this riff on This Island Earth--the whole thing, ruthlessly pared down, lasts only 73 minutes--but watching it in a crowd offers a different high. As the gags pile up remorselessly, and the viewer strains to keep up with the story line and the cutting subtext, a furious but benign apnea takes hold. You can't enjoy a good long laugh because you'll miss too much; you must let it explode in short blasts. It's the happiest form of internal injury.
Next month the Laserblast episode will take MST3K out in style, with deftly flicked allusions to, among others, Eddie Deezen ("heir to the Arnold Stang fortune"), Ram Dass, Georgia O'Keeffe, Haile Selassie, Sister Mary Elephant, Iron Eyes Cody and Roddy McDowall ("as Dr. Casabamelon"). Crow notes that "this movie was run through a highly technical process called 'tension extraction.'" And in an especially inert section of Laserblast, Servo says what might be said of any MST3K experiment: "There's a point where it stops being a movie."
Now MST3K may stop being a TV show. In the last episode, Dr. Forrester announces that his funding has been cut and, before he goes off to live with his mother, he's disconnecting the satellite; Mike, Crow and Tom will drift off in space toward a rendezvous with a mysterious monolith. Back on earth, Comedy Central will air reruns till February '97. Rhino Home Video is issuing 25 MST3K shows, the first three (Cave Dwellers, The Amazing Colossal Man, Mitchell) April 30.
Best of all, there's word that cable's Sci-Fi Channel may pick up the show for next year. The graybeards who have religiously taped every episode--and the recruits who will find laugh at first sight watching the new movie--can only hope that their favorite space travelers will be stranded up there for eons to come.