Nov 11, 2008

The "Theater" in "Mystery Science Theater"



I knew there had to be an element of theater in the late, great TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000--in other words, another excuse to refer to it here. In the latest Onion, a 20th-anniversary reunion interview confirms that the famous mud-planet logo--well, read on:

AVC: How did that distinctive logo come about?

Joel Hodgson: That's foam insulation. That's the stuff that you caulk around your windows, and we had a bunch of cans of that. And Trace had this ball that he got from the Guthrie Theater in his storage.

Trace Beaulieu: It was a 48-inch fiberglass ball that was used in one of their productions, and it was made so meticulously that it had to drop from the ceiling of the theater and roll to a specific spot on the stage every time. You couldn't bring it in a door. It had to go out through a dock door, it was so huge. But we just sat in the shop and sprayed it with foam insulation and then cut the letters out with a band saw.

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