Frank Conniff and Keith Olbermann on Kim Jong-il

It's time for more fun with the late Kim Jong-il, which is fine, because he wasn't much fun when he was alive.

The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Copyediting

 As often is the case when I write a post about magazine covers, this is apropos of nothing particularly significant.

This morning I found online the above cover of a 1992 issue of Omni magazine. I immediately figured I should order a copy, because it features an article on Mystery Science Theater 3000, one of the great TV shows of all time. Except ... Omni mistitles MST3K on the cover text: "Laughing at the Future with Mystery Science 3000."

It would not be the last time that MST3K was incorrectly identified on a genre magazine cover. Four years later, Starlog would announce the MST3K motion picture by shouting on its cover, "Joel, Tom Servo & Crow make a movie!" Which would have been great, except that creator and host Joel Hodgson had left the show some time earlier and it was his successor, Michael J. Nelson, who made a movie with the help of his robot friends.

Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic: Twice the Fun

In 1988, I piled into an old Dodge Omni for a trip to New Orleans to attend the 1988 Republican National Convention as a college journalist. Joining me for the drive were three other editors of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Badger Herald student newspaper (the good one). Granted, we didn't get ringside seats to the convention speeches, being lowly northerner college boys, but we did get to sit in the auditorium during the final day's speeches (waaaaay in the very last row up in the rafters, I kid you not), and I got to sit next to my newspaper's sports editor (hey, we were The Badger Herald, America's premiere independent daily student newspaper, and if we wanted to bring our sports editor to the GOP convention, we'll bring the damn sports editor to the convention, okay?)

Anyway, the sports editor provided a running commentary wisecracking on everything that was spoken from the podium. It was great. Hilarious. He should have gotten his own comedy show. We barely escaped the wrath of the overdressed Republican woman sitting near us, who didn't like us sniggering about the political claptrap being served up on stage. But I was raised by my mother to not take the utterings of TV and other stars seriously, and that included taking a skeptical attitude toward politicos (my stepfather is a political cartoonist, after all).

When I discovered the great Comedy Central (later Sci Fi Channel) TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 sometime in the 1990s, I knew I'd discovered a secret show no one else could possibly know about. After all, the humans (and robots) on the screen were wisecracking their way through pretty horrible movies, many of them science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Add to that the fact that they had my sense of humor (I'll sue!), and because they were based in Minneapolis (the Scandinavian neighbor to my then-home state of Wisconsin) they were regularly using references of places and events that were a part of my life. (Any show that references Ashwaubenon gets points in my book.)

Classic stuff. Though I wish it were still around, MST3K was a treasure, and I should be happy that it existed as long as it did.

After Sci Fi Channel finally drove a stake through its wise-cracking Midwestern heart, its creators/writers/performers were flung to the far ends of the galaxy, hunted down by the clone stormtroopers ... wait, I'm getting carried away. They went and did other stuff.

The Film Crew. Remember it? Of course you don't.

Then one batch of the MST3K crew created Rifftrax, and another batch created Cinematic Titanic. There are some differences between the two, but basically all you need to know is that in both projects, smart and funny people make fun of (usually) very bad movies. We can't have MST3K back, but we now have two, not one, replacements. Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic. I love them both, and I heartily recommend them to all of you.

PS: Last I heard, the former Herald sports editor is now a TV sportscaster in Michigan. I hope they're paying him oodles of money.

MST3K YouTube: Gumby's Robot

It's been a tough week, so I present the above YouTube video. It's a short from the late, great Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which Mike and the robots take apart a Gumby short.

"That's Wallce & Gromit's yard!" I needed that.

Have a good weekend.

Crow T. Robot Does Jay Leno Impression

Because so many people on earth are wailing in pain and suffering, I wanted to share this impression from Crow from the long-defunct Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Jay Leno. Not much changed, eh?



Courtesy the MST3K fan club.

The Onion for Sale?

A long time ago in a city far, far away, a young cartoonist named Scott Dikkers drew a comic strip for a college paper. The comic strip was a bare-bones, stick-figure affair, and it was occasionally funny. Then Dikkers got involved in another enterprise at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: The Onion, which started out in the mid-1980s as a coupon-supported humor newspaper on campus.

Dikkers drew his comic for The Daily Cardinal, a left-wing campus daily that competed with my own centrist/center-right daily campus paper, The Badger Herald. (Madison was a great city for student newspaper wars and competition.) In those early years of The Onion's life, the targets of its satire were local, including the Herald and the Cardinal. I remember walking into our offices one afternoon while our news editors were moaning about some Onion lampoon of the campus dailies. I didn't moan; the Onion's satirization of us was usually dead-on, hitting us at our obvious weak points, which for us included some fairly weak copy editing.

One such satire was a one-column box that sought to explain the difference between the Cardinal and the Herald. One of the bullet points for the leftist Cardinal was that its staff supported the El Salvadoran marxist rebel group FMLN; as for the Herald, it would misspell FMLN.

That's good. A better bullet point was that the Cardinal editors were all rich kids from the north shore of Milwaukee; the Badger Herald's editors all wanted to be rich kids from the north shore of Milwaukee. Perfect! There was truth to it, and it played up to the stereotypes of the two papers.

Anyway, The Onion began to widen its circulation and broaden its sights. No longer was it mainly supported by coupons for local pizza joints running along the bottoms of the pages. And a few years later, it was sold to a New York firm, which has continued to expand the company over the years.

Gawker reports that The Onion is for sale, and the New York-based owners are negotiating with a large media company to buy it. Please, please, please, don't let it be News Corp.

I was sorry to see The Onion lose its Madison base in its first sale, and I'm sure it won't regain it in this sale (there being no "large media company" in Madison). But it was another great midwestern humor creation, like Mystery Science Theater 3000 (which also included some UW-Madison alumni, plus Green Bay native Joel Hodgson) in the Twin Cities, and it went on to conquer the humor world almost as much as National Lampoon did in the 1970s.