Attack of the B Movies: MST3K & The Green Slime
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Attack of the B-Movies
Mystery Science Theater 3000 originally got its start on a very low rated Minnesota UHF television station. Given two hours to fill with anything he liked, show creator Joel Hodgson decided to make what he called a "cow town puppet show" in which he and his puppets were forced to make fun of bad movies.
The show was a hard sell, so Joel put together a pilot using one of the more notorious films in KTMA's film library- The Green Slime.
The Green Slime was the sort of film that everyone should have seen was a disaster in the making. A joint production of Japan's Toei Studio and MGM, the film was written by American writers, featured an international cast of mostly American B-Movie actors, directed by a Japanese director and filmed in Japan. Besides the obvious language barriers, the film had other issues, like poor special effects and wooden acting.
Joel put together a shortened version of the film where the movie jokes were improvised, but the host sequences were scripted. Station management approved the project and Mystery Science Theater 3000 was born.
While KTMA had permission to air the films, they never got permission to use them for Mystery Science Theater 3000. As a result, these films will likely never see legitimate releases.
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