Kevin Murphy

KTMA and the Second Tom Servo

By 1988 Murphy was in Minneapolis. He told Reminder Publications that he was producing commercials for KTMA, an independent UHF station, in 1988 when Joel Hodgson brought in the idea of a host who stays with the audience through a whole movie. That idea became Mystery Science Theater 3000. Murphy stayed with it until it ended in 1999.

Richard Corliss of Time described the first season: Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu and Josh Weinstein built the robot puppets from parts found in a Salvation Army basement, mostly ad-libbed their riffs, and the station paid $2,400 for the show. When the series moved to the cable channel that became Comedy Central, Weinstein left over "creative differences." Murphy took over the voice and puppetry of Tom Servo, the robot with a gumball-machine head. By Time's count he voiced Servo in all but the first 13 of the show's 176 nationally aired episodes.

The writer-performers incorporated as Best Brains and produced the show in a mall in Eden Prairie, outside Minneapolis. It ran for seven years on Comedy Central, then on the Sci-Fi Channel until August 1999, and won a Peabody Award. Its official fan club grew to about 64,000 members. RiffTrax's own biography of Murphy says he co-wrote and directed the series for ten years.

Murphy also sang. Corliss singled out his "handsome Irish tenor, overdubbed about a dozen times," on "The United Servo Academy Men's Chorus Hymn." He also played a second character, Professor Bobo, a gorilla. Asked by Den of Geek in 2014 whether the costume got hot, he said it always did. The show owned two masks, both of which ended up stinking, and he wore them with a fright wig, fur gloves and full makeup because "we were still a really low-budget show."

When NBC News asked the cast for a favorite episode on the show's 25th anniversary, Murphy would not pick one. He listed the Gamera films, "the Russian-Finnish epics," "Space Mutiny," "Pumaman," "I Accuse My Parents" and "Outlaw of Gor," and said he had "a lot of favorite moments." At a reunion panel at Columbia University in 2001, the film he named as the hardest to sit through was "Red Zone Cuba."

A Year at the Movies, 2001

After the show ended, Murphy set himself a rule: see at least one movie in a theater every day of 2001. Corliss ran into him in line at the Cannes Film Festival on 20 May, the date Murphy had penciled in for Cannes, and weeks later Murphy wrote to say he was off to the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Finland.

The A.V. Club's review lists where the rule took him: Sundance, Cannes, the Midnight Sun festival, theaters in Britain, Italy, Australia and Canada, the Cook Islands, a screening room inside a Quebec hotel made of ice, the world's smallest theater, the Mall of America and Universal Studios. Publishers Weekly added Route 66 drive-ins and a week lived on concession-stand food. For one chapter he took six married women to the same date movie. For another he smuggled a full meal into a theater, which Reminder Publications identified as his Thanksgiving dinner.

The book, "A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey," came out in 2002. Publishers Weekly called Murphy "a highbrow man of the people." The A.V. Club found it "lively, entertaining, diverse, sometimes fascinating, and deeply telling," and faulted it for glossing over most of the films. One chapter, subtitled "How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Film Festival," goes after Sundance. Murphy went back to Park City in January 2003 anyway, to promote the book and to watch films at the smaller Slamdance and No Dance festivals. "It sounds like a lot more fun than it actually was," he told the Deseret News. He told Reminder Publications that he came out of the year more patient with movies and that he never walks out of one.

The RiffTrax biography dates the project to 2002 and says it covered more than a hundred cities in ten countries. The reviews written at the time, and Corliss's meeting with him at Cannes, put the year of moviegoing in 2001.

The Film Crew and the RiffTrax MP3s

Murphy reunited with Mike Nelson, who had replaced Hodgson as host in 1993, and Bill Corbett, who had taken over the robot Crow. Their first project was The Film Crew, a DVD series from Shout Factory in which the three play working men hired by a billionaire named Bob Honcho to record commentary tracks for films that never had one. The titles, among them "Killers from Space" and "Hollywood After Dark," were public-domain films supplied by Sinister Cinema. Murphy told Reminder Publications that each of the three wrote a third of every script before a group rewrite, and that the best films for riffing are "earnest but inept."

The longer-lasting project was RiffTrax, which Den of Geek dates to 2006. Instead of licensing films, the trio sold MP3 commentary tracks and left viewers to supply the movie, which let them riff Hollywood releases such as "The Lord of the Rings" and "300." Murphy called that "a different beast" and "a little scarier, but fun."

Murphy has said the format proved itself on stage. Their first live show, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" at SF Sketchfest in San Francisco, filled a large theater. "People have been missing this thing," he remembered the three telling each other. RiffTrax Live shows were later broadcast to theaters across the United States and Canada. In 2014 a Kickstarter campaign to stage the 1998 "Godzilla" passed its $100,000 goal and raised more than $250,000, and the surplus paid for a second live show of "Anaconda." By 2019 the Cap Times counted "The Giant Spider Invasion," broadcast from the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, as the 30th film RiffTrax had shown live in a decade.

The writing room has also changed. In the same interview Murphy pointed to Conor Lastowka and Sean Thomason, "new writers" who are "much younger than Mike and Bill and I" and "not at all from the Midwest." For "The Giant Spider Invasion," a 1975 film shot in Merrill, Wisconsin, he wrote a closing-credits song, "Spider on the Highway," with Jonah Ray, the host of the Netflix revival of Mystery Science Theater 3000, on drums. RiffTrax's biography adds that he produced the album "Music for Riffing" by The RiffTones, that his movie commentaries ran on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, and that he wrote the "Bottom Shelf" column for Total Movie Magazine.

A Skull Ring From a Poker Game

Murphy lives in Minnesota. In 2014 he told Den of Geek that he lives in the woods and gets coyotes in the yard, and he explained the skull ring he always wears: "It's a constant reminder of my eventual face." He bought it in Mexico more than twenty years earlier as a gift for his brother, who was then at a seminary. It terrified the brother, so Murphy kept it. His father had also owned a skull ring, which he won from a Luftwaffe officer in a poker game. "How's that for cool?" Murphy said.

He describes riffing as affection more than attack. "You sort of cringe for the shortcomings of the director and the actors and the screenwriters and their hopelessly limited resources," he told the Cap Times. "We nudge and we tease." As of 2019 he had not riffed "Blood Hook," the film he and Mallon made in Hayward in 1985. "We could definitely riff that movie," he said. "I think we haven't built up the nerve to do it."

Sources

• Cheesy movies don't get much cheesier than Wisconsin's 'The Giant Spider Invasion' | Movies | captimes.com
• Author slams fest but stops by to promote book - Deseret News
• AFI|Catalog
• Mocking movies a major career for Murphy
• That Old Feeling: MST2K+1
• Interview with RiffTrax's Kevin Murphy | Den of Geek
• Robot roll call! 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' cast share favorite episodes as show turns 25
• A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey by Kevin Murphy
• Kevin Murphy: A Year At The Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey
• Kevin Murphy | RiffTrax