Last Installment Of ‘Science Theater’ Is Final Show Featuring Frank Conniff
This Saturday’s edition of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” will be a bittersweet occasion for fans.
The Peabody Award-winning series on cable’s Comedy Channel will present its sixth-season finale, long-awaited by MSTies, as fans call themselves.
When the episode airs at 7 p.m. Saturday (it’s repeated at 10 a.m. Sunday and at noon Monday), it’ll be the final installment featuring Frank Conniff as the downtrodden lab assistant named, in the show’s typically screwball fashion, “TV’s Frank.”
Conniff announced his impending departure in November on on-line computer services as well as on the three - yes, three - Internet newsgroups devoted to chatter about the series. The fans’ response was a rash of speculation about just how the character would be written out of the show. An advance tape shows that the “MST3K” writers fashioned a witty, whimsical and musical sendoff that nobody could have predicted - one that will make Conniff’s fans proud even as they mourn his departure.
Once they get over the shock of Frank’s leaving, MSTies are in for another surprise: They’ll have to wait for “MST3K’s” seventh season, because new episodes won’t be ready when the rest of Comedy Central’s new season starts in the summer. They’ll probably arrive in fall. Best Brains Inc., the small Minneapolis company that produces “MST3K,” was slowed first by extended negotiations with Comedy Central and then by other projects.
And when new episodes do arrive, there won’t be as many as in previous seasons.
Viewers, who this season have suffered and laughed through such barrel-bottom scrapings as “Red Zone Cuba” and “The Beast of Yucca Flats,” will likely rejoice at the prospect.Best Brains had good reason to
want to make fewer episodes: The company is busy developing two series it wants to sell to the network.
More change is probably the last thing fans wish for. A few are “still adjusting to the departure of series creator” Joel Hodgson, who bowed out in October 1993, saying he wanted to move on to fresher pastures.
All this comes at a time when “MST3K” has been getting a lot of attention. Earlier this month, the Museum of Television and Radio honored the series at the Director’s Guild Theater in Los Angeles, and Topic A was the much-discussed “Mystery Science Theater” feature film. Negotiations with Universal Studios fell apart, so Best Brains is planning to produce the movie independently and then shop it around to distributors.
The name of the film that Nelson and his robot pals will watch in the feature is a tightly guarded secret. In the Universal deal, the plan was to use the studio’s 1955 sci-fi gem “This Island Earth.” But it is now generally assumed another movie has been chosen.