ROBOCRITICS TAKE FLIGHT

By RICHARD CORLISS

The show is a cherished TV institution. It boasts a fan club of 60,000 fervent viewers, many of them high school graduates. In 128 two-hour episodes, it has consistently delivered the most sophisticated (and some of the loopiest) humor on the tube. Really, it's one of the best reasons to be alive in the '90s. And now, after seven years on cable TV, Mystery Science Theater 3000--the show about the guy and the two robots who watch cheesy movies and make jokes about them--is spinning off into a book, a CD-ROM, a series of videocassettes and its very own major motion picture.

As a TV show, however, MST3K may be kaput. Citing a ratings dip, the Comedy Central network first cut the number of episodes from 24 a year to a paltry but precious six, then banished the show to hours appropriate only for Psychic Friends Network infomercials (2 a.m. weeknights, 7 a.m. Sunday and the big prime-time slot, 5 p.m. Saturday). Late last year Doug Herzog, the new president of Comedy Central, said the network was not picking up the show. Negotiations to devise a new format were unfruitful; two weeks ago, Herzog gave Best Brains, MST3K's production company, permission to try to sell the program elsewhere. The final new episode--a fond savaging of the sluggish sci-fi teen-angst epic Laserblast--will air May 18.

The faithful, known as MSTies, get to binge before they have to purge. Bookstores are now carrying The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide (Bantam), a beguiling history of the show with behind-the-scenes revelations, explanations of the more obscure references and photos of men with their arms inside puppets. But the essential event is this week's arrival, in 25 major cities, of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, which fans will be able to enjoy in a big theater, surrounded by hordes of the uninitiated muttering "Huh?"

Each TV show starts with a jingly theme song explaining that a mad scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu), is conducting a bizarre "experiment." He has launched into space a satellite containing a human named Mike (head writer Michael J. Nelson) and the automatons Tom Servo (operated and voiced by Kevin Murphy) and Crow T. Robot (Beaulieu again) and forced them to watch bad films: Ed Wood classics like Bride of the Monster and stuff way, way worse, like the 1965 Attack of the the Eye Creatures--a movie so inept that its makers put the word the twice in the title. Mike and the 'bots crack wise; we laugh; that's about it. This simple, supple premise allows for pop-cultural japes, low banter and a nice, acidy undertaste.

The routine is the same in their big-screen debut, except that Best Brains chose a not-so-bad film, This Island Earth--Universal-International's 1955 space opera about American scientists kidnapped to a distant planet, where they are attacked by macrocephalous monsters. The MST3K prologue is a bit ragged, but once This Island Earth kicks in, so does the Brains' mother wit. It finds the absurd everywhere, from the studio logo ("Doesn't the fact that it's Universal make it International?") to the ethereal, annoying ringing sound that accompanies the aliens ("Now we know what the world sounds like to Pete Townshend").

The typical MST3K show has perhaps 700 of these asides. There are fewer in this riff on This Island Earth--the whole thing, ruthlessly pared down, lasts only 73 minutes--but watching it in a crowd offers a different high. As the gags pile up remorselessly, and the viewer strains to keep up with the story line and the cutting subtext, a furious but benign apnea takes hold. You can't enjoy a good long laugh because you'll miss too much; you must let it explode in short blasts. It's the happiest form of internal injury.

Next month the Laserblast episode will take MST3K out in style, with deftly flicked allusions to, among others, Eddie Deezen ("heir to the Arnold Stang fortune"), Ram Dass, Georgia O'Keeffe, Haile Selassie, Sister Mary Elephant, Iron Eyes Cody and Roddy McDowall ("as Dr. Casabamelon"). Crow notes that "this movie was run through a highly technical process called 'tension extraction.'" And in an especially inert section of Laserblast, Servo says what might be said of any MST3K experiment: "There's a point where it stops being a movie."

Now MST3K may stop being a TV show. In the last episode, Dr. Forrester announces that his funding has been cut and, before he goes off to live with his mother, he's disconnecting the satellite; Mike, Crow and Tom will drift off in space toward a rendezvous with a mysterious monolith. Back on earth, Comedy Central will air reruns till February '97. Rhino Home Video is issuing 25 MST3K shows, the first three (Cave Dwellers, The Amazing Colossal Man, Mitchell) April 30.

Best of all, there's word that cable's Sci-Fi Channel may pick up the show for next year. The graybeards who have religiously taped every episode--and the recruits who will find laugh at first sight watching the new movie--can only hope that their favorite space travelers will be stranded up there for eons to come.