Jon Kilgannon, creator of Mystery Anime Theater 3000

Skulking through the Baltimore Convention Center early Friday morning, I got the chance to have a short conversation with Jon Kilgannon, creator of Otakon's amazingly funny Mystery Anime Theater 3000. At the same time an homage to a cultural icon of a television show, and very competently done live theater, MAT3K provides a much needed shot in the arm to anime convention programming. Jon was gracious enough to give me some time before the day's con programming got started, before the mantle of Security Chief of the convention took his attention away. Mystery Anime Theater this year performed to an estimated crowd of 1,400 at Otakon '99.


"We didn't do any animated movies because we just thought it was too bizarre having puppets make fun of cartoons." - Frank Conniff, TV's Frank from Mystery Science Theater 3000


How did MAT3K first come about?

The way Mystery Anime Theater (MAT) started was back in like 91 or so, I'd just gotten into anime, and the phrase 'Mystery Anime Theater' popped into my head one day, and I said, "You know, that would be something to do. We just need a genlock, an Amiga, and a TV, and about $9 Million worth of hardware. Crap." Cause I thought about having little animated bitmaps of anime characters down at the bottom. I was going to use like Briareos and Deunan and one of the big bruiser-bots from Appleseed and I thought that would be perfect, cause you've got 'Crow', 'Tom' and you've got a 'Joel. (and) I just realized it was well beyond our technical capabilities or our wallets at that time. So I just shelved the entire project until Bernhard (Warg, Anime's Frank) just showed up with Tom and Crow (replicas of the MST3K puppets), he'd just finished them and went "Look what I've got, guys!" I said "Those are perfect!" He said "yeah". and I said "No. You don't understand" , and I decided we were going to do Mystery Anime Theater for Otakon. I think Bernhard had been building them for a couple of years at that point. That was 1996, and we did our first MAT in 1997.


Before we get started, could you go over who some of the cast and bizarre crew are of MAT3K?

Well the original crew...Well I started out with the idea and with getting Bernhard and all that. Bernhard is our prop wrangler and he's also plays Anime's Frank. I'm the producer, director, head writer, and the general guy who has to watch the movie the most times, (shudder) and I do Tom Servo. Mark Sacks(sp) is Joel (Joel Saotome), and one of the writers. Joe F?(sp), another one of the chief writers, does Crow. Matt Pyson does Dr. Forrest Clay, and he has a wonderful evil laugh , and looks good in a grease paint mustache. Well it was sort of just that, the five of us, and anyone else we could drag in. At this point, I've managed to pull in probably around fifteen writers. We've got Sue and Carl Monroe, my fiancee Ivy Martin, Donna Eulen, geez lots of people. I have the entire list at home. Anyone we could drag in basically, um, Chris Ochs, Mike Ryan, John Atchison. Basically, something on the order of probably around 15% of the convention committee has written for me at some point (laugh).

Yeah, people like 'Here, I've got a good joke for there"

Yeah, basically, they'll give me a couple jokes. The people who do a lot of the writing, most of the writing, are myself, Mark (Sacks), Joe Foring, Matt, John Atchison. And this year Chris Ochs put in a lot of work, a lot of good lines.

What were the production levels like when you first started?

In 1997, we had a video theater, and I think that was the year that we seated around 800, and it was standing room only. I was running live programming at that time, basically in charge of any programming that wasn't video. Something that you didn't just sit on your ass and watch. We said, "we'll try MAT as an experiment. We'll take the time slot nobody wants, Friday at midnight:" No one wants Friday at midnight, we'll try it. and it was standing room only Friday at midnight. It looked pretty good, the bots looked really good, the anime was atrocious, M.D. Geist (shudder). One of our writers still if you go up and say 'Geist!', he goes "AH!" The costumes looked really good. Bernhard does a really good job on the costumes and, you know, props. We had the problem that getting the mix between the movie and the speech, the riffing, is really hard. Especially the bad movies, because they are really really really really badly done (really?). The volume just wanders up and down, the FX and the voice of the actors are at the wrong levels. Lensman, we were sitting there watching the levels on Lensman while doing it, and like Buskirk, who's the big bison guy, his levels are about 10% above normal, and Kim, the whiny 'hero', is about 20% below normal, so we're saying how are you going to raise up Kim's voice so you can hear it and not have Buskirk's voice blowing out the ears of everyone in the front row? Um, you don't. It's a very bad movie and there's nothing you can do about it, so it sounded kind of crappy. Looked great, though.

Have you been basically been using the same formula of recording the riffing on tape and miming the puppet's actions on stage?

That was actually an experiment this year. The way we did it for 97 and 98, we just popped in the movie, hit play, and riffed it live. We had a script, I mean the script was like 60 pages long, and we practice over and over...basically what we do is sit down, and have about a dozen writing sessions, with whatever writers I can get together. I'm normally present for those, which is why I've seen the movie the most of everyone. We riff the heck out of it, get all the lines down, try to write cues and then I take this wad of paper about two inches thick of everyone's gags, and I sit down with a laptop and watch the movie over and over and over again getting things timed out; making sure that our riffs aren't on top of anyone's line on screen, making sure there isn't an explosion going on while we're trying to talk so you can't hear us, making sure the gags are in the right place because occasionally, we're riffing so fast, (the writers) forget to write down cues. So I'm going "this is a great line! Where does it go? I have no clue!". So we come in with a script, as I un-digress, having rehearsed the living hell out of it, and we riff it live, that was 97 and 98, for (M.D.) Geist and (Battle Arena) Toshinden. This year, because the sound on Geist was really bad, (we got it a little better on Toshinden but it was still kind of bad) so I decided to try an experiment this year, and what I did was I went out and bought a mixing board that was about as expensive as a car payment on my Jeep, and we mixed it, played the tape, and riffed it in-studio, and it worked a little better. We're going to have to do a post-mortem on it and see if we want to do it again next year, cause it's a question of, you've got the script memorized so you could have done it live and realize 'Oh, I just came up with an ad-lib.' I'd really want to do it but I have my microphone turned off.

That's the big disadvantage of that approach...

The problem with the live, is that if you're riffing in the studio, I can have the mixing board in front of me and go 'Oh, Buskirk's about to talk, pot it down a little bit'. I didn't do much of that but occasionally we had a line that had to be over an explosion, so we could look for the level to drop and then be able to do the line. So you could get the lines in when you could hear them.