Dr. Clay: "I'm a naughty boy! Naughty! Naughty!"

 Did you ever consider doing any setup where you don't have everybody up on stage live, perhaps use a backstage set to portray something more elaborate with Frank and Dr. Clay?

That's not really worth it. Part of the reason why the host segments work is that it's up on stage. When you saw this weekend when we flubbed a line, Matt just flubbed a line as Dr. F, and I said 'This is live guys, remember it's live!" I wasn't talking to the players, I was talking to the audience. I'll say "guys, remember this is live. You're allowed to laugh at the flubs." And that doesn't work on camera. Part of the charm of live theater is the spontaneity of it, and you lose that at one remove (from stage), even when doing it live (backstage).

What did you feel about this year's experiment, going to the longer form (a movie)?

We went to the longer form because out of all the movies we looked at, Lensman was probably the crappiest. Well, no, actually there were two worse. We watched Starchaser: Legend of Orin. We watched, and I looked at the VCR, 27 minutes and 40 seconds of it, and then we hit stop, looked at each other and said we shall never speak of this again. Because it was such an atrociously bad movie, and I'm glad we didn't do it because shortly thereafter I found out that it was actually written by an American and animated in japan, so I said "This isn't even anime, no wonder it looks like crap." But yeah, we will just take movies, we'll watch them, and riff it while we're watching. The first run through it's usually me, Mark, Joe, Matt, a couple of the main writers will sit down and just bust on the movie the first time watching it through.

Do you use any kind of recording device while writing?

No, we just have pads of paper, and we write it down, and half of the watching is just yelling 'Hey! That was good, write that down!" Writing each other's lines down as others need to take a rest room break. Lensman was just the best movie we had. We realized that it was atrociously bad, it wasn't nearly as talkie as some other movies we had. One problem we have with movies is..take Legend of Nolandia (Dirty Pair: Affair on Nolandia). Legend of Nolandia is a bad dub, a really bad dub. The problem is, is that they never shut up. THEY NEVER SHUT UP! It was a perfect movie for us. It was an hour long, it had characters that everyone loves, badly dubbed (it takes TWO cops to play 'good cop, bad cop'). I mean it's just a really bad movie, but we just couldn't do it cause there seemed to be about 10-15 seconds of silence in the entire movie.

And there's no rumbling battle fleets going by..

Yeah, you need ships lumbering through space, or fighting characters sitting there, bouncing back and forth going, 'I must use the Gummi Bear Fuku Technique!" Because then you've got these long awkward pauses, these long, painful, Manos-like2 awkward pauses that you can just riff in, and a lot of anime, the way it's dubbed, especially with the voice-fit system they use, it's just 'blahblahblahblah', next character 'blahblahblahblah'. You're like 'hello..breathe. Breathe. Breathe damnit!" This is not natural. And Lensman, as we were doing it, we did it in pieces. There's a first segment, second segment, third segment, and we wouldn't do all of them in one long stretch.

I like the idea of going back and finding that what today would be considered more of the obscure anime. There was just a glut of 1985-87 OAVS that would be just gluttons for punishment.

There is an entire pool of basically just remakes of Iczer-1, etc, that are just festering underneath anime that we have not yet tapped. One of the things we like don't want to do is get in a rut. We did (M.D.) Geist, which was a big heavy-metal, doom and death and horror and if-you're-fifteen-you'll-like-it movie. And people would come up to us and say "You know, they made a sequel." and we reply "Oh yes, we know, we know." We don't want to see it. Then we did Toshinden, which was a fighting game, and with Toshinden it's not so much a horrible movie as it is aggressively there. It takes away an hour of your life and doesn't give it back. Then this year we did Lensman, which was, it was anime by Ed Wood. My fiancee's a big fan of E.E. "Doc" Smith, and we had her sit in on a couple of the scripting sessions, and
she sat there watching the movie in incredulity and pain.

Cutting the 'Flying Through Pipes' scenes probably could have saved one or two segments!

Oh yes, the 50 minutes of flying through pipes! Who's ideas was this?! Actually we had one segment where we were originally going to do the entire Star Wars trench thing but we went 'Nah, no one's ever going to laugh at this.'

You guys reminded me of how bad that movie was, I hadn't seen it in 10 years, and even subtitled, that movie is really bad.

We actually got a group to watch the subtitles, and that's where the 'credits-are-louder-in-Japanese' gag came from. Actually we cut the credits being louder gag, never mind. It's so bad, and I think the consensus at this point is that we'll go back to hour-long anime. It's grueling. Grueling for us to do something that is 50% longer, and it's grueling on the audience.

So after your 33rd watching of the film, have you figured out what the lens actually does?

I have a construct I use whenever I can't understand something in anime. I call it the Plot Device-O Ray. Basically the lens is a portable plot device you carry around on your hand. What it really does (though) is allow the whiny hero to be even whinier for approximately an hour.

'I'm the hero, cause I'm the whiniest!'

God, that was painful. BAD MOVIE, BAD MOVIE! Ugh.

Yeah, I noticed it kind of took a bit of a toll on the audience, especially when you announced 'rool part 3 of the movie'

And the audience was like 'NOOOooo...' Basically, if you look at the first two, (97 & 98) we actually had some fairly lengthy host segments and a lot more commercials, and the reason for it was that the film's only an hour long. We had one commercial break. We had an opening host segment, a middle host segment, and a close host segment. This year we deliberately kept the host segments and the commercials short. The ending sketch, you'll note, was about 2 minutes long, the opening sketch was about five, and the middle sketch was maybe three (minutes), the idea was that I didn't want people confined to the theater for that long a time. We actually went back and tried to figure out is there any way to cut this without it being bloody obvious that there's been a cut, and I watched it three times and realized, no, there's no way to cut stuff out. The problem is that there's loud music going on, characters talk through the ends of scenes, horrible, so we couldn't cut anything out. I really would have liked to cut out about twenty minutes. I thought, 'the pipes, I can cut out the pipes!', then no, people talked in the beginning and ends of scenes, loud music would continue and not change with scene changes, and a couple things are mentioned that are actually important to understanding the ending, such as it is.

Exactly...

I mean you know, MST3K can get away with it (2 hour movies) because they've got like seven commercial breaks. You can go off to the bathroom real fast, you can go off and get yourself a coke. You've got two or three commercial breaks in MAT, 40 minutes of anime and then a break and the anime is bad, is just too long. So I think we're going to go back to the hour format.