"MST3K Fanvid Interview for Suicidegirls.com" by Troy H. Cheek on Mar 06, 2005

Since this interview is no longer available online, I thought I'd mirror a copy of it here.

Interview with Troy Cheek (MST3K Fanvid The Brain from Space Station Theta)

by staff reporter Rhonda Ralph ()

RR: Thank you for joining us today, Troy. Please tell us a little about yourself.

THC: Glad to be here, Rhonda. Well, my name is Troy H. Cheek, I'm in my late 30's, schooled in engineering and computer science, and currently employed as a security systems technical coordinator for a local healthcare facility. My turn-ons include puppies, sunsets, and women who don't laugh at me.

RR: Heh heh. For those who have been living under a rock for the last 15 years, please tell us a little about MST3K.

THC: Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a long-running TV series that made fun of bad movies. The premise was that some mad scientists (the "Mads") shot a guy into space so that his only interaction with the world came from the really bad movies that they kept sending him. The Mads planned to monitor his eventual mental breakdown and use the data to take over the world. But the guy was too smart for them, and with the help of a few robot friends built from spare parts, he survives from week to week by quipping and riffing and generally making sport of the movies. MST3K shows the movies with the guy and his robots superimposed over the bottom as if they're sitting in front of the view in a movie theater.

RR: When were you first exposed to MST3K?

THC: I can't remember exactly, but I believe it was back during the first few seasons. A friend with cable TV (back when I had none) stumbled across it on Comedy Central and started recording it for me. I got to watch the last few seasons on the SciFi Channel. I also picked up a few of the Rhino videos on VHS from the Columbia House Video Club. I'm still mad at them.

RR: Why is that?

THC: Before I signed up to receive the MST3K series from Columbia House, I called to make sure that it was the "complete" series as mentioned in the advertisements they'd sent me. I was assured that this was the "complete" collection of episodes, so I signed up. After 5 or 6 videos, they stopped coming. When I called to complain, I was told that I already had the complete collection! I kept complaining and the called kept being escalated until I was finally speaking to the regional sales manager. Her "logic" was that since Rhino had only released that many episodes on tape, those episodes constituted the "complete" collection, so they were more than justified in refering to them that way.

RR: Why did you decide to do a MST3K fanvid?

THC: I was a big fan of the show but only had access to a couple dozen shows, and I knew that no more were going to be made and very few would ever be re-released, so I figured that the only way to get more MST3K was to make my own. I came up with the idea on my own, but a quick internet search showed that several other people had come up with it before me.

RR: Have you seen any other fanvids?

THC: I've seen a few stills and read a few lines of transcripts, but I've not been able to track down an actual vids. Most of the fanvids I've read about use movies that they do not have permission to distribute, so they are understandably hard to find. That's why I picked the movie I did.

RR: Tell us about The Brain from Space Station Theta.

THC: The Brain came to me by a circuitous route. A friend had gotten a VHS tape from a penpal overseas and had come to me for help playing it since it was PAL format and he didn't have a VCR, anyway. It took a couple of years to track down a PAL VCR and even then we couldn't play the movie on any TV we had. I ended up doing a vidcapture to my harddrive. After about a zillion attempts, we got a mostly watchable video capture, but the audio was so muffled that at first we thought it was a silent movie. It didn't matter, since we didn't know the language anyway.

RR: What language was that?

THC: We never did find out. My friend didn't recognize it and neither did the penpal who had sent it. The Brain from Space Station Theta was my own title as the video didn't include a title sequence or end credits. The title was meant to be ironic since there was no brain or space station in the film, just your standard Earth invaded by aliens who look like humans in funny clothes story line. Anyway, I figured since the movie was so old (looked like pre-WWII cars) and from an unknown Eastern European country that probably didn't exist anymore, there couldn't be any copyright issues. (Turned out I was wrong, but anyway...)

RR: Describe the process of making the fanvid.

THC: The "Shadowrama" effect was filmed against a brightly-lit white wall in my basement. I sat in a comfy chair with my puppet Catfish propped up next to me. I added my shadow to the movie using the techniques outlined in the excellent "Cheap Shadowrama" (geocities.com/mst3kfanvids/shadtut/cheapshadowrama.html) page using free Zwei-Stein (thugsatbay.com/software/zweistein) software. I watched the video on a laptop computer sitting on a stack of books in front of me, recording my commentary into the same computer using the headset mic that you occasionally see sticking out of the side of my head. A cheap webcam recording to the harddrive of a second computer caught my movements. Using Zwei-Stein I was able to comp together the original video, my shadow webcam video, a still picture of theater seats that I picked up off the internet, and my new commentary. The mic caught bits of the original audio track, especially the loud music during the fight scenes, but that was unintentional. I didn't bother with a script. After watching the same segment 6 or 8 times, I had all my quips down pat.

RR: Unlike many MST fanvids, you didn't have any host segments. Why?

THC: Mostly because I'm lazy. In Shadorama, nobody can see that your "jumpsuit" is a T-shirt and that your "robot" is a furry hand puppet. Actually, Catfish was intended to be an alien stranded on the satellite by accident. I said a few words at the beginning explaining that I was being forced to watch old movies by mad scientists as the The Brain from Space Station Theta title sequence (hand-written on notebook paper, processed with inverted colors) unfolded, and that was about it for the backstory.

RR: How long did it take to make the fanvid?

THC: I piddled with it on and off for about a year, then actually started filming during the summer of 2004. I did the recording in 7 or 8 roughly 10-minute chunks, usually having to do each chunk several times over two or three nights to get them just right. It probably took me a week to do the editing, then a month of experimenting to get the re-encoding right. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft or the WMV format, but it's what I ended up using. I made the vid available for download from my website a few days before Halloween that year.

RR: How was the response?

THC: Response was great! I got a few good reviews on MST3K-related sites and fanvid listings. I used up my entire webhosting bandwidth quota for November in the first week. I then gave permission for some people who had successfully downloaded it to make it available via BitTorrent and similar technology. I got lots of good feedback via email and on my website (cheek.org), primarily because I listed the addresses for them in the closing credits. Which turned out to be a bad idea.

RR: The aforementioned copyright issues?

THC: (laughs) Right. I got a pack of registered mail just before Christmas. The letter within said that an American production company held the copyright and worldwide distribution rights for the movie in question because they had imported and released it on video a few years before. It also said they were agressively protecting their copyright because they were intending on doing a remake for theatrical release within the next few years. I Am Not A Lawyer, but their claims seemed very suspect to me. However, it happened that I was scheduled for surgery in early January and I really didn't have the time or money to go to court. I called them up just after Christmas and agreed to their terms, which simply put were to stop distributing the vid and destroy any copies of derivative works. I also agreed not to reveal the name of the production company or the actual name of the film "so as not to negatively impact future marketability" or some such lawyerspeak.

RR: Do any copies of The Brain from Space Station Theta still exist?

THC: I deleted all my working files before I went into surgery as I didn't want anyone with a subpoena showing up at the house while I was recuperating. The finished file was available for download for nearly two months so it is possible that copies still exist. I've made no effort to track down a copy or attempted any contact with anyone who may still be distributing copies.

RR: Is it true that your webhosting service was shut down for distrubuting the vid?

THC: The guy running the webhosting service I used got a similar letter, but that was after I'd already deleted the file from my site, so I think he pretty much ignored it. I've heard rumors that any websites that host the file or even mention The Brain from Space Station Theta receive "cease and desist" emails, but have not been able to confirm this. I will say that I can't seem to locate any of the reviews or fanvid listings I remember reading last year.

RR: Do you think anyone will page down this far and realize that this entire interview is a fake you made to freak out some of your friends?

THC: No, I expect that they'll skip right past this and then get mad at me later when they realize that I made it all up. Which is a shame because, for a figment of my imagination, you're kinda hot.

RR: (blush) Any plans for future MST3K fanvids?

THC: I'm currently searching for movies, shorts, cartoons and other video items whose copyrights have unquestionably expired and are in the public domain. In spite of Disney's and some other studios' best efforts, there do exist some films whose copyrights have expired or have been released, with more coming every year. I also have to buy a new webcam as I traded the old one away to a friend who wanted one. Once I get those, it's just a matter of rigging the lights and following all the procedures I laid out earlier in this interview.

RR: How with the new fanvids be distributed?

THC: I will probably go straight to p2p networking to distribute a low-to-medium quality version for free. If there is sufficient demand, I may create a high quality version distributed on DVD+/-R for a small fee.

RR: Thank you for your time!

Copyright 2005 by Troy H. Cheek. Reprint with prior written permission only. Comments and questions to