Weird Al wanted him for the role of Philo in UHF. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your stance, he couldn’t take the job. He was already busy, you see. He was starting a show on an actual UHF station, St. Paul’s KTMA Channel 23. The show was inspired by the movie Silent Running and was about a guy trapped in space with robots. So Joel had to work on scripts and sets and build puppets and watch terrible, terrible movies. It would be interesting to live in a world where Joel was Philo, but I’d hate to live in a world without Mystery Science Theater 3000 and its offshoots.
I have no intention of getting into host debates here. Joel’s original vision was that it would be a bit of a Doctor Who thing, and you’d have your preferred host just as some people have a preferred Doctor. The reason that didn’t happen has a lot to do with the cable landscape of the ’90s; the reason it may yet happen has a lot to do with the streaming landscape today. But whether your preferred host is Joel, Mike, or Jonah, there is no show without Joel. Individual aspects can be traced to others, but the show itself was created by Joel.
Joel was originally a stand-up comedian, in those pre-MST3K days. I’ve never actually seen his stand-up, but apparently, he was into prop comedy. (His dislike of Gallagher is one of the few resentments I’m aware of his holding; Gallagher used to touch his props, among other issues.) He did a few appearances on TV; he did four episodes each of Saturday Night Live and The David Letterman Show. After taking some time off to creatively reorient himself, he teamed up with Jim Mallon and started his little cable access puppet show.
Whether you prefer him or one of the others, another thing that’s clear is that the show changed when he left. Later changes were the product of executive interference—The Sci-Fi Channel insisted on the shift to just science fiction movies; USA executives insisted on the ongoing plotlines—but the loss of the invention exchange was just simply that Joel was the one who created the inventions. The show’s aesthetic was Joel’s; the inventions and the robots were Joel’s. Note that, in the Mike years, they don’t even pretend that Mike was capable of building a robot by himself. Joel may have been sleepy—because, in the pilot, he’d been up for four days—but it was a sleepiness with a lot of cleverness behind it.
Okay, I admit it. I’m a Joel fan. He’s my host. That’s okay; that probably has at least something to do with the fact that I started watching the show during the Joel years, in its initial run. The first episodes I saw included Giant Gila Monster and City Limits. But a thing even a lot of Mike fans have agreed with me on is that one of Joel’s most winning qualities is that he just seems to love movies. After all, he’s the one who told the ‘bots that they needed to come up with a good thing about the day’s film. Even when that was extremely hard to do.
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