This Movie Star Threatened to Beat Up the Cast of ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’
Thanksgiving is a time to visit family, eat food with family and scream at said family over their terrible politics after three glasses of red wine. But it’s also a time to watch countless hours of Mystery Science Theater 3000, thanks to their annual “Turkey Day” marathon.
The show is predicated on the idea that it’s fun for people (and robots) to make fun of cheesy old movies. Which does beg the question: Have any of MST3K’s cinematic targets ever gotten upset at the show? Well, yeah.
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The most famous example of a movie star taking umbrage with the residents of the Satellite of Love involved actor Joe Don Baker, the star of Mitchell, a 1975 procedural about a slovenly rogue cop who gets results, dammit.
Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Mitchell episode was one of their very best. But they were particularly rough on Baker, whose charmless performance is one of the reasons why Mitchell was so spectacularly dreadful. Even in the opening credits, Baker took a hit, as Tom Servo sings, “Who’s the puffy guy who’s a big blurry sex machine? Mitchell!”
But the cast soon found out that Baker knew about the show, and wasn’t happy. “We really did a number on Joe Don Baker in this show, and personally I don’t regret a minute of it,” Kevin Murphy wrote in The Mystery Science Theater 3000: Amazing Colossal Episode Guide. “As a result, the rumor mill tells us, Joe Don Baker himself hates us and wishes us all dead.” NPR noted that Baker once said of the MST3K gang that he would “kick their asses.”
Writer (and TV’s Frank) Frank Conniff thinks that the mythology of the story may be a tad overblown. “I think if it’s true at all, I think it’s something he thought about for one minute and forgot about immediately,” Conniff told an interviewer in 2018.
Host Michael J. Nelson cleared up the sequence of events slightly in a 2006 podcast interview. After hearing the rumor that Baker was mad, Nelson joked about it during a panel at a critics’ convention, leading a large number of critics to contact Baker about the validity of the story. “At the end of being called 50 times, he probably said, ‘Yes I do hate them, I do want them dead’ or whatever. But it was confirmed that he wasn’t pleased about what we did.”
The perceived threats didn’t stop MST3K from going after Baker again, years later, when they riffed on his movie Final Justice. Possibly because of his displeasure with the “Mitchell” episode, they were even harsher this time, branding him “Meatloaf: Texas Ranger” and ridiculing both his appearance and the sorry state of his career.
As of writing, 88-year-old Joe Don Baker has yet to physically attack any of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys.
