Test Pattern: Mike Nelson returns

• Sept. 15, 2004 | 6 a.m. PT

Mike Nelson, how we missed you

Those of us who loved "Mystery Science Theater 3000" have had a hole in our entertainment schedules since the show went off the air in January, leaving Mike Nelson and the 'Bots watching their first-ever movie all over again in a Wisconsin rec room. (New episodes haven't been made since 1999, but the Sci-Fi Channel kept showing reruns until January 2004 — read the cast's farewell messages at Satellite News.)

Oh sure, we have our tapes (as in: "Keep circulating the tapes."), but they're getting frayed. And the Rhino DVDs are great, but they're just not coming out fast enough (and would it kill them to put out a disc of "Incredible Melting Man"?) And cast members have come out with books —"Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese" and Kevin "Tom Servo" Murphy's "A Year at the Movies" among them.

Fox Home Entertainment

But if you really want some more Mike Nelson movie satire on new films, have I got a secret for you. Thanks to DAP Central, I learned that Nelson has done DVD commentaries for two classic movies: 1962 horror movie "Carnival of Souls" and the restored edition of 1938's "Reefer Madness." Of course, I had to buy them both. (If you do the same, be sure to get the right ones: Both movies have non-Nelson editions as well.)

The Nelson-featured edition of "Carnival of Souls," which is only available through Off-Color Films, comes with Nelson's autograph in silver paint pen across the DVD cover. The horror classic is offered both in its original black-and-white and in a colorized version.

If you're unfamiliar with "Carnival of Souls," you're in for a treat. The sometimes creepy, sometimes campy film uses as part of its setting an abandoned Mormon amusement park, Saltair, and you better believe Nelson has some comments about that. (As a group of zombie-like undead swirl in a weird dance scene, he notes "That's what raves looks like in 1966.") He also provides real factual info: I'd seen the film before, but didn't realize that director Herk Harvey played the lead zombie until Nelson repeatedly hollered things like "DIRECT! Get back and DIRECT!"

Nelson also has a great time with "Reefer Madness," the infamous anti-marijuana film. (The film repeatedly spells it "marihuana," which inspires Nelson to note "This was 10 years before the invention of the letter 'J.' Not a lot of people know that.") The film's casting of 40-year-olds as teenagers and eternally long introductory warning come in for a lot of derision. ("There's the 'startle' warning, there because back then people were easily startled. Cartoons had the same warning," Nelson notes.)

Both DVDs are short — "Reefer Madness" is 62 minutes long, and "Carnival of Souls" is 78. While I missed Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot chiming in, I laughed out loud all through both DVDs. Notes DAPCentral: "I think this is the closest we are going to get to new MST3K episodes."

P.S.: I'll take it!

• Sept. 13, 2004 | 6 a.m. PT

Test Pattern Book Club: "Betty Crocker's Cooky Book"

I grew up in the 1970s with a mom who, like many moms of her era, seemed to throw together delicious, multi-course dinners just out of her head. But that doesn't mean she didn't own cookbooks — she had a whole shelf of them, and my favorite was, and remains, "Betty Crocker's Cooky Book." And best of all, the "Cooky Book" has been republished exactly as it was in 1963, with no modern editor going back and yanking out all the charm that made it such a favorite (Betty Crocker, $24.95).

The charms of this cookbook are many and varied — from the oddly endearing spelling of "cooky" in the title to the three-ring-binder, reminds-me-of-a-school-notebook format. But the best feature of the cookbook is its use of photography.

First, you should know that I am an enormous fan of photographs in cookbooks. Can't have enough of 'em, as far as I am concerned — how do I know if I want to bake an item if I have no clue what it will look like?

Betty Crocker understands me. Not only does she feature photos of virtually every cookie, there are often photos or lovely illustrations of the cookie being made.

And then, the pièce de résistance: Every so often, the "Betty Crocker Cooky Book" features full-page photos of cookies in the most unintentionally hilarious photographs ever. It's as if the photographer snuck into a kitchen in Cookieland, State of Cookiedom, planet of Cookie.

My absolute favorite is the two-page spread on pages 86 and 87. We see a countertop next to an open fridge, and this countertop is spread with a feast that Cookie Monster would kill for.

Three plates of cookies (molasses crinkles, orange drops, cherry almond macaroons and oatmeal cookies) share space with a full glass cookie jar and a pan of frosted, nut-topped brownies. A scoop sits in a full half-gallon of strawberry ice cream. Orange and strawberry pop and milk (out of a bottle — ah, the good ol' days) are available to wash everything down.

But just displaying the food wasn't enough for this set designer: He or she set a orange-and-white letter sweater, a radio, record albums and a gauzy blue scarf around the eats, as if Jane or Joe Campus had just come home from classes at Rydell High. Best of all is a note impaled on a nearby pencil: "Have fun! Please clean up the mess. Mom."

Ah, if only staring into this photo could let me jump back through time and space, into this fantasy "Brady Bunch" world where Mom has time to make four or five different kinds of cookies every day, and kids have nothing more pressing on their minds than eating them all up. The photos in the reproduced cookbook haven't been touched up, either, they have that sort of muted 1960s color scheme that marks the difference between actual footage of the past and recreations.

There are other great full-page photos in the book — one features beautifully decorated gingerbread cookies, another shows four kinds of cookies on a cooling rack next to a just-being-packed blue tin lunchbox. And near the end of the book there's a terrific section that features a top Betty Crocker recipe from each decade, from the 1880s (hermits, plump with raisins and nuts) through the 1960s (elegant French lace cookies). I'm almost inspired to host a cookies-through-the-years party just so I could bake them all.

I review cookbooks as part of my job, and there have been some wonderful ones in recent years. But "Betty Crocker's Cooky Book" is the one I'd pick for a gift for a newlywed or new homeowner, because the memories are as sweet as the recipes.

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