On October 28, 2010, Mary Jo Pehl and Trace Beaulieu participated in an approximately hour-long interview as part of the CMS Colloquium Series podcast that comes out of the  Massachusetts Institute Of Technology’s Comparative Media Studies program. They were there in connection with Cinematic Titanic Live‘s premier of Rattlers!, being performed the next day at the Wilbur theater in Boston. At about 31 minutes into the interview, the two MST3K alums were asked about movie riffing as being an American-only phenomenon and Trace let out the there was a Russian version on YouTube. This set Chris ‘Sampo’ Cornell to digging and on 27 January 2011, he posted his findings as a news item on the Satellite News website: the opening theme song.

It was called Project Popcorn.

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Way, way (way before even Josh Way, way) back when the original MST3KFanvids site was brand new, the researches of Listy uncovered information about some kids that were making some mysterious MST3K shows of their own. Don’t ask what they were called (Mystery Science Theater 4000), it’s a mystery. Shhh! The main instigator of this band of kinder-riffers was the less than mysterious Kyle Pittman. He’d soon be interviewed in the very first of the website’s series of interviews with fanvid creators: 7 1/2 Questions With Kyle Pittman.

Born in Germany, while his US Army father was stationed there, he ended up in Ohio, where the mysterious MST4000 series was created when Kyle was around fourteen. What can’t be summed up as mysterious is the easily confirmable fanvid called Play MSTie For Me: Cindy Goes to a Party.

The premise? Adam Heart, played by Kyle, lives on the moon- inside a moon base. (Or he could just be “in another State”.) He watches a single educational short, and is joined in the theater by chairs. It’s a very lonely moon base. There aren’t even any talking plants (like in the Moon Base Nine fanvid series). If there had been any more episodes, perhaps the moon base could have been explored further. Alas, there were not. The only episode Kyle produced was uploaded to YouTube, in two parts, on October 6, 2009. Some of the mystery of MST4000 is explained in the description of PMFM:CGTAP:

Used to do this when when I was a kid, with some cardboard thrown across a tv and filming it with a Hi-8 camcorder, now my childhood dream has come true and I’m actually sitting in the seats!

His early fanvid work is not available, so it’s more important details are still a mystery. Play MSTie For Me, is the fulfillment of Kyle’s dream to do a proper MST3K hommage.

Kyle Lorenzo Pittman is a twenty five year old filmmaker who labors under the auspices of his own Black Moth Pictures. In a former life, he was also a full-time professional musician. Working as the front man of creative outlets The Illiad, Adam Heart (and the Children of Light), and his current project Heavy Sixer. Kyle’s music is available from various online sources, including his record label Germ Free.

You can find PMFM on the adamheart85 channel on YouTube. You can even find some of his early BMP efforts on slimymeteor, a channel run by his sometime collaborator Jeremy Dick. But his more serious efforts are catalogued on Vimeo. There’s a teaser for his latest project: an animated short entitled The Unholy Blood of Dracula; an experimental short; the pilot episode of a scienty fiction webseries; and his latest creation I Was a Teenage Antichrist.

Kyle  lives in London.

The stalwart MST3K fanvid series Mystery Fandom Theater 3000 has returned! We are now all Fillipino.

MFT3K is working on its fourth episode. After a long wait, they’re back, with a tiny shake-up in the cast due to life moving on and actors moving away.

Check their site for details.