Calling all fans of the 1990s TV cult hit “Mystery Science Theater 3000” — the Ann Arbor Summer Festival will present the new, live variation of the show, “Cinematic Titanic,” Friday night at the Michigan Theater.

"Mystery Science Theater 3000" alums riff on cheesy sci-fi flicks Friday in "Cinematic Titanic."

As they did on “MST3k,” “Cinematic Titanic” creator Joel Hodgson and fellow “riffers” Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein, Frank Conniff and Mary Jo Pehl will offer snarky commentary on B movies deemed among the cheesiest of the cheesiest, lamest of the lame, so-bad-they’re-good flicks that Hodgson and cast delight in verbally skewering.

Friday’s cinematic victims will be “East Meets Watts” and “The Oozing Skull.”

The Internet Movie Database describes “East Meets Watts” (1974, AKA “Stud Brown”) as a drama in which a young black man teams up with a Chinese kung-fu expert to fight a drug ring. In “The Oozing Skull” (1972, AKA “Brain of Blood”) “a blood-dripping brain transplant turns a maniac into a monster.”

Watch a teaser of “Cinematic Titanic”'s take on “East Meets Watts” (Want more? Check out “Cinematic Titanic” on “The Oozing Skull.”)

“Mystery Science Theater 3000” ended its run in 1989. “Cinematic Titanic” launched in late 2007, bringing new fans to the comedy art form as well as reconnecting with old ones. Although “MST 3000,” which developed a huge cult following during its 1988-1999 television run, used black silhouettes of the riffers placed on the lower right of the films, the “Cinematic Titanic” live cast sits on both sides of the movie screen.

Although performing in front of real people is obviously different than doing a canned TV show, Hodgson said he loves having an audience.

“The week we made our first studio DVD was (also) the first time we did our first live show in San Francisco,” he explained. “We got so many new ideas from riffing live that we came back and added jokes to the DVD. There’s so much to be gained from performing live. More than anything you look at the material really differently. … It’s creative and it’s fun.”

Besides a slew of television awards, including a Peabody, TIME magazine included “Mystery Science Theater 3000” in its list of “100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME” in 2007.

“It’s very peculiar,” Hodgson admitted of the honor, especially since the program was not aggressively marketed.

“People who liked ‘MST3000’ probably found it or got it shown to them by a friend,” he observed. “I don’t think it got sold to people like most TV. Most people didn’t find it because they saw an ad for it. It was an inversion of most TV, I think. There wasn’t a lot of hype. … It was almost like social networking before social networking — just people sending tapes to their friends and talking about it.”

He said the time seemed right to pick up where “MST3000” left off.

“Personally, I realized that I really missed it,” explained Hodgson. “That’s what was motivating me. It just took a couple of phone calls. We all felt like doing it again. … (And) ‘MST’ just keeps selling more and more DVDs. It hasn’t gone down (in popularity) which is really strange and which I am really grateful for.”

Hodgson said he and his cast unearth a lot of “Cinematic Titanic” candidates online. However there’s more to the selection process than just locating a movie ripe for the kind of commentary in which they specialize.

“Behind the curtain, you have to find movies you know you can work with. It’s pretty academic, it’s not like you could go window-shopping and say ‘I’d really love to do that movie.’ It doesn’t really work that way. … It takes a long time for us to find a movie we all like that we want to work with.”

About half the movies they consider are in the public domain, he said, meaning they are royalty and license-free, while others have be licensed from their owners. There are usually more restrictions on the films that have to be licensed. Sometimes, Hodgson added, the group gets recommendations from fans.

“They are online just like we are, looking at movies. Most of the time they are movies we can’t use,” he said. “Most folks don’t understand the particulars of licensing. (They say) we should do ‘Yor, The Hunter From The Future,’ but they don’t know that behind the scenes you have to track somebody down, negotiate with them, make them an offer, sign a contract, transfer the print, edit and all that.”

Once a suitable film is in hand, the team views it and then breaks it down into sections.

“We all work on it. We each do a riff pass, we basically go through the entire movie on our own,” he explained. “Once we have a master list of riffs, each person takes a segment, they are the producer of the segment, they’re the one that goes in finds the best riffs, or comes up with riffs if there’s places where there are no riffs.”

Doing the show does lead to complications — like a riff bombing — they didn’t have to worry about when they didn’t have an audience.

“Sometimes there’s stuff you write you think is going to kill and it doesn’t get a reaction. That does happen,” he confirmed, adding that it doesn’t necessarily mean the material was bad. Acoustics can also have something to do with how the performer feels the audience is reacting.

“A lot of times it’s the rooms we play,” he said. “Some of them are acoustically perfect and in that case you can hear the audience and they’re right with you, but sometimes you can’t hear the audience. We played this arena in St. Louis, which is a hockey arena, 8,000 people, and we couldn’t hear anything. You couldn’t really say to yourself it’s not going well.”

He said that although other forms of media may be ripe for skewering (soap operas, infomercials and reality shows come immediately to mind), “Cinematic Titanic” will just to stick to movies.

“When we did ‘MST’ I think we did a couple of ‘General Hospitals’ that were public domain, but to me it feels like we are genetically predisposed to movies. They’re just this perfect size. On the track that we’re on to perform live, that works best for us.”

Hodgson observed that, thanks to the Internet, riffing on pop culture has become more popular than ever, and other comedy groups are doing the same thing live. “They’re doing it to everything, it’s wide open,” he observed. “There’s groups that I’ve seen in Atlanta or Austin, San Francisco, and the people online.

“I’m really happy that, as far as a comedic art form, movie riffing is growing. There’s lots of people doing it and finding new ways to do it. I’m pretty proud of that, pretty amazed that’s going on … I’m thrilled to be associated with that, it’s great,” he said.

Roger LeLievre is a free-lance writer for AnnArbor.com.