by William Moon

NOTE: This article originally ran on scifigangstas.com in April 2021.

There’s been a flurry of articles discussing Mystery Science Theater 3000 lately. Like this one…or this one. (Both of those are definitely worth reading.) Maybe I don’t have a tremendous amount to add here. MST3K is an institution, something that began airing in 1989 and will now plunge forth into another Kickstarter-funded iteration (to which you can donate here), this time one that’s web-based and not beholden to an outside network or streaming service. They’ve already more than doubled their original funding goal, but are looking to bring in as much as possible so a presumptive season 13 can be expanded. And the Kickstarter ends tomorrow (May 7th)! So get donating!

OK, plug over. (Joel, if you read this, I’d like my Gizmonic Institute jumpsuit in a size large, please.) Anywho, I’m really writing this article to mostly just gas on about one of my all-time favorite pop culture entities. When I first caught Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie on HBO3 or Cinemax West or whatever back in the late ’90s, I had no idea what the hell it was even supposed to be. I’d never heard of the show, and so had no clue why MST3K: The Movie had to make a point to call itself The Movie. But the goofy title did what it was designed to do and roped my 12 or 13-year-old dorky self in (along with my brother and mom, to some degree), and I watched it whenever it would randomly appear on the various movie channels our big-ass late-’90s satellite dish provided us. (Having a satellite dish in your yard that looked like it could contact the Vulcans was an entirely normal thing in those wild, wooly, Surge soda-fueled days.)

Not long after, I found episodes of the show running on the SciFi Channel (back when that network ran promos like these) and then eventually dove more into the show when I went off to college. (Our mutual love of the show was a major icebreaker for my wife and I.) While MST3K has always been considered a niche or cult show, its fanbase is sizable and loyal, and I don’t doubt that many people have associations with the show that are similar to mine (or my wife’s). One of the key attractions is it carries a certain timeless quality. (I’m far from the first person to make that observation.) There’s only the faintest whiff of a plot (though not for lack of trying on some networks’ parts), and the basic concept of “guy and two robots riff on a B-movie” just doesn’t get old. Even though you likely first think of old Atomic Era sci-fi flicks when you think of Mystery Science Theater, the kind of crud lampooned (and semi-celebrated) on the show is always being churned out by somebody somewhere. (In the most recent season, The Gauntlet, the 2013 mockbuster Atlantic Rim became the first 21st-century turd to stink up the Satellite of Love.) And as long as there are bad movies, there are going to be people who want to talk s*** about them. Mystery Science Theater just gave voice and focus to that common urge. (Let’s ask ourselves one of the truly pressing questions of our time – does a world without MST3K care whether or not there was a Cats Butthole Cut? I say no, and what a sad, butthole-deficient world that would be.)

Now that I’m older and, uh…wiser (?), reading back through the history of the franchise also inspires me somewhat. As a total wannabe creatively speaking, I take heart knowing that a show that sprung from such tremendously humble origins is still kicking into a fourth decade. A trip through the show’s Wikipedia page gives you a good idea of how DIY and cost-efficient it was in those early years. Its cable access origins also hearken back to the time of weird and occasionally wonderful local programming, some of which would spill out into regional or national success. (Tennessee advertising character Ernest P. Worrell ended up headlining a long series of low-budget comedies, the SNL sketch Wayne’s World and its subsequent movies depicted and were inspired by cable-access TV, and this era also saw uniquely weird local TV incidents like the Max Headroom Hijack in 1987.) And throughout its now long history, the show has worked hard to retain that Twin Cities puppet show aesthetic, even when given opportunities to transition to something more mainstream.

After a year on KTMA in Minnesota (which now exists as a CW affiliate under different call letters), the program moved to and helped launch what was then The Comedy Channel, which became Comedy Central two rebrands later. Whereas MST3K quickly outgrew the declining KTMA, over seven seasons, the show went from its new network’s signature series to something the channel had outgrown (by Comedy Central’s reckoning anyway). The release of the long-gestating, difficult to produce MST3K: The Movie coincided with the series’ move to the SciFi Channel, which was five years old at the time. Through these years, there was pretty much a full cast turnover, but the strength of the core premise remained. By the time SciFi canceled the series in 1999, the show had aired 197 episodes spread across its three home networks, along with the movie. Like any good science fiction TV franchise, syndication and reruns were a big part of the show’s growth post-cancellation, along with the sporadic release of DVD sets, which usually offered a sampling of episodes from different seasons due to the difficulty in securing home media distribution rights for the riffed movies. (Reactions from those involved with the mocked films varied wildly, with some people being unenthused to the point of making life difficult for the series however they could.)

But by the 2000s, we’d come to a point where the franchise had existed as a local yokel show, an award-winning cable program, a theatrically-released movie, and now a DVD binger. Original creator/star Joel Hodgson’s purchase of the rights to the series from former production partner Jim Mallon in 2015 (the two had drifted apart while working together in the Comedy Central years, with differing ideas for The Movie being a particular bone of contention) led to the relatively brief Netflix revival, which opened up the show to a new generation, a new media consumption platform, and some new headaches. (Netflix’s preferred method of releasing entire seasons of its productions at one time didn’t jibe particularly well with what the MST3K crowd were used to.) But a lot of positive elements were introduced in the Netflix years – a strong new cast, a couple of new bots, and a deep writers’ room that occasionally featured ringers. At least some of those will now carry over to the franchise’s next web-based incarnation, one that seems like a natural fit for material like this. I mean, what are YouTube/TikTok/et al. if not platforms for people to do the kind of weird crap that used to populate cable access TV? And obviously the internet in general has been a big part of the franchise since the very early days (back when getting on the internet involved the sound of a dying electronic Rodan). This kind of distribution has also been somewhat trialed by MST3K alumni series like Cinematic Titanic and RiffTrax.

So the experiment lives on, or will when the Kickstarter money comes in. Another bonus to the web model is it may make it easier for fans to enjoy both the more traditional broadcast version of the show and the live events, which have been part of the franchise since the very beginning but have become much more accessible since the proliferation of streaming. However it works out, it probably won’t be the last incarnation of the series. Mystery Science Theater 3000 may truly be The Thing That Couldn’t Die.

One Final Stinger

And now, as a parting stinger, here is an incomplete list of the kind of bizarro cinematic ephemera that is A – worth knowing about if you don’t already, and B – seems like the kind of stuff that a culture living in the shadow of MST3K is particularly appreciative of.

• The aforementioned Cats Butthole Cut
• The Interplanetary Unusual Attacking Team (this may be my all-time favorite)
• All the weird stuff people have done with the otherwise completely forgettable Bee Movie over the years
• I mean, this was a fire and not a joke or anything, but this image is from real life, not a movie
• Superstache
• The initial, joyous reaction to Sharknado before that joke got run into the ground (and became a Sharkquake)
• What Torgo or Joe Estevez were to MST3K, master thespian Nicolas Cage has become to the world at large

This list could go on forever, and feel free to comment with your additions, but, alas, it is time to go. Push the button, Frank.