Revisiting MST3K for the first time

Way back in the 1990s, while channel-surfing on an early Saturday morning, I happened to fall upon the Sci-Fi channel (long before it chose to rebrand itself with a name that resembles Polish slang for syphilis). It was there that I noticed they were showing a really terrible film, which wasn't out of the ordinary. But though the identity of the film escapes me, what couldn't escape was a peculiar silhouette taking up the bottom portion of the film, a silhouette of a movie theater seating row and three people seated in that row. But why were two of these occupants robots, one shaped like a gumball machine and the other with a duck beak and a catcher's mitt on his head?

Before I could contemplate the meaning of this, the shadows in the "seats" started talking. Commenting about the movie? Yes, but that doesn't sound true...wait...that was...yes, that was actually pretty funny, I realized. And then they spoke again. And again. And again. By the end of the film (curse you, poor memory for being unable to recall its name!) I was in stitches, and a new fan of MST3K had been born.

Since that day, I became a devoted fan of Sci-Fi's reruns of their three seasons of MST3K, watching each episode every Saturday morning until the channel finally removed it from their schedule. But by then I had made several of these horrible films with commentary by Mike and the bots my own personal "classics." Puma man. Werewolf. The Final Sacrifice. Space Mutiny. Future War. Hobgoblins. These and more were the lifeblood of my budding interest in terrible movies , an interest that has extended to films that are so terrible that they are beautifully entertaining (give me the chance and I shall expound upon the glories of cinema dreck such as R.O.T.O.R., Gymkata, and Deadly Prey).

Ah, but I soon realized that my exposure to MST3K was lacking. Though I had watched countless times the three seasons that ran on Sci-Fi, there other episodes of Mike Nelson, Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo that had aired long ago on Comedy Central. And what of the man who had come before Mike, Joel Hodgson, who had led the show through a local access station in Minnesota before taking the show to the big state on the Comedy Channel?

I've decided that it is time for me to correct this. Though I doubt I will have the same experience as those lucky enough to watch the show since its first episode, I still wish to see as much of the show as necessary to full appreciate where the show came from and how it gradually changed into the final three seasons that are so dear to my heart. Thus, I will perform the following task: watch every MST3K from season one* and onward, writing a review in this little blog afterward of each episode.

*I've chosen to begin with season one and not with the KTMA episodes of MST3K for several reasons:

1) Several of the initial KTMA episodes are "lost," i.e., no fan-copies are known to exist. The only copies are likely held by Best Brains, Inc., who don't wish to share them for obvious reasons.


2) Some of the KTMA episodes are reused in later seasons, which makes their inclusion a bit redundant.


3) I feel it would be best to begin where a national audience would be exposed to them.

And then we'll see where things go from there. So without further ado, let's get things rolling!