The first topic of discussion: How did you discover/find out about MST3K?
My story can only be told after telling you another story, which is this:
Back in the early ’80s I was just-out-college guy sharing an apartment in Philadelphia with several people, including the woman I would marry a few years later.
One evening four of us, two couples, were hanging out, drinking cheap wine and perhaps enjoying other festive substances (I do not recall for certain, your honor), and somehow or other the little black-and-white portable TV we rarely watched got turned on. Clicking around the channels, what should we encounter but a weird and hilarious movie called “Women of the Prehistoric Planet.” We started watching, and as we sat together on the couch, everybody started throwing out funny comments. It was clearly a you-had-to-be-there situation. We were all –ahem– relaxed and we were all good friends, very familiar with each other’s sense of humor, and we were all just exactly in the mood to be doing this. The result, at least in my memory, was an evening of genuine hilarity, a really golden evening with good friends.
I guess the reason the evening was such fun for me is that I love collaborative comedy. A great standup is fun, but the only thing I enjoy more than watching a group of funny people being funny together is being PART of that group.
Anyway, after that evening, that movie became my “white whale.” I wanted to see it again, to kind of re-live that wonderful evening. I scoured the TV Guide for another airing, to no avail. (This was back in the days before VCRs, when movies were, as James Lileks has observed, like comets with unknown trajectories. They would appear without warning, then go away for a while, then come back…)
Now, flash-forward to December of ’89. I’m living in a different apartment, in a different Philadelphia neighborhood. I had married that lady a few years ago and there was an 18-month-old baby napping in the back room (that baby is now a sophomore in college, who still likes the occasional nap). With the great new job I’d gotten I could afford cable TV (newly available in my neighborhood), and being a comedy buff, one of my favorite channels was “The Comedy Channel.”
One Saturday morning I turned on the TV and what should appear but “Women of the Prehistoric Planet!” I was beside myself. I called my wife in from the other room to show her my find. I reminded her of the golden evening. She sort of remembered, a little. Then she went back to what she was doing.
I settled in to watch and it was pretty much at that point that I began to notice something strange going on at the bottom of the screen. I watched on in gob-smacked amazement. These people were doing the SAME thing WE did with this movie! They were making fun of it! And they were making fun of it really, really well! I was hooked.
That’s my story. What’s yours?
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All I can say is thank the good Lord above for Marcus Alexander Hart (http://www.marcushart.com/) who saved my MSTie soul and showed me the silhouetted light.
One Saturday afternoon many moons ago, my dad and I ran across some silly shows with silhouettes at the bottom. The episode was “Project Moonbase” and I’ve been hooked ever since.
I remember talking to my uncle from Minneapolis on the phone sometime in the late 80s. He seemed distracted, said something about “some weird show on tv with people talking to the screen” . . . In the summer of 89, he came to visit, and brought some videotapes wtih him. The rest is history . . .
Four graying, portly men bellowed along with the karaoke machine, trying to recreate Twist and Shout at my twenty year high school class reunion. As I strained to do my best John Lennon, the guy next to me, married to one of my classmates winced and gyrated. Somehow, we must have bonded.
He took me over to the cash bar and started talking to me about a TV show he watched about a guy stuck in a spaceship with two robots. The marooned terrain and his mechanical companions were forced to sit through really bad movies sent to them by a couple of mad scientists. Since he was buying my import, I listened further.
My fellow crooner explained that the bad movie show was a comedy. I thought, how could this be? I’d heard of Dr. Who, and I was a fan of Firesign Theater, but the concept of the show sounded odd. Our liquid leisure ended with me being informed that the show was shown on Comedy Central, a network my cable didn’t provide. Guess I was out of luck, since I wasn’t going to call my cable provider the next day. No space stranded cinema comedy for me. Life went on.
Three years later, I was punching my TV remote on a cold February night, and I came across a cheap black and white film with three heads in the corner making wisecracks about it. My oldest son alerted me to cease the involuntary clicking, and allow my finger to rest for awhile. What we were viewing was The terror from the year 5000. We didn’t stop watching until the stinger, and I couldn’t wait to see another episode.
Channel surfing, I came across “Teeanagers From Outer Space” being MSTed. Between that and the Adam West-hosted Turkey Day Marathon the following Thursday, I was hooked.
I grew up in Juneau, Alaska and one of the bummers is that we did not get Comedy Central until the mid-90s!
I was in 7th grade and my family was living in a crummy duplex while our new home was being built about a mile away. It must have been a Friday or Saturday night and I was flipping the channels. I stopped when I saw a terrible looking 70s movie with a men in wannabe ancient Greek garb running through a field. I noticed the silhouette right away and decided to watch for a bit. I was cracking up. LOSING it, in fact. The episode was Colossus and the Headhunters.
The summer we moved into our new house was the summer they had the fans pick the episodes that would run late at night. Well, I am the youngest of five kids and I had a great time watching MST3K just about every night with my mom and my oldest brother, who is about 10 years older than me. I even think that because I had older brothers and sisters (and a mother who retains “useless” pop-culture knowledge like a camel retains water) really helped me appreciate MST a lot more at a younger age. I felt privileged.
The whole next school year my schedule went like this:
Wake up, go to school, come home, watch MST3K on a VHS tape with some popcorn and, since I lived in Alaska, Hot Cocoa. MST aired from 1 to 3 AM in Juneau every night and I would set the VCR up to record it.
Today I am 25 and am proud to still be in love with the show. When people ask me to tell them about myself I usually say something like, “I really love punk rock, zombie movies, and Mystery Science Theater 3000”. The crazies thing, to me anyway, is that MST3K has become a sort of lifestyle for me. I go about my day as if I were marooned in space and the bad movie I have to watch is my life.
Thank you, Mystery Science Theater 3000!!!
Around 1990 I read an article in TV Guide or some other publication about the Comedy Channel, which made my 9 year old brain explode.
Of course, my local station didn’t get Comedy Central ’till early 1992. By which point I had heard of MST in various articles and was excited to watch it already, so I did. And uh.. never stopped really.
I wish I could remember exactly how it happened. I came to it late (93? 94? 95? you get the idea). I would get home from work and turn on the tube and there was this funky one-hour show on Comedy Central hosted by this weird guy with white hair and beard. It didn’t take long, however, for me to rush home and watch that show every night after work. Sure wish I could remember what the first movie was I saw.
Here’s my attempt at an homage to two of my favorite things: LINK to MST3PO
Channel surfing in San Luis Obispo one lonely Saturday afternoon with just my little 1 year-old to keep me busy, I found a weird movie with silhouettes in front and an address flashed on the screen, bearing the city name of Hopkins, MN, which is one city over from where I went to high school. I was intrigued, thinking anything out of MN has got to be good. And lo, it was. I nearly choked laughing while watching Ator fly with his contraption over the castle. The comments these shadow things made were hilarious!
For a long time, though when my husband and I moved back to MN we didn’t have cable so I missed many shows, but I am happy to play catch up with DVDs. I saw all the Sci-Fi shows, though. And I finally got into the second to last tour of BBI when they were working on Horrors of Spider Island.
I am the youngest of five, ages spread out over almost twenty years, and I worshiped my older siblings’ tastes in film, music, and tv. (Except for Gary Glitter. I still can’t understand that one.) When summer time came I was usually shipped out to live under their care–not unlike “A Visit to Uncle Jim’s Farm” except with less rope climbing and good, old, wholesome food–and for one particular summer in the early 90s, my eldest sister introduced me to MST3K. My first episode was “Teenagers From Space”, and while most of the riffs were well over my head, the host segments hooked me.
Alas, when that golden summer was over, so was my access to cable. And it would be 1996 before I encountered cable in my own home.
Fast forward to 1995–I found myself shipped out to a youth writing conference for the summer (beginning to see a pattern here…), where the dorm councilors blasted the soundtrack from Grease 24/7. My only solace was to be found in unlimited fountain drinks from the student union and *gasp* a MST3K marathon!!! Before the first episode was over, J&tb had attracted a smallish group of musical refugees, and so began yet another golden summer in my young life.
Since then MST3K has pulled me towards the B side of cinema, and though the dvds are in constant rotation in my dvd player, no movie is truly safe from riffing. MST3K has also become a mighty litmus test of friends, as those who don’t enjoy a good riff don’t last long in my address book.
So thank you, MST3K, for giving me the gift that keeps on giving–the ability to laugh at contemporary mores.
I moved from my chldhood home in the city to a more rural/suburban area in the summer of ’99. I was 11 years old and despite missing my old friends I was enjoying the better schools, you know, ones where kids weren’t beating the crap out of each other. I liked that but a lack of people my own age anywhere near my home gave me a lot of time to read and watch TV. I had been somewhat aware of MST3K via channel surfing and I remember seeing a commercial for the series finale but I wasn’t that interested.
A little while later, on a whim, I picked up MST3K The Movie at the local video rental. I don’t know what inspired me to get it, but I did, and I loved it. I found out when Sci Fi was airing the show and then I began my four years of watching MST3K re-runs on Saturday mornings. When I started to notice some episodes dissappearing from rotation I began to tape the show and bring them to friends and family. I bought the episode guide at Books A Million and learned about Joel, Frank, KTMA and so on… And here I am, a few years and several hundreds of dollars worth of DVDs later.
Back in 1995, I was hanging out with a buddy of mine in college, and after many, MANY drinks (among other things) he started flipping through the channels on TV when I noticed something really odd: a movie with some kind of shadowplay going on at the bottom. I told him to hold up and asked him what the HELL is that?
“Oh, that’s Mystery Science Theater. Dude, YOU would LOVE this show.”
So we watched it for a minute or two (the movie, BTW, was Hercules & the Captive Women) and as I saw a character sitting on a beach, I remarked to my buddy that said character looked just like Christopher Walken. Less than 2 seconds later, Servo piped up with: “Christoper Walken!”
And with that, I was hooked, and Tom Servo became one of my new heroes (and has been ever since).
Ironically, I found out a few days later that I actually OWNED 3 episodes on a VCR tape that had been gifted to me 2 years earlier. But it was never explained to me that they were Misties, and the tape was simply marked as The Crawling Hand, Gamera, and Robot Monster, none of which were movies I EVER wanted to watch for their stand alone… value, as it were.
In conclusion, MST3K = Greatest Comedy Show EVER. :grin: :grin: :grin:
About the time MST3K: The Movie came out, there was an article about the show and movie in TV Guide. I didn’t have cable at the time so I’d never heard of the show, but it caught my interest. I managed to catch a few of the episodes in syndication, but being on at 2 or 3 AM I didn’t actually make it through it as much as I liked until we got satellite… when I didn’t get to see it as much as I wished because of Comedy Central’s scheduling.
In 2004 my friend told me about this show i’d never heard of about this guy and some robots making fun of old sci fi movies. He eventually showed me eegah, Ive been hooked ever since.
I was a senior in college, the local cable operator just started carrying The Comedy Channel in January. The first episode I watched in its entirety was “Moon Zero Two,” cartoon intro and all. :mrgreen:
I’ve always liked films that are cheesy. Grew up with Japanese monster movies and shows of the 60s and 70s. In the late 80s I was channel surfing and noticed a movie. Then I notice there was talking during it. Then I noticed what I thought was animated characters in the lower right of the screen. At that point I was hooked.
I remember seeing MST3k for the first time during the first Thanksgiving marathon. It must have been first because I seem to remember it being a season one episode. I’m about 90% certain it was “The Crawling Hand.” I can remember my mom waking in and laughing at some silly riff they were making. Though, she denies, to this day, that she thinks the show is funny (though she still laughs).
I was in 7th grade, and growing up in Chicago, I was already a fan of the idea that you can show a cheesy movie on TV and have a host make fun of it. Son of Svengoolie was my first exposure to the concept. But MST3k seemed to refine it.
It was November 6, 1999. My brother and I just got our first apartment away from our parents. We finally had cable TV! I woke up and watched ESPN for a while, I’m not a college football fan and baseball season was over, so I didn’t watch it long. I then decided to flip around and see what else was on, I found something funny on the Sci-Fi channel. It was a guy and two robots making fun of a really bad movie called “The Space Children”. I couldn’t believe a show like this existed because up until a month early, all I ever saw was ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and PBS. I then spent that weekend telling my little sister about it and looking around on the internet for something about it. The next night I was at a friend’s house and asked him about it. He said it was called Mystery Science Theater 3000 and it had been around for like 8 or 9 years. I found mst3kinfo.com on his computer and found out it had just been canceled. I couldn’t believe it. I finally found something worth watching on cable and it wasn’t gonna be there anymore. Of course I had no idea that the show would be on TV until January 04 and there was over 170 episodes to watch and here it is 9 years later and I’m no where close to seeing all of them.
i’m dave’s older brother!!!
the 1st time i probably saw mst3k was in college in arizona – i briefly breezed past it while channel surfing. it wasn’t until the summer, when i went back to Alaska to work did i watch a full episode with my little brother, dave. we were 10 years apart in age, but this silly show brought us closer together. we still trade lines from the show and enjoy putting in a DVD whenever we’re together.
i don’t remember what episode was the 1st, but my favorite is probably “Space Mutiny”. I don’t think i’ve ever laughed that much during any movie EVER.
Thanks, mst3k –
I’m not exactly sure what the first episode of MST3K I ever saw was. As for how I discovered it, I’m thinking that my parents watched it pretty often and I just joined in on their viewing one day. Back in the glorious early 90s, the years of my childhood, I was all hopped up on great children’s fair like Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, the Muppets and Sherry Lewis’s Lambchop. Because I was so fond of Puppets, despite that MST3K aired on a “grownup channel” it still felt like it was just as much for me as for my folks.
I was a Godzilla fan in those years, and the only movie I distinctly remember watching being riffed was Godzilla VS. the Sea Monster, and I remember finding it odd they were riffing a movie I actually watched and enjoyed on its own. I really enjoyed the Godzilla Genealogy Bop.
The only other distinct riff I recall from those years was from an unknown film which featured a shot of the lines on the road going by as a car sped down a highway, and Crow, I believe, said “Honey, don’t look at the lines or you’ll throw up!” or something very similar and I absolutely cracked up at this particular line.
It’s funny how memory messes with you, and how, as a kid, if you don’t understand something, you make up your own explanations. I don’t think my parents ever fully paid attention to the shows’ premise, because I was always told, when I asked, that the reason Joel was in space was because he worked for NASA and watched the movie to keep himself from being bored after winding down from a hard day’s work. For some reason, I remember thinking that Dr. F and Frank were on the “ship” (the SOL) with him, and that the views of them were through some sort of opening in the ceiling, like they were on the floor above him, working on science-stuff.
After my cable dropped Comedy Central I was devastated. MST3K became an increasingly vague but fond memory in years to come. I rediscovered the show when I found Pod People and Manos for rent in Blockbuster in about 2003 and, after doing a ‘net search, was shocked to find that the show had switched networks and continued to air all the way to ’99 with a new host. I regretted missing all those years. I do think I remember ads for the movie coming out briefly and was disappointed when it didn’t play near me. I’d still love to see it in the theater.
And I’m delighted by the Film Crew, Rifftrax and Ct. The legend lives on!
Like most good comedy shows in my life, I was introduced to MST3k by my mother, who had it on and invited me over to watch with her. I have no idea how this leapt from ‘watching some show with my mom’ to ‘getting up at 6am every Saturday to watch this show on the SciFi channel’, but it did.
To this day I cannot remember if my first episode was Overdrawn at the Memory Bank or the Undead. They were the first two, but in some uncertain order. It was a bit sad to learn that I missed out on the Comedy Central years, but hey – I’ve just got that much good stuff left to go! Thank you, Internet!
Not an exciting origin, but it resulted in the cardboard Crow robot that I made for a high school ceramics class. Got a pretty good grade on it, too!
My wife and I were on vacation down in New Orleans in September of 1991. While getting dressed to go out and about that night in the hotel room, we had the TV on and the most bizarre show came on. It was a Gamera movie and the were these silhoettes at the bottom of the screen. Within seconds of the appearance of ‘Cornjob’, we were hooked. The evenings festivities were delayed while we watched. When we got back home to the Chicago burbs, I made a point of seeking out MST and eventually, our cable company finally got Comedy central and never missed an ep. Now, we’ve got every one that’s come out on DVD and will continue to get them, as well as any next FC and CT DVD that comes out in the future.
The memory of everything surrounding my first viewing is all in a haze; I was around seven years old, alone in the living room, and randomly flipping channels. The one thing I do remember perfectly vividly, though, was catching one snippet of The Amazing Colossal Man –
“I don’t want to grow anymore…”
“I’m a Toys ‘R Us kid.”
“I don’t want to grow anymore!”
“I’m a Toys ‘R Us kid!”
– and thinking it was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen. I want to say that even as a little kid I could vaguely discern the powerful arms of large companies trying to protect their creative works, so the very idea of such direct mocking allowed on television struck me as a watershed moment in entertainment.
Being small and lacking attention, I forgot about the show entirely until, six or seven years later, one of my friends made it a point to gift everyone MST3K: The Movie as their birthdays rolled around. We watched the tape, the memories flooded back, and another confirmed mstie joined the ranks.
One Saturday morning peeling an eye open I saw a program on Sci-Fi channel about a guy with two robots who were shown really bad movies and how they reacted to them. Enjoying bad movies was an old hobby of mine anyway, but watching with these guys made it even more fun. When talking to a friend I found out that not only was there a Mike but a Joel and a past much deeper than I knew! Since then I’ve been a confirmed mystie, and have watched almost every episode. Great stuff, cutting edge, love the fact that they’re all still out there making us laugh eight years after the final broadcast.
I first found MST3K in ’96 or ’97, when our cable company finally added Comedy Central to our channel line up. I think the shows’ run on that channel may have already ended by then, or it was about to. I watched reruns of episodes on that channel and then Comedy Central stopped showing them. The MST3K movie came out and I bought it on VHS.
Having known about the show, I then looked for news of it’s return, which I found on the Sci-Fi Channel. The Sci-Fi Channel era of the show was my first true exposure to MST3K, in which I would watch the show regularly. I know some long time fans of the show may consider Sci-Fi the “down” years of the show, but I’ll always remember those seasons with fondness.
Mine was all the way back in the ’90s, but I should preface it that I loved hosted movies on tv, especially horror/sci fi ones. In Kentucky our local host (for only just over a year, 1985-86) was Millicent B. Ghastly. Loved her show, but she left to pursue actual acting or something. After that there was always that one guy on USA, or Joe Bob Briggs, but none really caught my eye again until MST3K.
1990, I guess, because they weren’t Comedy Central yet. I was at the apartment of a married couple of friends, and while they were off arguing or something, I flipped through the channels until I found something interesting… First Spaceship on Venus. Like others, it took me a few minutes to realize that there was something more than a bad movie going on… and by then I was hooked. I loved bad movies, I loved making fun of them.
I was so hooked that I immediately bought these friends their own VCR, or rather, I bought one for myself and loaned it to them, because I didn’t have cable and was too poor to get it. I’m surprised I could even afford the VCR at the time, to be honest. The deal was they could use the VCR as long as they left it set for MST3K. Then I’d drop by the day after the show, switch out tapes, and try to get out of the battlezone as soon as I could.
See, by “married” couple, I should really say “married, fighting, cheating, yelling, back-stabbing, talking-bad-about-the-other-behind-their-back, irritating-me-to-the-point-of-not-wanting-to-spend-any-more-time-with-them-other-than-to-get-my-damn-tape” couple. When the marriage ended messily, and the guy went on to marry the girl he cheated on his wife with, they amicably let me keep the VCR there a little longer, although I really still couldn’t stand being there because all my friend would talk about when I came over is how crazy his ex was.
Eventually the new couple wised up and got really snotty towards me if I wanted to tape MST3K there, but that was okay because I’d gotten a raise and could afford cable.
It was 1996 and I was 11 years old. I lived outside of Philadelphia and the old independent station – WGTW 48 – had started showing MST3K Wednesday nights at 9PM. I don’t remember which episode first hooked me, but before long I was pleading with my dad to tape the shows. I still have a VCR hooked up to watch my remaining VHS tapes, like Master Ninja II and War of the Colossal Beast.
Before long, I made my parents drive me to Willow Grove to buy a copy of the ACEG (hard to find at that point), had convinced the local video renter, Corner Video, to let me have the movie poster in the window, and once Mike and the bots moved to Sci Fi, started pleading with granpa to tape the shows, because we didn’t get that channel.
A good friend living in Minneapolis had told me about MST back in early 1989, but I never saw it until July 1993 when my local cable company finally picked up Comedy Central. On a Sunday morning I flipped on the TV and saw Mr B Natural was on. The short itself caught my attention, but then I started listening to the riffing, which of course was absolutely hilarious. This was followed by the movie War of the Colossal Beast and I was hooked. MST had just started airing every night at midnight and I immediately began watching every chance I could. I’ve been an avid fan ever since.
At some point in the early nineties I was flipping through channels at my grandparents house and caught an episode of MST3K. Within minutes I was hooked and then told that we was watching something else and it wasn’t until the very beginning of the Scifi years on that first broadcast that this became my obsession.
It was late January 1996 when I was up early one Sunday morning and found my father was up already and watching TV. Comedy Central had just been added to our cable lineup a week or so prior, so when he said he was watching some B-movie (which I later found out was The Human Duplicators) on CC I just figured it was for the cheesy potential. I had no idea that these cheesy movie actually had built-in teasing until, like everyone else here, I took notice of those three guys at the bottom of the screen and their antics. I sat down to check it out and became hooked at the moment where the Asian woman was duplicated to which Crow riffed “Oh, it’s a Hunan duplicator!”
I was an instant convert. I hit up the Internet for information on what this Mystery Science dealie was all about. I started taping the late night reruns. Being midway through high school at the time, I started exposing my friends to the show. When I found out about MST3K: The Movie I convinced my parents to take a friend and I on the great pilgrimage to the one-night-only local showing about an hour’s drive away (tickets were limited, the line to get in was long, and luckily we snapped up the last of the seats) where after the film Kevin Murphy and Jim Mallon came out to take some Q&A. I special-ordered the ACEG from the local bookstore and read it until the pages began falling out.
The obsession leaked into my schoolwork. A group project in American history class about the 1950s was a perfect excuse to screen the “A Date With Your Family” short to the entire class (which, thankfully, “got it”). When we needed an alarm sound for a “duck and cover” drill, we used the “Movie Sign!” alarm (and it took forever to find an instance we could get an audio recording of where it’s silent on the SOL bridge when that alarm goes off!). Some friends and I even toyed with the idea of riffing one of the school’s foreign language instructional shorts for German class (in German, of course) for extra credit, although that fell apart when we couldn’t convince the teacher that the idea had some educational value.
When the show moved to Sci-Fi I convinced my parents to upgrade our cable package to get the new channel. I taped every new episode and had friends over to watch each new episode. One friend even came as Observer for a Halloween night MST viewing (complete with Jell-O brain). New episodes ended the week before I began my freshman year of college, all moved out and on my own in my new apartment. I still watched the reruns on Saturday mornings until those ended, and even today if there’s nothing else happening on Saturday mornings I pop in a DVD or old tape to listen to while I do other things. I still even have my old framed MST cast poster from Season 6 hanging in my bedroom.
I’m just about caught up on seeing all of the older episodes that I missed out on. I can’t say I’m in a hurry to finish my list of unseen shows though. I like the idea that there’s still more MST that’s new to me. And of course I’ve moved onto Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic, but I still come back to my MST archives. The world needs the likes of Tom Servo, Crow, Mike, Joel, Dr. Forrester, and Frank now more than ever.
I VAGUELY recall the exact year that I discovered MST3K. It might have been late ’97 or early ’98. But I remember just seeing it while flipping through channels (that shadowrama is enough to catch anyone’s attention). I really wasn’t a fan of The Sci-Fi Channel (and hey, you know what, I still am not!), so I never really stopped to watch it.
Then one day I was in my room doing something (homework I guess, I don’t remember) and my dad called me into the front room, to check out this funny show.
My initial thought was, “Oh, this is from the Sci-Fi Channel, I don’t wanna watch this.” But, I did watch a few minutes of it (the episode was, I believe, season 8’s The Deadly Mantis) and I started laughing my ass off. I’ve been hooked since.
Ironically, my dad hates my MST3K obsession despite the fact, he’s the reason I actually sat down and watched it originally.
Don’t get me wrong — I did actually go outside and hang out with other kids, but…
From the moment it appeared on the dial, I was glued to The Comedy Channel.
So I was always watching out for new stuff on there.
I think they showed the “it’s all in the name of science” promo every day,
and I decided to check it out.
Unfortunately we went on vacation shortly thereafter, but I eventually caught up with their first marathon.
After that, I couldn’t leave.
Oh, I’d hate to shoot a butt like that…
When I was a wee lad, I was a Boy Scout, and I subscribed to Boy’s Life magazine. One day in the mid-90s, they did an article on Robots, which included a section on fictional robots. I recognized most of them, except for some red robot that looked like a gumball machine. I think his name was Tim Salvo or something.
Anyway, the memories get a bit hazy until one time I was at the PX (a sort of military-based shopping center) with my father, and I wandered over to the electronics section as I always did. I couldn’t find anything interesting to do (the Virtual Boy display was pretty boring) so I flipped around on the tv until I found “Attack of the the Eye Creatures”. With puppets! While my parents shopped, I made a spectacle of my 13-year old self by losing my mind laughing in the middle of the electronics department for about an hour. I was so unhappy when we had to leave, but I eventually tracked it down again. And while I thought it was hilarious, it wasn’t until it came on Sci-Fi that it became a weekly ritual.
I even recorded the series finale, though several years later my parents would accidentally record over it with “Murder She Wrote”. Thank God for the Internet!
My post can best be summed up as I’M FREAKING OLD.
I was channel surfing over 15 years ago and watched Gamera vs Gaos. I heard commentary that I did not notice, I thought there was a problem with the sound or something. I had no clue as to what was going on. I wound up not watching no more than 5-10 minutes. I must have flipped channels on a Saturday and there was the show again, this time I saw Silhouettes & heard the commentary, still not quite sure what the hell I was watching. I think it was during the 4th Season at night and for some reason I started watching the Saturday morning shows and it was Season 2 ( I didnt know any seasons at the time, but I knew Joel was wearing Green on Saturday AM & red in the evening) I really dont know how I got hooked or what have you, but I just kept watching & soon Saturday night was running re-runs of Season 4 and I thought Season 2 were the new episodes.
I recall Manos & seeing that one come up often. I think just as I had seen & had become a Joel fan, he left the show. Its so odd, I really draw a blank as to how I just started watching the show. Some jokes still make no sense to me, but now others do as I am older now.
I still watch the show from time to time when I need a nap or just dont feel like watching much else. Ive seen all the episodes many times now. I am currently on a movie binge seeing movies for the first time ever, basically classics like Casablanca, Metropolis,etc so I dont get to view MST as much as there are movies I want to see for the 1st time. Still it was my favorite TV right up there with Dallas, The Incredible Hulk & Dukes of Hazard…
Flipping around after school in 1990, I found The Comedy Channel in the era of Supercar and the Higgins Boys & Gruber and there was a Commando Cody episode with these odd shapes in the bottom of the screen and I was almost instantly hooked. I credit MST3K with a big part of making me the person I am today.
It was a Saturday in 1997, I was home from college and I turned on the TV and saw this horrible b-movie called “Revenge Of The Creature”. I wondered what the things were at the bottom of the TV and when I heard them cracking on the movie I was instantly hooked! I found out the name of the show and I started taping each episode so I wouldn’t miss it. I had a stack of VHS tapes about 5 feet high. I could NOT get enough of the show. Mike & the ‘bots just cracked me up so much. Once I found out there were 7 other seasons I’d missed out on I tried to tracked them all down. I now own every episode from Season 2 thru Season 10 and I watch at least one episode a week! :grin:
Needless to say, I LOVE the show & really miss it. Best TV show I’ve ever seen! (Well, it’s a toss up between this and the Dukes of Hazzard for me! Ok, stop mocking me, I LOVED that show when I was a kid!)
My first MST3K memory would be Creature from the Black Lagoon (“Egrets, I’ve had a few…”). I became a steady viewer and have been filling in the early years as those episodes have been made available. The Final Sacrifice and Giant Spider Invasion are favorites from the later years and The Skydivers leads my list of faves from the early years. Thanks for the memories.
Don’t know many details, but it was in the mid-’90s, and we didn’t have Comedy Central at the time. Another cable channel was showing the best of other cable shows and was showing Cave Dwellers MST3K. I happened upon it during a host segment where Joel and the ‘bots were showing the Mads the obvious problems with the movie, like the tire tracks, someone with sunglasses. I quickly found out what the show was, and a bit later, we moved, we got Comedy Central, and luckily enough, it was in November, and I was able to tape a bunch of the Turkeyday that year. I think it was about 1994, ’cause I quickly got into it, joined the info club, taped as many episodes as I could, and went to the convention in ’96.
I don’t really remember what the first episode I ever saw was but I remember that my brother watched it and so I watched it with and I absolutely loved it. We had 2 or 3 tapes and I would watch those a lot because i’m sure if it wasn’t on scifi yet or we didn’t have scifi yet. I do remember that it came on scifi and I was estatic and would watch the new episodes with my brother and we would be laughing our heads off. I think I watched it new from I think mid season 8 to the end.
I remember watching some late night syndicated shows, like America’s Dumbest Criminals and Night Stand with Dick Dietrich, with some friends. I stumbled onto “The Mystery Science Theater Hour”, which my friends had seen before. There was some movie with either Hercules or Samson or something, and it was hilarious. So I started to record the hours, as I did with anything I liked but was inconvenient to watch. I ended up with two full episodes, “The Giant Gila Monster” and “War of the Colossal Beast”. If “Sing whatever I sing” wasn’t enough to hook me, Mr. B Natural was. Pretty soon (the next month or so), I found out the hour was taken off, but that the real series was coming to Sci Fi, which I actually had. I waited with baited breath, or maybe it was the nachos I had that day, but when “Revenge of the Creature” played, and “Egrets, I’ve had a few” entered my head for the first time, the rest was inevitable, really.
Total noob here. I’m from outside the US, so without the Internet I would never have seen the show. Two or three years ago I started reading somethingawful.com religiously, and I kept seeing references to this thing called MST3K. Eventually I wikipedia’d it, read the article, and knew that I, as a bad movie fan, would love it. The first episode I watched online was ‘Parts: The Clonus Horror’, and I’ve been hooked ever since.
I remember the day I became a Misty well. It was Thanksgiving, 1994. The big table was being set, the smell of delicious, still-cooking food was in the air, and friends and family were in the process of arriving. However, there was still hours to kill before the meal would begin. So I decided to watch a little TV.
I click on the old boob-tube and notice that a new channel was added to the lineup; Comedy Central. With a couple button depressions of the remote I was there in a flick of the screen. Once there, it took me a moment to figure out what my eyes were telling me. It was an old black and white movie called “It Conquered the World” with three little silhouettes superimposed on the bottom making jokes at the film’s expense. “What the hell is this?”, I muttered to myself in confused bewilderment. After five minutes I was hooked.
After Thanksgiving dinner (around 5)I went back to my TV to see what else Comedy Central had to offer… only to discover it was another episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, followed by another, and another, and another… I was begging to think that’s all Comedy Central ever aired. But alas, all good things come to an end, and the Turkey Day marathon ended at midnight… when they broadcast the regularly scheduled episode of MST3K,(as fate would have it, I think that one was episode 101).
From that night forward I tuned into MST3K every midnight till Comedy Central took it off the air, and taped the new episodes that aired on Saturday morning so I could watch them that midnight. That’s probably why I find the episodes funnier and more enjoyable to watch late at night. Just doesn’t feel right some how seeing it while the sun is still shining.
I was in the Air Force in November 1993 and my wife and I had just returned to the States (a base in Louisiana) from three years in England. We were staying in an on-base hotel and looking for an apartment to live in. We returned from the search one afternoon and flipped on the TV to see this weird movie with silhouettes at the bottom of the screen. It was “Pod People,” still our favorite episode. “It stinks!”
Way back in the very early 90s I noticed that late at night I would see this strange looking globe spinning once in a while as I channel surfed. Never watched much TV but always liked looking for a cheesy movie on a Friday or Saturday night. Then finally, totaly by accident, late one Saturday night I stopped surfing long enough to notice three shadows talking during a movie. So out of curisoity I watched it, thinking I’ll just surf past in a few minutes. Not so. I was hooked instantly. And finaly at the end I saw the mysterious globe I had seen before! I quickly noticed what it said-“Mystery Science Theater”. Oh, the episode that hooked me was “Mighty Jack”.
I was stationed overseas in Europe in the late 80s/early 90s and had never heard of MST3K. Before deploying to Desert Shield/Storm in Dec 1990, I came back to the US for some leave and one of the movies they showed on the aircraft was a modified version of the MST3K “Wild Rebels” episode. My first impression was “what the hell is this?” but by the end it had won me over. Been a huge fan ever since.
Mine was in the early 90’s. We were flipping channels and my older sister stopped me–“Hey, that’s ‘Santa Claus Conquered the Martians!'” She exclaimed. “I used to watch that as a kid!” But it wasn’t long before we noticed this was NOT the way she watched it. We all laughed at the MST version, and I was addicted ever since. (I even named my son Joel, after the original MST host!)
I first found MST3K back in 1991. I was a senior in high school at the time and I believe one of the first episodes I ever saw “Time of the Apes”. I was always a fan of “Planet of the Apes”, so that’s probably why it caught my attention. About that same time, I saw episodes like “Cave Dwellers” and “Pod People” and I was completely hooked and never looked back. Throughout the 1990’s, MST3K was my source of “escape” from stress of day-to-day life. There’s so many times I can remember things being rough in my life that were made so much better by laughing at a bad movie for two hours each weekend. Wonderful memories that I’ll hold onto the rest of my life. My love for it will never die and to this day, I still turn people onto the show who have never seen it before. Just last week, I watched “Cave Dwellers” with someone I recently met and have become very close friends with. She loved it and is now as hooked as I was 17 years ago! I honestly believe that MST3K is timeless and as long as we, the true fans keep it alive, it will never die!
Ironically, my first exposure to the series was ‘MST3K: The Movie.’ I think I caught it on Starz! or some such movie network one day while channel surfing out of intense boredom. Flipping through the channels, I caught a glimpse of a curious black mass at the bottom of the screen, and flipped back to investigate, my curiosity unexpectedly piqued. Before long I gathered that the silhouettes were a human and (as my dad later would explain) two robots. Initially, I was interested mainly in seeing what they looked like in person, and watched a bit just to see if they’d leave the theater. Surely enough a host segment came along (I believe I had tuned in shortly prior to the “Mike broke the Hubble” bit.) But before that mystery was solved, I started noticing that the three silhouettes were making some very funny jokes at the hokey scifi movies’ expense, a formula I quickly fell in love with.
Sadly, I did not have Comedy Central at the time so it wasn’t until the series began airing on Sci-fi that I became a regular viewer. Some time later when Rhino started releasing older episodes on VHS (remember that format?) I got my first exposure to Joel, Crow’s old voice (which I hadn’t really noticed was different in the months between seeing the movie and picking up on the series) after having been reared on MST3K as it was in the later years. So, I’ve always been kind of on the outside looking in when people who lost track of the series from the old days say, ‘what happened to Dr. F and Frank??”
I had just moved from CT to rochester MN, it was my first day there and was TV surfing. I saw a show of black and white giant spiders, and some very funny sarcasam, I was hooked right away during the first season. I also went and saw the first live showing up in the cities. I was in line bteween people how had flown in from New Zeland and England, discussing which was the best shorts. Mst3k has been one of the few things in life to keep me smiling or brightning my day. Thankyou all involved for all you have done, it really was a great show to all of us.