I’m curious if MST3K plays a role in anyone’s love life. That sounds weird, so let me explain. Is anyone out there lucky enough to have a spouse or significant other that loves MST3K as much as they do? Has anyone ever watched MST3K on a date? I tried “Day the Earth Froze” on a date one time and she just didn’t get it. We’re still friends and she still reminds me how weird “that one show with the red-haired guy in the bike helmet” was. Fast forward, my wife will watch MST3K with me if she has nothing else to do, except for “Space Mutiny” which she LOVES! In fact, she had me put the audio on a CD and we listened to it on a road trip one vacation. That definitely rocked!
One of the things I noticed at both the MST3K conventions, and subsequent convention appearances by the cast, is how many couples there were in the crowd. So I’m suspecting we’ll see a lot of answers in the affirmative.
By the way, keep those weekend discussion thread ideas coming! Send them to msampo at aol dot com.
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The short answer is no…but when we were dating 10 years ago we watched Werewolf togther and to this day “Dear sir, send pants at once!” is still a catchphrase in our home.
Yes, thankfully!
My girlfriend and I met in college, and my college did weekly screenings of MST3K episodes. I encouraged everyone I knew to go, and she was one of the few who “got it” instantly. She’s also a Monty Python fan, so perhaps she was more susceptible to quirky humor.
I got Rifftrax DVDs for Christmas. Not to brag, but I feel pretty lucky.
Husband and I never watched MST3K on a pre-marriage date because we got married in 1988 and, well, no MST3K then. But we’ve watched it together all the time whenever it was available to us (most of the time that MST was on the air we didn’t have cable). He doesn’t love it as much as I do, but he loves to see me laugh so he suggests watching it a lot. He does love Boggy Creek II and Eegah though. He’s always amused by the Beatles references, actually any 60s, 70s, and 80s music references. And I always know that each time a new DVD set comes out that he’ll get it for me immediately. Best presents ever!
MST3K is the very reason my wife and I met! Thanks to Prodigy and AOL, our tight group of online fans would get together all over the country for viewing parties and, well, one thing led to another… :grin:
My wife loves MST3K, but won’t admit it. She’ll rant on about how she cannot stand this episode or that episode, but will always slide right next to me and watch whenever I pop one on *lol*…
My wife and I watch and episode or two a week, usually in half-hour increments before we go to sleep. MST3K is quoted all the time, usually on a rotating basis, depending on what we just watched. Lately, “I hope he said peanuts” has been hear a lot!
I won my husband over with MST3K. He had been out with another girl once or twice when we were first casually hanging out. The second time he came over, we watched Space Mutiny and I made dinner. He never went out with the other girl again. A recreation of that date is quickly becoming our anniversary tradition!
Much like Barth Gamble, my wife and I also met through our love for MST3k. We met in the old Sci-Fi Channels Dominion chatrooms around 11 years ago and just recently we celebrated our 8th wedding Anniversary. Not only do my wife and I still enjoy MST3k, but our 7 year old son is a fan of the show as well. :)
I watched a Cinematic Titanic on a date and noted our Mike/Joel dispute in a magazine contributors page bio: http://reason.com/archives/2009/05/29/contributors
This is an interesting thread to read all the posts, especially how MST has brought some couples together. Me, well my wife isn’t interested in it but I’ll bring her along slowly. She’s watched about 25 minutes of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and did laugh a few times so there is hope.
My first year in college was a particularly stressful one for me. One weekend, feeling particularly low, I went into a rarely-used dorm lounge to get some peace and quiet. I ended up watching this show I’d never seen called Mystery Science Theater 3000 (I didn’t have cable at home). Then this girl came in and said “Oh, I love this show”. We watched the shows (CC was running a marathon), talked a lot, and were married 5 years later. I guess you could call that our first date : )
We still watch MST3k, and we’ve gone to the Boston area to hear Joel and Trace talk at MIT, and to see a CT show there. We were going to try to catch the live Rifftrax broadcast in a theater in Brunswick, ME, but circumstances prevented that. Generally when there’s nothing good to watch on TV (recently, just about every night) our solution is to “throw in a MSTie!”
While this didn’t happen to me personally, I was able to plant a seed. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I would show a weekly episode to anyone who was interested while at college. During my final year, I lived in the dorms for only the first of the two semesters, but a friend of mine continued the tradition during the winter semester. Come graduation, one of my other friends who was a regular viewer told me about a couple that had gotten together during those MST3K nights and had gotten engaged because of them.
I’ve been with my SO for two and a half years. We first tried to watch an MST3K together after about six months; she couldn’t get into the episode (it was The Touch of Satan, which is a great intro to the series). I asked her why she was struggling. “Because I want to know what’s going on in the movie, but I can’t figure it out because they keep making fun of them. I know that’s the point, but wouldn’t it be funnier if I saw the original movie first, and then this?” I explained that watching the original movies of all the episodes would send her into a catatonic state.
Slowly, I introduced her to more episodes; she enjoyed the usual “big ones” (Mitchell, Space Mutiny, Time Chasers, Final Sacrifice, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, The Touch of Satan, Parts: The Clonus Horror, Werewolf, and Soultaker, for example). She likes Mike better, despite my insistence they are both good. She enjoys Rifftrax as well (I thought she was going to have an accident when we were watching Twilight and The Fast and The Furious).
Last Friday, she made a comment how “nothing was on,” and said she wanted to watch “Space Mutiny.” Her transformation is complete.
Very touching & personal posts by all! MST3K isn’t for everyone, thank [insert your higher power here], which is just fine with me.
MSTie challenge: is there a MST3K primer out there or a pamphlet, training manual or a link for conversion? Kind of like Dianetics? :mrgreen: Easy CoS, it is a joke!
Garza #13 – What is it with women an Space Mutiny? Do women find Reb Brown attractive? John Philip Law? Cameron Mitchell? Hmmmm….
One ex did like it enough to watch it on a regular basis but was decent enough to let me have the tapes upon break up. Another found the shows ‘Too immature’ and my response was ‘Cha’ and I kicked her to the curb!
Ya no. I would have to have a love life to respond to this one…
One of the things that endeared me to my now-wife when I first met her in 1995 was that she had a big stack of VHS tapes full of MST3K. We used to watch them all the time when we were first dating! And in fact, just last night we stayed at home, opened a nice bottle of wine, and watched “The Giant Spider Invasion”. (And the night before we watched “Mitchell” in memory of Merlin Olsen’s passing.)
While my wife is not a full-fledged Mstie, we will view certain eps together, with Giant Spider Invasion, Boggy Creek 2, Screaming Skull being her faves. In her work as a language professor, she actually used Mike and the ‘Bots discussion of Noh theatre vs Kabuki theatre as a way to loosen up the class room and illustrate a point or two.
My husband and I met in college. My roommate was a huge MST3K fan, and she and I watched it regularly. I was instantly hooked. This was at the time when Rhino had just started releasing individual episodes on disk, and I wanted to buy my roommate one for her birthday.
I didn’t want to walk from campus to the shopping area in town alone, and I had just started getting to know this really nice guy who was friends with mutual friends. I mentioned MST3K and needing a shopping buddy, and this nice guy knew all about MST3K and liked it. He said he would go with me later that day. We walked together to the store, picked out “Pod People” for my roommate, and he asked me out. We went out on a ‘real date’ days later, and have now been together for 11 years.
We watch MST3K at least 3-4 times a week, usually in the evening when we are getting settled. We even have a lottery system in place when we can’t decide which one to watch. We also use MST3K to convert our friends to our brand of comedy.
“Hey, you know what I’m in the mood for? Let’s watch Mystery Science Theater!” My wife has never spoken these words, at least in that order. She has always been a really good sport when it comes to MST3K, though. Of course, I was a Mstie long before she came along, so she really doesn’t have much of a choice. She’ll watch an episode if I put it on, and laugh along with it, but does not typically follow it all that closely. My biggest frustration is that once she has seen an episode, she’s done with it. “We’ve already seen this one!” Now that is a phrase she’s spoken more than once. Love you hon!
The night my wife and I met, I found out that she was an MST fan. Along with her many other fine qualities, I took that to be a very good sign! While she’s not quite the fanatic that I am, we do watch MST3K, Cinematic Titanic, and RiffTrax together on a fairly regular basis. Since following these guys has been something of an obsession for me for almost 20 years now, it’s nice to have a spouse who can not only handle that, but enjoy it, too!
My wife and I have always been big fans of MST3K, although I think I turned her from casual viewer to fanatic (like me).
Speaking of couples at MST3K conventions…here’s us in costume at Gateway
I was a big MST3K fan before I met my wife. She didn’t know about the show before we met. When I introduced the show to her, at first she didn’t know what to think of it. After she sat down and watched it with me she started liking it. She’s not as big a fan as I am but she always has a good laugh when I pop it in. :mrgreen:
Whereas I’m the huge MSTie, my boyfriend is the casual fan, though I got him into it via a weekly watching me and my friends do via a chat function at a website. We had been friends for quite a long time, so I was just thrilled to get another compadre into it. Fast forward a few months, we start dating, and he asked me rather eagerly, “Do you have Hobgoblins on DVD?” since he had been advised by a friend to watch it. So we watched that as basically our first couple episode. (And what an episode…)
Though our first like, real-important date was going to see the CT crew when they came to Chicago last September. I’d say that be pretty awesome.
What to do on a date- Watch MST3K- maybe “The Magic Sword” “Jack Frost” or “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank”- certainly my life would center around someone of the other camp liking J or MTB. Previous GF really liked “Mole People”.
New sugar, well she and I like “The Touch of Satan” “Merlin” “Master Ninga I and II” “Time Chasers” “Wild Rebels” “Boggy Creek II” “Squirm” (‘cept she doesn’t like it when I say Mr. Beardsley)”Daddy O” “High School Big Shot” “Final Sacrifice” and the aforementioned. She thinks Joel is cuter than Mike. This is very important.
We will watch them in streaks- building up to a spring one, likely starting with the 4 on the new SHOUT set.
I hate to be a stereotype, but I’m not a man who dates a lot. Or at all, these days. My one proper (though short-lived) relationship, from a couple of years back, involved us meeting up and watching MST3K together (er, amongst other things). I showed her my two favorite episodes (“Deathstalker” and “San Francisco International”) both of which went over well. The relationship fell swiftly to pieces shortly after, but those are among the good memories.
As someone who owns well over a hundred MST3K DVDs, not to mention some books and running an MST3K blog, being a MSTie (or at least being receptive to the show) is kind of a prerequisite for a wife, here. :) I’m sure we could work around it, but she’d have to be one hell of a woman to make up for any hatred of MST.
My fella says he’s only seen the show once, and he couldn’t even remember which episode, so I’ve been meaning to bring over some shorts or something to get him into it. We quote The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Monty Python, etc. to each other all the time, so it would really be the icing on the cake if he could love MST as much as I do! He realizes it plays a big part in my life, and he’s got a great sense of humor, so I’m hoping this will be an easy transition.
I do have a friend who I bonded with through our love of the show, though.
Gee, this is a little depressing. It looks like most of you have someone to watch MST3K with. A few years ago I talked my husband into watching Space Mutiny with me. His very polite response was “Well, I can see why you think it’s funny”; he’s never asked to see another one. :cry:
My wife (we celebrated our eighth anniversary last weekend) isn’t quite the MSTie I am, but she suffers me fairly well. She gave me the first Shout Factory box for Christmas the year before last and really enjoyed both of the Rifftrax live shows. She even got a good laugh out of the Twilight riff. A lot of our tastes don’t really intersect, so it’s nice to have something like this to share.
(She also thinks Mike is cute, by the way…)
My wife is more of a nut than I am. She will pull off random MST riffs and then ask me what episode it is from. Now we watch all of the eps in order from 101 through Film Crew, CT and Rifftrax (those that are on DVD) and then repeat them ad infinitum. But she gets to put them on during the day (less now that our son is working), so she has better familiarity with the constant obscurities put out by J/M&TB. But, our viewing of MST is together, every week night (Sun-Thu). We do argue though over Squirm. I actually think it is a pretty good movie on its own, but she doesn’t understand my knuckle-headed opinion. Good times though.
Ummm..Yes, in an odd way…somewhat similar to the The Eye Creature (#24.)
On June 16, 2001 I found myself facing a situation that I never found myself and asking myself do I want to go through this life-altering experience I’m about to go through. While getting dressed, MST3K was re-showing “Horror of Party Beach,” at that moment I knew that everything was going to be okay, even though the show might stop airing, there are episodes out there that I could buy. It made me smile about my past and what role the show had in it. I instantly relaxed, drove to St. Catherine’s of Siena church, and married the woman who I have stayed married to for eight years, eight months and 27 days (and dated the previous one year, 10 months and nine days.)
During our dating/engagement period, I watched episodes and she kind of chuckled at some episodes. She wasn’t a big fan but knew how much I loved the show and would, in her words, “watch me watching the shows,” especially since I knew most of the riffs and when she does buy an episode or two for me for some celebration, she will come out and watch certain times when I laugh out loud (especially during the Violent Years and Earth v. the Spider, which harkens back to last week’s discussion). She will sit, once in a while, and watch an entire episode with me (much like I do when she watches Friends.) She did love “Space Mutiny,” especially how Ryder had to yell everything. She will do his “Move, move, move” line when I’m lulling behind something. She also loved “The Giant Spider Invasion.”
The point is when we share some jokes and she’ll come out of the bedroom everytime Crow yells “Communism!” during the Violent Years and she smiles. When you find a woman who finds the humor in that or in a crazed mob yelling “Packers,” that, folks, answers the question “Is it Love?” Yes. Yes, it is love.
My girlfriend loves MST, Rifftrax, CT, et al. I’m very lucky. She even makes up her own riffs a lot of the time and she’s pretty good.
Guys, in my opinion you shouldn’t show MST on a date or talk about it (if your date doesn’t know what it is at all, or is only vaguely familiar with it). Don’t show her an ep until she says “Hey, can I watch a little of that show you seem to like so much?”
For some reason this seems to work much better than, hey, watch this favorite show of mine, I’m really nervous if you’re going to like this kind of attitude.
Just my two bits anyway.
MST saved my marriage. My wife could care less about experiments on the SOL but while she watches the Batchelor, American Idol or some other crap I slip away for my daily dose of J/M&TB. We wouldn’t last if I had to watch her shows. The only problem is when her show isn’t done and I come back it doesn’t go over well when I start riffing on Desperate Housewives!
My wife and I have been married for twenty-six years, and we fell in love with the show twelve years ago. A friend of ours recommended the Movie, so we checked it out, and we both loved it. (We had been long-time fans of Monty Python and SCTV, so we had always been on the same wavelength in terms of comedy [and much else, in fact].) As it happened, we moved back to Canada a year or so after and learned that a friend was REALLY into the show (which wasn’t shown where we lived, but my friend had a friend in the States who supplied her with tapes), and she started supplying us with tapes. We now love the show so much that we have an elaborate “bidding system” for watching episodes that occurs over dinner. I won’t bore you with the details, but it pretty much illustrates our mutual love for the show. :grin:
Me and my wife met many years ago on the Internet, and many years ago, while our relationship was still long-distance, the Sci-Fi channel website had an event where they started streaming some of their shows via realplayer. So we both got into the chatroom where we always met and streamed it at the exact same time. After that I started taping other MST3Ks and making 2 copies so we could watch them together over the internet. Whenever we got together in person, a big pile of MST3K episodes would come with me. Today, we’re married and we can watch them in the same room, but all that Syncing up made for good practice for Rifftrax. :^)
I’m sort of puzzled by my wife’s luke warmth toward the show. If I have it on she pays little to no attention to it. But on any first-run Rifftrax or Cinematic Titanic she insists on watching with me. She gets into them and enjoys them so RT and CT are among the many things we enjoy together. But she has next to no enthusiasm for MST3K. I don’t get it.
My husband and I have watched it and loved it together since 1994. We tape traded as a couple and burned them all to DVD as a couple. When we watched the most recent Cinematic Titanic together, I thought he’d die laughing from the Chevy Chase class line. I feel very lucky to have someone who gets my sense of humor!
MST3K was a big part of my husband and I getting together. We met during college when my roommates had a party, and my husband came along with a mutual friend of ours. Walking through our apartment, he found the collection of MST3K episodes I had taped off of TV. Being a huge fan himself, he had to know who’s collection it was. We hit it off right away.
Our first date was a premiere of a local independent film made in La Crosse, WI. It was a terrible movie, and we spent the entire time riffing it and laughing hysterically. When the movie ended and the house lights came up, we realize the whole cast was sitting in front of us and heard every riff about crappy acting and horrible plot we had made! After that we were inseparable. The first episode we watched together was Clonus. Here we are five years later, and watching MST3K is still one of our favorite things to do together.
My wife and my situation is very similar to Prof. Gunther — we’ve been married nearly 25 years now, and watched MST3K from the beginning.
I *might* be a slightly bigger fan, but it’s close — she can quote the episodes with the best of them (like the Prof, we’re both huge Monty Python fans). She loves going to the live RT shows as well.
Once it went off the air we started watching them in order, once a month (to ration them out). This has continued for ten years now. When we do we have a “feast” in bed, spreading out smoked salmon and smoked tuna, with cheeses, olives, crackers and cream cheese, and washing it down with a fine Prosecco. Nothing is as fun as laughing and eating (and the alcohol always makes the shows better :>)
I can’t imagine not being able to enjoy MST3K with my best friend, love, and lifelong partner — fellows (and ladies), don’t bother to marry anyone who doesn’t share this interest (you don’t have to always like everything the same, as differences make it interesting, but someone who doesn’t love MST3K is just wrong )
GizmonicTemp #15
I think it’s Captain Santa Claus.
I am a much larger fan of MST3K than my husband. I have watched since ’91 and he really started in ’96, after having gone to see the movie. We worked together at the library, and one day he saw me cataloging the episode guide. We struck up a conversation about the movie and the show in general, which led to a friendship, then a bit of dating, co-habitation, then marriage in ’97. We have enthusiastically purchased every MST3K box set available, VHS and DVD alike. We’ve figured we will have to stay married forever, because we don’t want to have to split up our collection in a divorce settlement. ;-)
It’s good to see that my wife and I aren’t the only ones who do this! I do have to say that Invastion of the Neptune Man’s story and ours somewhat similar. My wife (then girlfriend) came up to visit me while in college, and I had seen bits and pieces of the show before hand, so I suggested watching it. The episode was “Werewolf”, and to this day, still watch MST3K all the time. We’ll throw quotes at each other in any situation, although we’re usually the only ones who get it. We every line before they say it, but we still laugh hysterically every time!
My wife and I were married in 1990, so I had time to discover that she didn’t get MST3K at all, but I married her anyway!. I have many episodes on tape and dvd and I watch them frequently, and she has watched a few, but she really doesn’t get it. That hasn’t interfered with us being very happy, though, and on a side note, my 15 year old son totally gets it and we watch together all the time.
My husband and I have been married almost 32 years, so we were together long before MST3K. He’s a good sport and will laugh at the occasional line, but he is too busy watching the movie to pay attention to the riffs – does anyone else have this problem? I watch each episode as it comes up for the weekly discussion by myself, frequently laughing my ass off. I used to watch the SciFi episodes on Saturdays with my two girls when they were small. One likes MST3K but not as much as I do. That daughter is married to an MST3K fan. We’re going to visit them in a couple of weeks and they’ve promised to show me the Rifftrax of Twilight. I can’t wait!
What this thread has taught me most of all so far is that there are a bunch more (alleged) female posters here than I once thought. Which is grand of course, minus the fact that they are all taken :-P
@ Is anyone out there lucky enough to have a spouse or significant other that loves MST3K as much as they do?
Absolutely! My wife and I have watched MST3K together since we were lucky enough to get the Comedy Channel during Season 2 of the show. She also enthusiastically said yes when I suggested we fly to Minnesota from Maryland for both “Conventio-Cons”. We also flew with our 12-year-old son to Minneapolis in Oct. 2008 for the Cinematic Titanic live show there and drove to Philly last July for the live CT shows there. The three of us also went to a local theater to watch both Rifftrax Live shows. MST3K has been and continues to be an important bit of family fun for us.
We fall asleep to MST3K all the time. She’s usually half asleep when i turn it on and i hear “ugh the puppets” but i know deep likes it. And she comes to Cineprov! our live, improvised version that we do every week in Atlanta so i know she gets the idea. btw http://www.cineprov.com if you’re in the atlanta area :-)
While the MSTie love bug never caught me, through my AOL MSTie friends, I did attend two MSTie-weddings in the late ’90s.
The first happened to take place the same day as the premiere of “Devil Doll.” Fortunately, they had remembered to set the VCR. And while they took photos in the church, we all hustled back to the hotel to catch the show before the reception.
The second was in ’99, and if I may name-drop, both Erhardt and I were there to dance at their wedding.
I also know of two other couples, who met on the AOL boards, who have since married. (I just wasn’t invited to their weddings.)
Huge, huge, HUGE YES here. My wife loves MST3K as much as myself, although we often like very different episodes.