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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Hold up, that can’t be right….More like 1990 or 1991. ‘Cause I watched first run from Season 4 on and that was in 1991. Sorry folks…brain need caffeine!
I can’t help it I’ll add some other tidbits
( nothing better to do on my lunch break ). I really enjoy reminising with you folks. First off I can say without a doubt that I am not the only one that can say Joel,Frank,Trace, Mike, Kevin and Bill ( and the show ) has really influenced me alot ( my overall sense of humor ). Back in 1996 my senior year in high school because of my taped ep. Godzilla vs. Megalon ( #212 ) I actually copied TV’s Frank ( the idea ) and put a cut in half Fram oil filter and put it on my face and pretended I was Lavar Burton ( or Jordi Laforge )! I even duct taped a big silver G in the back of my black long sleeved shirt! I love the sickness! I always refer myself as ” Koooky ” which goes back to Hellcats ( #208 ) when Joel and the bots were making fun of this hippy who got caught by the cops. ( @Neil ) I actually do remember a little that MTV did have a couple of MST3k eps on the air in 1994 I actually remembered ( #301 ) Cave Dwellers at the time ( maybe not? a little foggy ).
I was on a roll watching every cheap Italian sword and sorcery flick I could find on the video store shelves. One of them (Cave Dwellers) had talking silhouettes across the bottom, and they were pretty funny. There were several others from the same show in the video store, so I rented them as well. Then I looked up my local listings to see what time it came on TV. Then I moved to a place that didn’t have cable, so I bugged some friends of mine to record them for me as new episodes were released, until the show finally ended.
Back in 1996, Des Moines didn’t have Comedy Central, but the local NBC station picked up the syndication package and aired it at 2 a.m. Sunday mornings.
I started recording it and played it for friends. That summer I visited my parents in Florida. I knew they had Comedy Central, so I brought a tape to record whatever episode aired that week. It turned out to be Manos, and my life was changed.
That was also the summer the movie came out, which I saw four times in the theater.
My first episode of MST3K was a showing of Alien from L.A. that was shown on MTV. A good friend of mine was talking about the show a few days before and so I immediately knew what I was in for. Now, about 13 years later, I have every episode on DVD. Thanks go to my high school chum James who also turned me onto Red Dwarf and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
My first exposure was at an Aunt and Uncle’s House . The scene that stuck in my mind was from Robot Holocaust where the heroes are traversing the underground cave and being accosted by hand puppets. one of the puppets is cut open and the comment of “Egg rolls” was heard. I was entranced for the remainder of the episode.
Sadly it was only a one time exposure as my home did not have cable. Not until the end of the ’92 season, did I actually begin to watch in earnest at friend’s houses, late at night. Not until after Turkey Day ’93 did I start to record them whenever I got the chance (in a place with a working VCR and Comedy Central on Friday and Saturday). I should have asked my friends to record them for me, but it never occurred to me.
My first, and most frequently, taped episode was Manos. It became my seed episode that would be foisted on friends and family to expose them to the wonder of MST3K.
Good times, Good times.
I had heard about the show when it was on Comedy Central but I didn’t watch it until August of 1997. The first episode I watched was The Giant Spider Invasion. Unfortunately I have a big fear of spiders and when the part came where Dan Kester was being eaten by a giant spider, I ran out of the room screaming. I couldn’t finish watching it but since then I’ve been able to watch it in its entirety. Months later, when my grandfather and I saw that episode and that scene, he told me that a spider that big could not exist for scientific reasons; assuming that the spider had the same anatomy as an earth spider, it would have to eat and eat to maintain its high metabolism.
The first episode I saw in its entirety was Jack Frost. I became hooked and started taping the show. Unfortunately I taped over almost all of them for reasons I cannot remember right now.
I was an unwilling participant in a viewing at my friend’s house. I wanted to play SNES, he wanted to show me the Mstied “Catalina Caper”. When Dr. Forrester told Frank he couldn’t have the plush banana during the invention exchange, I was intrigued by that rather ironic dialogue.
My grandparents taped what they could for me because my cable didn’t have Comedy Central so my viewing was sporadic and frustrating since I usually got the MST Hour. I got the first half of Manos, but NEVER got lucky enough to tape the second half until the commercial release, which was GOLD!
Then came college and a complete severance from the show.
Several years ago I decided to check out the “new” Mst3k on Sci-Fi and viewed “Space Mutiny”. I was in love again and used the power of the internet to dabble in tape trading. What followed was a massive, almost unholy, influx of Mst3k goodness. I was introduced to classic episodes at a rapid-fire pace I never even knew existed and my new bachelor pad meant Mst3k marathons and the freedom bolster my library until I had ’em all!
And then I noticed that some shows seemed to have more riffs than others…
I was channel surfing around the Christmas of 1992 (I was 22) when I caught “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”. Instantly laughing, instantly hooked. They couldn’t have asked for a better “gateway” episode for someone.
I got cable in late 1990, and the ad I saw for MST3K on Comedy Central actually discouraged me from watching it. I think it’s on the Scrapbook tape– the one where the only riff is “Shuuuut uuuup!” I thought, if this is the quality of their comedy, then to hell with it.
Flash forward a year or so. It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, and I’m flipping through the channels. On Comedy Central, it’s “the show with the silhouettes,” as I thought of it. I decided to give it a chance, practically daring it to make me laugh.
Next thing I know, a giant is tugging on the huge chains holding him down, and one of the silhouettes exclaims, “Chains! My baby’s got me locked up in chains! And they ARE the kind that you can see!” I became a regular viewer after that.
In January 1992, I moved, and didn’t have cable again until 1999. I’d see the occasional MST3K on vacation, and bits of it at a friend’s house. (He didn’t like MST3K.)
So I got back into watching it regularly, although it took quite a while for me to work out the new backstory, since they were showing them out of order. Then I found mst3kinfo.com.
I never recorded MST3K the first time I had cable, and the second time, I’d only record it if I couldn’t be up for it on Saturday morning. Then I’d record over it, figuring it must pall on the second viewing. When I started seeing the same ones on SciFi again, I realized that isn’t the case, and got into tape trading. Now I have them all, but I still have a few from Season 6 to see for the first time, over 15 years after starting.
I’m nearly positive the first episode I saw was Cave Dwellers which aired on LIFETME of all places, because they were showing shows nominated for Cable Ace Awards. That’s enough fish Dong nearly killed my brother and me. Soon CBS was running fragmented shows around when SNL would be on and Rhino began releasing tapes. When I went away to college and finally got Comedy Central, the show was still in semi-regular circulation, and I’d catch whatever I could. Then it went to SciFi, and I followed. Then it left SciFi, and I wept openly. But the tapes keep circulating, and dvds still come out. So there is always hope.
“slappypyne says:
My first episode of MST3K was a showing of Alien from L.A. that was shown on MTV…”
Thanks for my answer to if anyone else first saw MST3K via this MTV airing :mrgreen:
Neil
MST and LSD
In 1990, during the first national season, it seemed like every time I channel surfed I would come across this show hosted by the guy I vaguely remember seeing on Letterman and SNL. But I never stayed with it long enough to give it a chance. A year later my roommate tried to get me to watch it, but although I thought the premise was clever I didn’t think the jokes I heard were very funny. So whenever he was watching MST3K, I would find something else to do.
Fast forward to 1996. After many years of studying history and getting up to speed on pop culture, I found myself at an extreme low point in life. It was at this time that my unbelievably fine, way-too-good-looking-for-me girlfriend decided to dump me for Chuck BeefKnob. I was still friends with my old roommate and he talked me into dropping acid and going to see Star Trek: First Contact. Although I later came to view it as one of the better Star Trek movies, I found it to be quite the party crasher while tripping. My trip was in danger of spiraling down into the nether regions of my soul, leaving me marooned to wallow in the LSD-intensified feelings of depression, disillusionment and guilt…which is exactly what happened!
We made our way back to his place and I was in BAD shape. My friend and his roommate had rented This Island Earth and, although they had already watched it, they wanted to watch it again. For the duration of that movie my troubles were forgotten and I laughed so hard that my ribs hurt and my eyes were drenched with tears. Without even being aware of it, my mental state went through a complete transformation. It was miraculous! On the way home I couldn’t stop thinking about “riffs” from the movie and I found myself grinning the whole way. When I got home all I could think of was “damn, I wish I could see that again.” So the next day I started working on scoring some more acid and taping episodes of the show (I had no idea that these were some of the last episodes that CC was going to broadcast).
A few months later, toward the end of 1996, I was ready to recreate the experience. Once the LSD kicked in sufficiently, I popped in a tape and it turned out to be 502-Hercules. OH…MY…GAWD!!!!! I never knew that comedy could be such a rewarding experience! I laughed so hard I was in physical pain!! After that, I popped in the next one which turned out to be 424-Manos: The Hands of Fate. Hired II turned out to be my first short and it made me laugh to the point where snot was spewing from my nose. Then…the main feature (insert Torgo’s Theme here)! I had no idea that a movie that bad could possibly exist in reality. The third tape turned out to be 512-Mitchell and my fourth and final tape of the evening turned out to be 418-Attack of the the Eye Creatures. What a glorious experience that evening was!!! From then on my devotion to the show and the performers was pretty much set in stone.
My MST3K life started in the early 90’s, I got up with my kids on a saturday morning and they found this goofy show with robots and started watching. I wasnt paying much attention until one of the riffs caught my ear and I laughed outloud! I rolled over on the couch so i could see what the kids were watching, and the rest is blissful history!!
I saw Cave Dwellers in a hotel on the way to Florida when I was 10, laughed my ass off. For some reason a couple of years later Lifetime showed Cave Dwellers and I taped it and watched it (sans first 10-15 mins) probably 100 times. See, we didn’t get Comedy Central until well after MST3K wasn’t on their air anymore for whatever reason.
I have now seen every episode, and I am happier for it
I think it was spring of ’91 when I first discovered it. I had seen clips of it on another Comedy Channel show (Short Attention Span Theater???) and had seen commercials for it during Night After Night. But the first few times I caught it, it just didn’t grab me and I’d only watch a few minutes and move on.
I remember that it was a Friday morning, had a class cancel, so I was flipping channels and eating a late breakfast when I stumbled upon “Lost Continent” near the beginning of the movie. The riffing during the flying scenes grabbed my attention, and by the time the Hugh Beaumont visit host segment was over, I was completely hooked. By the time season 3 started up, I was obsessed with the show and taping all of the episodes – the rest is history.
I remember I was hanging out at my Dad’s apartment, I must have been 11 or 12. After flipping channels for a while I came across Comedy Central and low and behold there it was…Pod People. I would catch the show randomly from time to time after that day.
Jumping to the Scifi years, I really got addicted to the show, I’ve only recently discovered the euphoria of older episodes thanks to the magic of the internet.
But I’ll always remember Trumpy, and his panache for doing stupid, stupid things.
I was living in St. Paul, MN, in the late 80s, and while channel surfing one spring day in 1989, I hit one of the local stations and came across a cheesy airplane-disaster movie. That had silhouettes at the bottom. And right at a moment of high “tension,” one of those silhouettes said, “Hmm, virile young hunk or dying dead guy?”
Note to self: Try to catch this show again.
But then I graduated from college and moved away from St. Paul.
Fast forward to the early 90s. While channel surfing late one night, I hit Comedy Central and came across another cheesy movie. That had silhouettes at the bottom. And they were again talking back to the movie.
Hey, it was That Show! Who knew?
The more I watched, the more hooked I got.
Now in the early 90s, I was still fairly fresh out of school, I was pretty much alone in a big, new city, and I was working the evening shift at a job that was slowly grinding my soul to a bloody pulp. I was beginning to doubt things would ever get better, and I spent my days feeling utterly defeated and depressed and desperate.
But then when I got home from work around midnight, I’d put on Comedy Central, and there was my show. There were Joel and the bots and some cheesy movie. And five minutes in, I’d be laughing. And then I’d think to myself, “Well, okay, I guess I won’t kill myself ~today.~”
Things did get better. I found a job that didn’t bleed me dry, I moved to a larger apartment, I developed a small circle of friends. But I will never forget how “Mystery Science Theater 3000” got me through my dark night of the soul.
I taped as many as I could. I joined the Info Club. I followed the show from Comedy Central to the Sci-Fi Channel, and I sent letters protesting the final cancellation. I started buying the dvds. I shared it with my friends. I even sneak a listen via the internet when I’m at work sometimes and have a really long, boring project to do and need something to occupy the part of my brain that would otherwise get deathly bored.
And I’m thrilled that Joel, Mike, the bots, and the Mads have all found new ways to keep the riffs going.
Thanks, guys. For everything.
Well it was only ever shown in Britain in a limited capacity on a channel I couldn’t get so my first time was The Movie. It was shown on terrestrial TV at about 1am and I couldn’t sleep. The listing of “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie – based on a cult TV show where a guy trapped in space and some puppet robots make fun of a cheesy movie” had me intrigued so I watched. From that point I was hooked. About a year later i found out on a DVD Importers website that The Collection Volume 5 had just been released. I promptly spent every penny I had getting every Rhino release including the VHS Amazing Colossal Man. In the course of the next 18 months I managed to get a hold of every available episode from traders. Damn I fell for that show hard!
It was fall of 1990 and The Comedy Channel had just been added to our local cable system. I was delighted as comedy is my favorite form of entertainment, so I checked out the channel every chance I got as soon as we had it. Friday night of the week we got The Comedy Channel I turned it on to find they were airing a strange biker movie. I had a history of watching bad movies to laugh at them, but I’d never seen a film like it on TV ever before, even in the wee hours on UHF years earlier I’d never seen such a film. It was Wild Rebels and I turned it on during the scene where the Wild Rebels are riding Rod back to their shack at “night”. There were these silhouettes in the corner making jokes about it non-stop. I was immediately intrigued and I just had to find out about the full premise of the show by seeing it from the beginning. Later in the weekend I caught another showing, but again, it was part of the way into the show. Then on Sunday I finally caught it from the beginning. I thought it was terrific and my wife enjoyed it too. I was now extremely interested in the show and tried to catch it regularly after that. The more I watched it, the more dedicated I became about trying to see it. It was the most creative, hilarious show I’d ever seen. My wife watched it with me pretty avidly too that year and I immediately tried to introduce as many friends to it as possible, both then and now. We watched many Turkey Days together, went to both conventions in Minneapolis, and are still fans to this day.
The day we brought our son home from the hospital just a couple days after he was born the show came on the Sci-Fi Channel just twenty minutes after we got home, so though he doesn’t remember it of course, that was his first time seeing it. Now years later our son is a huge fan as well and we frequently watch DVDs of the show together.
My first time with MST3K?
Sadly, it was in season 10. I was with my parents (around 14/15 at the time) visiting family in Georgia. The house we were staying in was the house my Mother lived in when she was a baby, so it was a little older, poor insulation, that sort of thing. The TV used to be color, but was just a shade of purple-ish gray. Still, using an old Satellite dish, and bringing their box from home, we could still get channels on it.
Anyways, channel surfing, I came across the Sci-Fi channel, which, honestly, I never saw anything good on but an old episode of Star Trek every now and then. ‘Devil Fish’ was being shown, and I only got to watch for about 2 or 3 minutes before we had to leave, but they were doing the scene where the “Beery guy” gets killed, which was an onslaught of beer jokes, which was a great way to hook me for just a few minutes (a running gag, that is, not the beer… wasn’t old enough yet, you see.)
Anywho… some time passes. Back at home, I had a tendency to stay up really late. (I was in that phase of youth where I realized, hey, if I sleep less, I have more time to do stuff. This phase lasted all of about 5 months before I found out why we sleep.) MTV2 had just started to get to the point where it was popular enough to play music videos people cared about, so I would stay up watching that most of the time. (Fuse TV, then called MUCH Music was another music station I would watch, which actually would help me understand a number of MST3K jokes, since it was a Canada-based station.) Going through the channel guide, I saw the phrase Mystery Science Theater 3000 and immediately recognized that to be the name of that show where “Those guys made fun of the movie”. I quickly grabbed a tape to record the episode “Squirm”, bouncing for joy that I had found a TV show worth watching.
Unfortunately, my heart was broken the same night I fell in love, as the commercials during that episode announced that the show was being cancelled and that the very last episode would be next week. I made it a personal quest to gather as many episodes as I could (the next 2.5 years would show reruns, to which I gathered all about 2 1/2 seasons worth of episodes). I’ve spent the last 9 years gathering episodes wherever I could, bringing my collection up to about 90 or 100 episodes to date. In that time, I’ve introduced the show to my wife, best friend, a number of other friends (one of which helped me to find a bunch of these episodes), and the like.
About 6 years ago, I started to also collect every bad movie I could get my hands on to make fun of. Today, I probably have about 50 movies or so purchased simply to make fun of. (of which, I’ve only seen about 10) I also have the ‘original’ film to 6 or 7 movies riffed by MST3K.
With the recent invent of CT and Rifftrax, I’ve been encouraged to get back into personal riffings and am trying to get some friends together to record some of our own.
I enjoyed everyone’s stories but I’m amazed at how many people didn’t have cable in the 90’s!!???/!!!! What planet are you from. I also enjoyed someone mentioning Sir Graves Ghastly. I rem him fondly hosting horror movies on Sat afternoons in Detroit. I also always loved when it was Monster week on the 4:00 clock movie so I could see Gamera. As a small child I loved the Gamera and Godzilla movies I guess that’s why I became so entranced with MST3K and loved it even more when a Godzilla or Gamera movie was on. Thanks for the memories and keep circulating the tapes.
It was a day like any other day. Suddenly, a shot rang out! No, wait – that’s the opening line to a really bad novel I read . . .
I was first exposed to MST3K in 1997, I think. I saw the show where they were doing a riff of awards specials (Titanic was big that year) and became hopelessly addicted. I at once infected my wife with the bot-bug and the rest, as they say, was history. We even hauled our two sons many miles to Depaw University to see Nelson speak at the campus one rainy evening (His monkey theory was fascinating). Sadly, the Sci-Fi channel has stopped showing the re-runs, and we must content ourselves with VHS tapes . . .
I must have been about eight or nine, spending the weekend at my Grandma’s apartment. Grandma was awesome (in far too many ways to recount) and would let us watch tv as late as we wanted, even as she slept in the same room.
I loved Godzilla movies at the time, and what do I find while channel surfing but Godzilla Vs. Megalon. Except there was this guy and puppet robots making fun of the movie. I was instantly smitten, especially when they broke into the “Jet Jaguar Theme Song”. To a nine year-old boy, there was nothing more incredible or audacious than to mock a movie that’s playing right in front of you. Come to think of it, it’s the same way for a 26 year-old.
The first thing I remember about MST3K is parts of ‘Pod People’ that I watched with my dad on a saturday morning. I specifically remembered the “Smucker’s Raspberry Preserves” and “Little potatoes” lines. I was about 7 at the time.I am now a junior in college and I have been infatuated with the show ever since that first time. I even bought a collection of almost every episode (probably missing about 20) on dvd and watch them with my roommates multiple times a week (usually under some influence, but they’re incredible sober too)
I first caught MST3K during the summer of ’98. I had just finished 8th grade. I was flipping through the channels and heard, “the little Bushman didn’t know what to make of the can.” I recognized the line from the movie “The Gods Must be Crazy,” but clearly that wasn’t the movie on the screen. I had to keep watching to figure out what this show was. It was MST3K, episode Parts: The Clonus Horror. I started watching and recording it every week.
Years later when I was in college, my roommates and I had a group of friends over to our apartment to hang out. One of the guys (who I didn’t know at the time) was looking through our movie collection. He noticed my collection of VHS tapes with handwritten “MST3K” labels on them. He asked, “Who’s the Mystery Science Theater fan?” We quickly started a conversation and discovered a mutual love for the show. He introduced me to the Joel episodes, and I fell in love with the show all over again. P.S. I also fell in love with him. Our first date was a screening of a terrible independent film that was made in the city where we went to college in Wisconsin. We riffed the entire thing. And we are still riffing and laughing together three years later.
My first time. 1988. or 89? Man I’m old! I was about 12 years old. I was lucky enough to live in Minneapolis so my first introduction to Mystery Science Theater 3000 was Season Zero on KTMA.
I can’t rememeber my exact first episode but it was one of the Gamera movies. I immediately fell in love with the show and started popping in a VHS tape and obsessively taping every episode and telling all my friends about it and screaming at them, “you gotta watch this show!”. Unfortunately I didn’t start taping early enough because I don’t have the first 3 episodes.
I still have my rickity old KTMA tapes with the commercials in between segments for Joel’s Comedy night club dates where he’s wearing these googly prop glasses and pretending to ogle a pretty lady and he’s says, “shhhee’s grreeaattt.” I still say that line all the time!!! The commercial also featured a clip of his prop cotton candy that screams when you bite into it. Weird. :smile:
I obsessively watched these episodes over and over again–Gamera Vs. Barugon, Vs. Zigra, SST Deathflight (“check the leaky seals” “arf arf arf!!”), Superdome, City On Fire, Mighty Jack, Time Of The Apes. At The time, these episodes had me in stiches. Well, looking back at them now, I don’t know what I was tripping on because they got a lot better and funnier in the years to come. But still, great memories!!
Thank god the show took off!
The first time I saw MST3K was in the winter of ’88/’89. Horrible reception on an old ’13 B/W set(KTMA not being one of the big stations out of the Twin Cities). I remember it was funny enough that I didn’t try to change channels. I didn’t catch it again until a few years later (’93 or ’94) at the MN Ren Faire. A bunch of ‘festies’ were sitting around watching a tape of a recent episode. I can’t remember which episode it was, but we all had a great time because there were numerous ‘Fest’ references. Since then I was hooked. So Jim, many thanks from me(not so many from my pocketbook).
It was sometime in the 1990’s while MST3k was still on the Comedy Channel, although I did not get that on my cable system (I had the cheapest cable package). But MST3k did have a syndicated show for a short time, and I would sometimes trip across that late on a Friday or maybe Saturday night (I forget which). I’d only watch for a minute or two, get annoyed at the silhouetted figures which kept talking and gesturing at the screen, and then go back to whatever else I had been watching.
One time I hit it during what was obviously a really low-budget and badly written movie from the 1950’s (I think it was some western). The movie had a scene where the camera is on the back of some guy, and he turns quickly around to face the camera and say some retort to some other movie character. The retort was incredibly lame, but everything else about the shot reminded me of a scene from some other movie — a movie which was much much better than the one they were watching. No sooner did I think of that other movie, then one of the silhouettes quoted a line from the very same classic movie! It was the kind of riff that you wouldn’t even notice unless you already knew what he was referring to. It was a perfect line, delivered with perfect timing. I cracked up laughing. From then on, I tried to catch MST3k whenever it was on.
And happily, I did have the Sci Fi channel by the time the show arrived there!
When I was in Junior High/High School in the ’80s my friend and I used to rent bad movies, turn the sound down and make up new dialogue. We do it on TV shows like “The Wizard” too. Remember that one with Billy Barty. Classic. All through college I couldn’t afford cable so I discovered MST3K a little late. Around ’94 or ’95 I finally got cable. I came home from my swing shift at the TV station and was channel surfing when I came upon the show. Wild Rebels was the episode. I was hooked immediately.
Not only was it “The TV Game” but the humor was intelligent and best of all, it had cute, witty robots. Within a week we were taping every episode and by ’96 we were on the web tape trading. I have every episode except and special now for the KTMAs. I only have one of those. This show has gotten me through some really rotten moods and over the years. I remember once, I was sick with the flu upon my first viewing of “The Girl in Lover’s Lane.” I was miserable just kind of staring at the TV. When Crow came out as Jack Elam I laughed so hard I got dizzy from lack of oxygen.
My first exposure to MST3K came in the summer of ’92, when my family was house-sitting for my mom’s employer for afew months. My dad had mentioned this hilarious show about a guy and two robots watching grade-b movies and making fun of them constantly. The home we were staying at did not carry CC, but the cable provider at our home did. He taped “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” during CC’s Christmas in July Marathon they had. The next episode I watched was “The Killer Shrews”. I’ve been an addict ever since.
September 1995: It was Friday night and I wasn’t feeling particularly great. I don’t remember it clearly, but I assume it had something to do with school. I was making an attempt to do my math homework and flipping through the channels.
I changed it to WBNA-21, which was our WB affiliate at the time, and saw a strange movie. There was a cabin in it that vaguely reminded me of my aunt and uncle’s house and an alien with a big snout. Some shadows at the bottom of the screen seemed to be saying things about it and the more they talked the more interested I got. They were making all kinds of references to things I remember watching on TV like ALF, Seseme Street, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, and various commercials.
This was Part 1 of Pod People on The Mystery Science Theater Hour. When I went back to school I told my friend about it and how he needed to see it. He said that he’d watch it if I agreed to watch some of the stuff he was watching at the time.
The following Friday I tuned in to Part 2 and I was not disappointed. My friend reported back that he enjoyed it. His sister particularly liked Crow’s line, “Don’t look at me without makeup!” which was used when Trumpy’s evil twin attacked a women while she was in the shower.
The following week I made the decision to try and record it. I didn’t know anything about tape trading at the time. I simply thought that the show was really funny and I didn’t want to have to watch it just once a week. The next episode was Part 1 of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. I was hooked.
I found out that the show was also airing on Comedy Central, a channel our cable company wasn’t offering. I convinced my aunt to tape it for me and she was kind enough to do so for several years, long after WBNA-21 stopped airing The MST Hour without warning. We didn’t get Comedy Central until after MST had left the station and we didn’t get SCI-FI until after the last new episode had aired, so I owe her for helping me keep up with my favorite show.
Was anyone else confused when there were different people in different episodes? I remember that it was sometimes hard to keep up with the continuity of the show in my early days of watching it. The MST Hour shows I watched were from Seasons 3 & 4. Pretty easy to keep track of.
My aunt’s Comedy Central episodes complicated things a bit. I saw some Season One shows and wondered why Larry was there. Then I was really confused when I saw 701 and 702 back to back. Joel AND Frank were gone and they’d been replaced by some guy that the bots were attacking with mace and Dr. F’s weird mother. I still thought it was funny, but it was a bit confusing and Mike seemed to be making more adult riffs than the ones I was used to with Joel.
Then the show moved to SCI-FI and I was introduced with 802. The last episode I saw before that was 703, so I was once again scratching my head. Fortunately my school allowed me access to this new “internet” thing, and the first thing I thought to look up was MST. I found the old SCI-FI/MST page and the Season 8 episode guide answered most of my questions.
I’ve spent the last few years trying to get all the episodes. With the exception of the KTMA shows I’ve pretty much done that, though I’m now in the process of getting upgrades. I’m a huge Rifftrax fan now, but I’ve never forgotten about those 10 PM Friday night showings of The Mystery Science Theater Hour. I still wish reruns were airing, but at least we have other outlets to keep the riffing alive.
In 1990 I was in my twenties and hanging out at a friends. We were going to see some other friends who had a band play at a local bar, and he had just got home from work when I showed up. He went to do personal getting ready things and I sat in his living room channel surfing. I found this black and white silent film with some people running around what looked like a train yard. I noticed that there were these weird looking people in sillouette supplying the dialog. The jokes they were making were truly hilarious! When my friend came out, I asked him what the deal was. He said “I don’t know, they just show up and make fun of the movies sometimes”. We left before the movie ended, I saw maybe ten to fifteen minutes that night. That was my first impression of the show; that it wasn’t even really a show, just some weird thing that Comedy Central did to be goofy.
Century 21 Calling! Cue the Very Expensive Special Effects as we travel to the magical future place we call last year. I just bought Volume 11 and am very excited that the Indestructible Man is included, since my hero at the age of six was Lon Chaney jr as the Wolfman (I used to draw werewolves obsessively as a second grader). As the film goes to climax, there is very little talking by the actual movie characters, but some very funny riffing. A weird sense of deja vu comes over me, and I realize- This is where it started for me. The only thing I’ve obsessed about since the Wolfman.
Making fun of bad movies in some weird way makes my life more bearable, probably because I am stuck in a bad movie of my own. I am very glad I got hooked early on (how I discovered it was really just a show that helps me to relax is a story for another time).
I guess i was about 9 or 10 years old (i’m 26 now) when i saw my first episode. It was a Saturday and I was watching the Comedy Channel (now Comedy Central) and saw this really old black and white monster movie, since i was getting into sci-fi movies at the time i started watching it. Then i saw the silhouettes at the bottom and they were talking and saying funny things, well i thought, “this is interesting”, so i kept watching. This was before the preview channel and we didn’t have tv guide and our newspaper didn’t have listings for that channel yet so I had no idea what this show was called. When it ended i hoped they would play another one but they played “Short Attention Span Theater” or “Whose Line is it Anyway” or something like that. I was 9, i had nothing else to do on a Saturday, so all i did was watch that station for the rest of the day in the hopes that they would play it again, i think i did the same thing all day Sunday too. Well eventually through many hours of watching the Comedy Channel and episodes of “SNL”, and “Lancalot Link”, “The Higgins Boys and Gruber” i finally saw it again and found out the name was Mystery Science Theater 3000 and thought, “That name is awesome!” So ever since i’ve been a fan, i joined the fan club and am #3901, i still have all the old satellite news (some things you just can’t throw away) and found out some years later that the first episode i ever watched was “Robot Monster”.
This is gonna be a long one, since I managed to see a lot of third-hand evidence of the show before actually understanding what it was, not having cable until the switch to SciFi Channel.
In 1992 or ’93, I was in a small comic-shop which always had something playing on the TV behind the counter. On this particular day, they were playing some movie with a scene at night in a city: 2 guys in color-coded raincoats walked by each other, and some voices intoned, “Hey, Black-Guy!”-“Hey, Yellow-Guy!” And then it cut to some guy in the back of a car. In hindsight, this must have been MST3K, but I didn’t know to look for the silhouettes, and the movie was so dark that they wouldn’t have stood out anyway. I haven’t seen many CC eps beyond what’s been released on video, but I’m guessing it was “City Limits” after reading several guides. Please correct me if you know otherwise.
The first time I actually saw the title: “Mystery Science Theater 3000” was in some Video Game mag, reviewing a game based on bad ’50s scifi movies. Still didn’t tell me much though.
Well, I’ll always be a Transfan first and a MSTie second, and during the one-year run of the “Transformers: Generation 2” comic, someone in their letters column mentioned that the 9th issue contained “The hidden corpses of Mystery Science Theater 3000!” I went back to that issue and, in an opening splash-page showing a planet whose robotic inhabitants had all died a horrible death, the crumbling husks of what I would later learn to be Tom Servo and Crow T, Robot were indeed mixed into the pile. Seek out the “Rage In Heaven” trade paperback to see this drawing for yourself, and you can feel solidarity with Transfans by hating Manny Galan’s artwork as much as they do!
I did occasionally get to see cable when my parents and I stayed at motels on vacation, and in late ’95, I saw what I later learned to be the prologue to “Operation Double 007” (which I have yet to actually see), and thought the goofy puppets and set were cool, but had to go to bed without seeing any more. The next night, I got to see the first half of “Fugitive Alien”, (which I did get to see a complete fan tape of later on, the only Sandy Frank I’ve ever seen) and FINALLY understood what the show was about, and that this was likely the greatest idea in the history of television.
This was right before the movie was released, and after reading some of the hoopla about it in TV guide and elsewhere, my local UPN station started airing the MST3K hour. I saw the second half of “ave Dwellers” first off, but can’t remember what my first complete episode was: probably “Space Travelers” or “The Amazing Colossal Man”, but “Pod People” will always stay in my heart as the first episode I really got, deep down, since I happened to have a adopted a kitten that looked just like Tommy’s that summer, but with amber eyes instead of green. And it had that intangible “fever-dream” quality that I look for in late-night entertainment, since it somehow makes me feel connected to the greater cosmos.
So, I’ll probably just wait for all the CC eps I haven’t seen to be released on disc, but at least I discovered it in time to see the epic season 8 from start to finish the year I started college!
Well, I’m one of those people who grew up watching the late night monster movies–in this case, Chilly Billy’s Chiller Theatre in Pittsburgh, PA. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of watching Giant Gila Monster (music scared me) and Viking Women (that long to see the Sea Serpent!) and Village of the Giants (my eyes popped out during the shirt button popping scene).
You can watch a Chiller host seg here (chilly billy has a cool guest star):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOD4uJgpY-w
So fast forward to the early nineties. TV was a wasteland as always and coming across an old B movie was a rare treat indeed. I was at my folks watching tv (I didn’t have cable) and then suddenly: a cool motorcycle movie from the 60’s! Awesome! It was a season two ep, of course, probably either Hellcats or Wild Rebels.
Then I noticed the figures at the bottom of the screen. What the heck? I had to keep the sound down so I barely heard the riffs but once I figured out what they were saying I knew I was seeing something new, unique and special.
The first ep I watched all the way through was Lost Continent (still one of my favs for that reason) and I was hooked.
A buddy and I were driving through Minneapolis in 1993 and happened to see part of an MST3K episode that had both of us laughing out loud. I hadn’t heard of it before and although I had cable at home, I didn’t get the Comedy Channel. It wasn’t until MST3K came to the SciFi Channel that I got to see it on a regular basis and I’ve been playing catch-up ever since. Thank goodness for the DVD sets and previously released tapes.
I was in high school in the early 90s, and my family could not afford cable. My best friend had cable, but he didn’t care for comedy, so all I knew of MST3k was the name of the show and a few glimpses as he flicked through the channels.
When I went to college in ’93, there was a lounge across from my dorm room, with a TV in it. Since this was at the quieter end of the dorm, the lounge was rarely used, and I thought of it as my space. One day, I was feeling down (for reasons we don’t need to go into), and I planned to crash on the couch in the lounge and vegetate. I tuned to Comedy Central, and found they were doing a marathon of MST3k. I had just got settled in when this girl came in and sat down to watch the show as well.
I thought that would ruin my day, but the show was too funny and she was too nice for my funk to withstand their dual onslaught. I found my wife and my favorite TV show that day!
My sister and I always enjoyed the Comedy Channel, and one dull afternoon back in 1990 we turned on the TV and discovered MST3K. The episode was Robot Monster. My mom and dad both wandered through the living room at some point and, each remembering this movie from their youths, sat down and started watching it with us. We were all hooked. MST3K-watching became a family ritual. Once the Turkey Day marathons began, that became one of our Thanksgiving traditions. My mom sort of drifted away from the show once Joel left (although she said she had nothing against “that cute blond guy” who replaced him, she just loved Joel), but my sister and I were loyal viewers until the very end.
I don’t quite remember the time sequence here, but the first time I saw MST3K was at some point in the early 1990s when MTV held either a Comedy Channel or Comedy Central preview weekend. I only saw about ten minutes of Kathy Ireland in Vampires from LA, and at that point I thought it was absolutely the dumbest thing I’d ever seen.
Fast-forward about four years: I’m in college, and a group of friends invite me to a midnight screening of MST3K: The Movie. I was hooked. Of course, we didn’t get Comedy Central on our cable system at that point, and I was ignorant enough not to realize eighteen months later that the show was now on Sci-Fi Channel, so I missed out on new shows more or less until the final season, but I am now a proud DVD owner and I still cherish the shows I taped that haven’t been released yet (and I was lucky enough to get the movie on DVD before it was taken out of print!).
1996 – A buddy of mine dragged me to see MST3K:TM at the large movieplex near ASU. I had never seen the show before, and since none of his other friends wanted to go, I figured that it would be a dog. I was throwing him a social bone.
I bought a box of sour patch kids and a soda. Big mistake. There are few things as painful as shooting sour patch kid powder up your nose from laughing so hard…
The rest is history.
Like the original poster I have a similar story to share…
in 1977 or so, there was a movie theater on Staten Island that showed normal films during the week, but on Saturday nights they would show X-rated movies. These were the cheese-fests like Flesh Gordon, Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, The Russ Meyer Vixens series, etc. They were pretty cornball and fun.
A whole group of us 8 or 9 young men and women would go for the laughs. We were all in rock bands or theater at the time, and we’d all meet up at the Fox Theater after our gigs for “The Porn Flick at the Fox,” and you would have a bunch of smart-assed NY performers shouting out lines at the dumb movies. Eventually, during the… ah… climactic moments on the screen, we’d whip out our squirt guns, and shoot the audience with Jergen’s Lotion. (We brought umbrellas when the audience started shooting back!)
It got that we became a pretty hot ticket in town for about 8 months- free admission, all the candy and soda we could stand, and free movies during the week. We raised the attendance to near capacity every week (except for the 4 rows in front of us- after a couple of weeks no one would sit there!) until the theater was having trouble finding movies they could get, and we had gigs that took us past our starting time. It started petering out then. But I still remember every time someone started to undress in the films that all 8 or nine of us would thrust a (left) leg straight into the air, and pull whatever clothing we had up, (down actually) and leave them there until at least one of the actors was undressed, all the while shouting out the lines like “Is it soup yet?”
Fast forward to sometime in the early 90’s. I’m now married 3 kids, living in Buffalo NY, and we’re visiting my brother back in NYC. It’s a Saturday and the TV is on. My brother flips to a channel, telling me that I have to watch this show, and I was greeted with The Killer Shrews.” It was absolutely Brilliant! I spent the rest of my vacation looking for more, and was immediately hooked. I’ve never looked back and still play the DVD’s I have quite often.
..Joe
My story is pretty boring, like most. I was at a friend’s house because his dad had cable (at the time not everyone had cable especially in rural areas like where I lived) and like most people we were flipping through the channels and came across the riffing on “Cave Dwellers” which made us almost choke to death on the spaghetti we were eating. So there you go. Boring story. Maybe someone could MST my story! It’s fun!
Mine’s definately not as cool as yours. Probably not as cool as anyone on here’s, nope. Not by a longshot.
I had probably heard of the show before I knew what it was. I remember other shows like the Simpsons mentioning it, but it never really phased me until last summer (OMZ u N00B!!111).
I was just wandering through the oddity of Wikipedia, clicking from page to page. I then went from one to the “Paul is Dead” theory. I was reading that page when on it it showed that MST3K had mentioned it. I then thought, “Ok, I’ve heard some things about it, I’ll click that one next.”
The first thing I saw was that it first aired the year I was born. Now, I happen to love things that happen in that year, and some pretty good things did so I’m justified.
After reading a bit of the premise they gave, I went on over to youtube and found the Gumby short “Robot Rumpus”. I proceeded to watch as many of the shorts as possible, then moving on to the actual episodes in parts (not going in any particular order, but my first being “Teenage Strangler”)
I may still be brand spankin’ new to the show, but that just means that I’ll be suprised when I finally get some of the seasons on DVD. (and with the movie being re-released in a lucky coincedence.
The first time I saw MST3K was almost an accident.
It was the first year it was on what was then called the Comedy Channel (the second cable season of the show).
I had seen the ads for the series and thinking it was a kid’s show, wasn’t going to bother with it.
What happened was, I brought home my VCR from a repair shop and to test it, hit ‘record’ and MST3K happened to be on.
When I watched it for the test results, I was surprised at how funny the show really was and I’ve been hooked ever since!
My first taste of MST3K was an odd happy coincidence/accident.
In the early/mid ninetys, I was flipping channels and accidentally went one higher than what we normally had.
I can only suppose that the cable service we had occasionally did some sort of ‘free preview service’ of some sort, so on those rare occasions, the channel (25-and I can’t believe I still remember that) would show Cinemax or some other channel for a few days.
Well, I’d happened upon that channel by accident and I guess it was some sort of marathon of MST as I don’t recall any commercials or station identifications. What I saw was some movie (later-as in in recent years, I found out it was Cave Dwellers) with a black silhouette of theater seats with three figures sitting in the last three seats on the right making comments about the film.
To be honest, I didn’t exactly ‘get’ it at first. I was thinking, “I can’t hear what’s happening in the movie. Those three guys keep talking.” Then I gave up trying to understand what was being said in the film and just rolled with the funny stuff that the guy and two robots were saying. I loved it, even if at the time, I couldn’t always hear what lines those guys were replying to (I think it was around this time that the speakers on the tv I was watching started to crap out so I could mostly just understand what was coming from one speaker)
I’d seen a full three or four episodes until the magical free cable channel suddenly was no more.
Later I found out that a local station (or maybe it was WGN, which is evidently everywhere-even in the small west Texas town I grew up in) would run the show (mostly the MST Hour, which I loved because of Mike’s Jack Perkins intros) at about 2-3am on Friday/Saturday nights/mornings.
After MST3K: TM game out (of course on video in my neck of the wasteland) I’d found other people who’d stumbled upon it and were also instant fans. We’d repeat lines from the movie so often, we’d start saying whole lines of dialogue in reverse, just to see how well we could do it.
Er, that might warrant an explanation. We’d start from the end of say the scene where Cal met Exeter in person in his office with the picture of the burger on the wall and run it all the way back to the beginning.
At any rate, now I’ve got all the collections to date and a few of the individual episodes and one copy of Reefer Madness where Mike Nelson did the commentary and I’ve seen a massive bulk of all the episodes (thanks to youtube). I’ve gotten people hooked with one episode, even if the representative film wasn’t the best I’d had available.
My wife likes the show and even my kids sometimes like it. BTW, my oldest’s favorite robot is Gypsy, which she always called “Chipsy” and my youngest likes Tom-mostly for the fact that he has a propensity to sing.