MST3K (series): One of my childhood favorites that I probably should have left in my childhood

I was a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 when I was a teenager and young adult. This was back in the time when the notion of streaming anything was something that we couldn't possibly imagine and we had to wait for it to come on, which was on some minor cable channel at a very unlikely to be seen time like 11pm or 1am. To say that this show had a fringe audience would be an understatement and this is evident in their production value. Even though that was and is the case, I still loved it.

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If you don't know what this show is, i would not surprise me. I don't know where it originally got its start but I was watching it on late night Comedy Central and when it changed to the illustrious 1am time slot, I actually programmed my VCR to record it for me because I had to go to school the next day. I just said VCR in case you were wondering how long ago this show was actually on TV.

The way the show worked was rather unconventional but in the end it worked out well enough that people were watching it enough to keep it on the air, barely.

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The way this show works is that they have a story of a guy who is stuck in space with his robot friends named Tom-Servo and Crow. There are other robots but they don't often speak. They are kept in space by the demented minds of some other scientists who want to force Mike and his robot friends to watch terrible movies and then monitor their minds. Because: Reasons. It's a ridiculous premise but they needed a reason for the show to be a series.
While the people involved have changed over the years the person who was the most frequently the human host is Mike Nelson, who is actually a very gifted writer with many books under his belt as well. If you haven't heard of him it wouldn't surprise me. When MST3K first started Mike Nelson was just a writer but when the original face of the show left, they needed someone else to take the place and well, I guess Mike decided he would do it because of love for the show. There couldn't have been much money involved in it.

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Often called "sleepy-eyed" the original human inhabitant of the spacecraft was Joel Hodgeson, but for reasons I do not know he just wasn't the face of it anymore after about halfway through the 5th season. Like with most things, the fans of the show were not happy about Joel's unannounced departure and didn't like Mike at first but again, just like most things, the audience warmed to him and I at least, forgot the Joel was ever part of it to begin with.

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All episodes consist of the crew sitting in on a movie, and they are always bad movies, and cracking jokes the entire way through. Given the age of the creators and how much older than they were than me at the time, A lot of the jokes just went over my head. This is part of the reason why when I would show it to my friends that they didn't understand the allure and thought I was a super-nerd for liking it. I guess I was a super nerd but to be honest, I think I wanted to like the show a lot more than I actually did like it. It can be quite boring to intentionally watch a boring movie and depend on the wisecracks of the people watching the movie in order to find it interesting. What can I say? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I don't recall why I originally started thinking about this recently but I decided to put it on our Plex server - just a single season and I'll tell you, the episodes are LONG. They are longer than a regular movie and tend to clock in at 2 hours each because they genuinely do watch the entire film and also have their interludes where they do some sort of puppeteer action for the cameras on their spacecraft.

It started out as a public access show in Minnesota and then ended up gaining some popularity in the late 80's and early 90s switching from local channels to The Comedy Channel, to Comedy Central, to Sci-Fi, briefly picked up by Netflix, and now they appear exclusively on a channel called Gizmoplex and I don't even know what that is.

Should I watch it?

I think if you have never heard of it and wanted to have a look perhaps look at the 20th anniversary edition that is featured in the trailer above and maybe stay away from just the regular episodes since I don't think most people have the attention span for that sort of thing these days. Hell, I already like the show and like I put in the title, I kind of regretted going back to relive my youth because well, it just isn't as entertaining as I remember it being because we are spoiled for choice at this point in time. I suppose it had its time but that time isn't really now. That being said, I have never seen any of the more recent episodes and perhaps I should go and have a look at those so I can see if the references and jabs in the episodes are a bit more relevant. This is a big issue with a lot of the older episodes in that they were designed to appeal to an adult audience in the late 80's and therefore talk about things from the 60's and 70's that most people aren't even going to understand.

I can't recommend this to everyone, especially not the younger people out there but I do think that it will appeal to an older audience that is looking for something a bit different and trust me, this is much more than a bit different.

_{The only legal way to stream this now is with a Gizmoplex subscription, whatever that is. Amazon had 300 episodes available. Netflix has seasons 11 and 12}