“ALL along,” Joel Hodgson said, “I had a real healthy disrespect for Hollywood.”

It was more than two decades ago that Mr. Hodgson walked away from a thriving stand-up comedy career, retreating to Minnesota to build sculptures of robots. There Mr. Hodgson, now 48, discovered that his eccentric hobby of building automatons, and especially his aptitude for finding the flaws in mass media, could be combined into something greater.

“There was kind of an invitation there,” he said, “that if you can see the seams in this, you can figure out how to make a TV show.” The show Mr. Hodgson and a cadre of like-minded Midwesterners came up with in 1988 was “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (“MST3K” for short), surely the only comedy series about an outer-space castaway and his robots, who provide a steady stream of quips and comebacks while watching low-budget films.

Image Joel Hodgson on the set of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Credit... Michael Kienitz/Best Brains

“MST3K” may have been the first television show in which the commentary was more important than what was being commented on. You tuned in not to watch schlocky features like “Fire Maidens of Outer Space” or “Manos: The Hands of Fate” but to see how Mr. Hodgson and his crew would tear them apart. (You couldn’t hear the dismal opening score of “The Unearthly” in the same way after one of Mr. Hodgson’s robots shouted out, “Music by the Edgar Allan Poe marching band!”)