Show-business veterans and movie-trivia mavens, gather round. The mystery of “Chief Zabu” has been solved.

The film, completed in 1986 but shelved by the filmmakers after a poorly received preview, will get its first official showing in New York on Thursday night at a comedy club. It’s a fitting premiere for a title that was the subject of a long-running joke on “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” the cult series that made fun of bad movies. Whenever a character in that week’s cheesy film would open a newspaper, the series’s original host, Joel Hodgson, would laconically drawl, “Hey, Zack Norman is Sammy in ‘Chief Zabu.’”

The line was from an actual ad with a black-and-white photo of a stern-looking Mr. Norman that ran every Wednesday for nine years in Weekly Variety. Initially, the ad, first bought in 1981, was a jokey bit of self-promotion, and subsequently a tease for “Chief Zabu” when it was in production. But the movie stalled in postproduction. One of its backers went bankrupt. The writer-directors, Mr. Norman (credited as Howard Zuker) and Neil Cohen, put the movie in storage and resolved to “get back to it sometime,” Mr. Cohen said in a recent phone interview. But Mr. Norman kept running the ad. Why? Last year, he told SouthFlorida.com, “Because it gave me great joy.”

In the recent phone interview, which included Mr. Norman, Mr. Cohen recalled: “Once Zack got a call from a reporter from Newsweek, and he wanted to do a story about ‘Chief Zabu’ and the ad. And Zack became indignant and said: ‘Clearly you don’t understand who I am and what I’m about. I hate publicity.’ And he hung up the phone.”