In the days before YouTube and Netflix, when idiotic videos actually died instead of going viral, the distribution of brilliantly bad cultural artifacts -- the plotless D-movies, the absurdly dubbed foreign flops -- rested heavily on the low-budget efforts of a Minneapolis television show called "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

The show shall hereby be referred to by its geek taxonomic name, MST3K, divided into the further sub-categories of MST3K-Joel and MST3K-Mike, in order to delineate hosting eras. The purist Joel people will never understand the fratty Mike people. This schism, conducted over Usenet, was a whole big flame war in the 1990s.

A version show is back, live, called "Cinematic Titanic," and it's coming to Washington for the first time on Friday.

"All the fans we knew about during the original run?" says original cast member Mary Jo Pehl. "They come back. And they've now indoctrinated their children."

Without MST3K, the viewing public may never have never seen "The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy," a 1957 slasher with the self-explanatory tag line, "See the relentless machine battle the gruesome corpse." Or "Squirm!," in which a town is terrorized by earthworms. The show's high-concept construct: Earthling Joel is trapped in space by mad scientists and forced -- along with several buddies -- to watch and wisecrack on campy old movies. ("Tonight I'm going to put it to the supreme test!" says an inventor in "Aztec Mummy," and a silhouetted Joel replies, "The Cosmo sex quiz?")

The resulting experience was a movie within a show, a meta-tutorial on snarky one-liners. It pioneered the concept of "so bad its good," a baptism-by-irony philosophy that the only barricade preventing terrible entertainment from becoming amazing entertainment is a lack of vision. It's now taken as given in current spectator circles. The online culture, in which horrible mistakes are heartily cheered, owes much to the MST3K sentiments.

More than that, the experience of watching a random dude (actually a professional comedian, but as familiar as any one of your buddies) toss blistering barbs toward the screen acted as permission for the viewer at home to do the same. Anyone could be a critic: It was the online-commenter universe, but before the Internet.

In 1999, after a decade-long run, MST3K disappeared from the Sci-Fi Channel, where it had landed after a stint on Comedy Central. The audience -- small but fervent -- never gave up hope that it might return, at one time pooling their resources to buy a full-page ad in Daily Variety begging another network to take the show on. Despite never exceeding a budget of approximately $150,000 per episode, the show won a Peabody Award, and it regularly appears on lists of the greatest cult shows of all time. Even now, years after its cancellation, visitors to message boards are warned to stay away from Joel vs. Mike discussions, because the subject is just still too fraught.

In late 2007, original host Joel Hodgson realized that the show's fandom hadn't died -- his royalty checks for the DVDs seemed to be increasing, not decreasing -- and he had a premonition: Do it live.

In the touring "Cinematic Titanic," Hodgson and other former cast members take seats on a darkened stage before a massive screen playing an awful movie, and proceed to riff, right there, right in front of you.

"We'll be doing a movie called 'War of the Insects,' " Hodgson says in a phone interview. "It's a nature-gone-awry movie. It focuses on a bomber pilot that's addicted to heroin, and he somehow gets mixed up with a beautiful scientist who is breeding insects."

It is in Japanese.