Mystery Science Theater 3000

It was around 1991, and I was 15 or so, and there I was at my uncle’s house watching TV by myself, as often was the case during many family gatherings. Since this was before the internet, I was satisfying that itchy impulse for instant gratification the old-fashioned way: by flipping channels at a speed that most people describe as “so fast that I’m getting a tumor.” Every now and again in my flipathon, I would notice some atomic-age non-classic about a killer something-or-other from space or the ocean or wherever, one of those old chiller cheapies knocked out for pocket change, featuring teenyboppers menaced by a linebacker in a shoddy rubber monster suit, that probably ran for a week or two at some drive-in down in Forth Worth or Muscogee or God-know-where. But something was odd about this movie. There was something unique going on here, and I didn’t know it yet, but I was about to fall in love with a television show, and that show was Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Of course, I didn’t know I was about to fall in love with a show. Indeed, I didn’t even know if it was a show at first. I thought at first that it was some strange commercial or some weird local promotion or something. It really didn’t look like a television show at all. Along the bottom of the screen, in black silhouette, there was a guy flanked by what looked like a popcorn popper on his right and a reindeer on his left, and they were firing off all sorts of one-liners and sarcastic jabs and obscure references at this adorably earnest yet incredibly inept monster movie, and that was all that was going on for several minutes. I watched, and laughed, but I was perplexed, asking myself, “What is this?”

Finally, there was a commercial break, and I saw the name of the show: Mystery Science Theater 3000. I don’t know why, but that title made me laugh. It sounded overblown and grandiose, like the titles of those old movies like The Day the World Ended and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, and it immediately made me think of crappy rocketships with sparklers taped to their butts and scientists with big levers, stuff that is endearing now because it was done absolutely seriously back then.

And then there was the host segment, where, instead of being silhouetted in front of a movie screen, I got to see my hard-riffing heroes with the lights on, which, incredibly enough, I found even funnier, since the popcorn popper was actually a little red robot named Tom Servo with a gumball head and non-functioning babydoll hands bobbing up and down on Slinky arms, and the reindeer was a gold robot named Crow with ping-pong eyes and a bisected bowling pin for a mouth and some kind of sports facemask coming up like reindeer horns from the back of his head, and the guy in the middle was Joel Robinson (a joke I got from watching Lost in Space on the Superstation), the hilariously loopy and sedate straight man in a red jumpsuit.

They were on what they called the Satellite of Love, the set of which continued in the same junk-shop-looting, hot-glue-and-duct-tape aesthetic as the robots; every surface you saw in the background was filled with all the little details that you would expect from a sci-fi spaceship, but instead of dials and buttons and consoles on the walls, there were toys and food trays and cups and saucers and all sorts of garage-sale bric-a-brak arranged and painted the flat jet gray we associate with spaceships. And yet, instead of detracting from the appeal of the show, this intentional cheapness of design only magnified it. They took that world of grade-Z, Ed-Woodian cardboard sets and paper-plate flying saucers and took it to its logical conclusion: a bunch of junk taped together with the insistence that this is SPACE and we are on a SPACESHIP. It was a genius decision in a show filled with genius decisions.

And indeed I felt, and feel today, that the show is genius, in the sense that, like other brilliant works of art like Wuthering Heights and the music of Frank Zappa, it is completely its own genre with its own rulebook that no one else can ever follow. It was one of those shows that come along where you truly feel like you had discovered something very special on your own, something that was speaking entirely on your wavelength. Sure Seinfeld was funny, but everyone liked Seinfeld. Seinfeld wasn’t your show. MST3K always felt like it was my show. It was like your best friends got together and made you a funny show for your birthday with whatever they had at hand, and had the best time doing it, and then sneaked in onto television as a joke to see how long it would take the network to find out. And whenever I met anyone else who was a fan, which wasn’t often, it was like we were both in a secret club together, where phrases like “Mitchell!” and “It stinks!” carried the same cultural weight as “May the Force be with you.” It went beyond television. It meant something greater than mere entertainment. It was a cultural force, albeit an underground one, and it still is one to this day. I love you, Mystery Science Theater 3000.

copyright 2013 Brian Stacy Sweat