With an act that included bizarre homemade inventions and contraptions, Joel Hodgson was one of the hottest rising comics in America in the mid 1980s, appearing multiple times on Late Night with David Letterman, Saturday Night Live, and an HBO Young Comedians special. But then, still in his early 20s, Hodgson decided to retire from stand-up and move from Hollywood back to his hometown of Minneapolis. The reason: "After doing stand-up, agents usually plug you into sitcoms. I didn't really want to do that. I got offered a job on a sitcom, and I just didn't think it was funny."

Back in Minnesota with enough money in the bank to live on, Hodgson killed time by making robots out of found objects he bought at the Salvation Army. He struck upon the idea of making his own show, but it would have to be "the cheapest show possible, and that way," he says, "you wouldn't need money, you wouldn't need to talk anybody into it, you wouldn't need approval." That's when he remembered his idea for the people talking back to a movie, and with host segments added in. For the host's companions, Hodgson took inspiration from the science-fiction classic Silent Running. That 1972 movie is about a man drifting through space with three robots—so Hodgson built three robot puppets named Crow, Tom Servo, and Gypsy.