20th Anniversary of MST3K
Posted in monsters, consumer culture, The Spectacle, psychotronic, kitsch, humanism, movies, retro, lowbrow, Inklings, mst3k, mystery science theater 3000, comedy on Dec 11th, 2008 No Comments »
For many years, one of the great pleasures in life (in my life, at least) was watching Mystery Science Theater 3000. I remember one Thanksgiving, in particular, when they had a marathon of around thirty episodes. I was in fanboy heaven, scarfing down turkey and watching turkeys at the same time. Although some took offense at the jibes and riffs and such, I couldn’t help but enjoy Joel and the Bots, then Mike and the Bots, in their peculiarly painful dilemma: stuck on a satellite in space, forced to watch bad movies. It seemed a smaller version of our own dilemma, since Earth itself is a satellite in space, as it were, and we also are forced to imbibe so much inane, mind-numbing, soul-destroying stuff simply while driving to the grocery store: billboards, radio ads, road rash, the whole sense of swimming endlessly through a consumer culture which has drastically changed the human horizon. Sometimes, the best option is to poke fun at it all and thereby make it less omnipotent and omnipresent. With that in mind, here is part one of our two part tribute to Mystery Science Theater 3000. Thanks Joel, Mike and everybody else at Best Brains, Inc. (Of course, past episodes of the show are available in various dvd boxed sets and episodes unavailable in that form can be found online through various bootleggers making use of the “one collector to another” legal loophole. As they say, keep circulating the tapes!)
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