Okay, so I couldn’t figure out what Speculative Fiction work that I wanted to do this week, and honestly, I am pretty tired. However, I have to admit that for every good speculative fiction work, there are at least ten that just don’t plain work. I’m not talking about films like Lucy or others that I just plain didn’t like. Then there are speculative fiction films that probably had good intentions, and may have looked good on paper, but ended up being just terrible and made even worse with the test of time.

Yeah, I’m talking about films that you would watch on Mystery Science Theater 3000, or MST3K. If you have never heard of this show, I don’t blame you as it went off the air in 1999, and it had a cult following that still continues until today.

I have no idea how this show got started, and I honestly don’t feel like looking it up on Wikipedia. As far as I know, this show was started just by some guys who bought some airtime and all the rights to some super bad movies.

From there, it was easy to set up a show. The premise is that a man is trapped in a spaceship, and is being sent terrible films by an evil scientist as part of an experiment. The man can only keep his sanity by watching the bad movie with two robots named Crow and Tom Servo. These robot are nothing more than puppets, and Crow has a bowling pin for a mouth while Tom Servo is a gumball machine with arms.

As the man watches the films, you can see silhouettes of him and his two robots in the lower right hand corner of the screen making fun of the dialogue, scenes, and even the beginning and ending credits.

There is no need for a set up for this premise. I remember discovering the show accidentally, and I couldn’t help but laugh uncontrollably at it. Some of the stuff that the make fun of is already funny because of how horrendously bad it is, so the lead and his robots are just adding to it.

This is one of those shows that could have gone on forever, and it had over ten seasons. It actually jumped the shark several times, but the basic concept of the show with making fun of bad movies, never changed.

You will note that I did not specify the main character’s name, as he has changed. Originally, he was played by Joel Hodgeson, the creator of the show, but Joel left and was replaced by Mike Nelson. Joel was being tortured by Dr. Clayton Forrester and TV’s Frank, but TV’s Frank left, then Forrester left, to be replaced by his mother as the villain. It didn’t really matter, and the show had a lot of skits in between the commercials that were deliberately cheesy in their humor.

MST3K never tried to be anything more than just fun, but its influence affects a lot of my favorite Internet critics, who often use clips from it based on the comments of the star and his robot friends. It’s probably like Saturday Night Live, where the humor is fast and cheap, and you only really appreciate it after it is over.

I’ve pretty much found all the episodes on YouTube, and I found it is funniest to just watch it without any interruption. If you haven’t watched it, just find it and have a good laugh.