MST3K

Thanks to the miracle of the internet I have been able to download old episodes of the show Mystery Science Theater 3000, also known as MST3K.

For those of you who don't know what this show is, you suck. It's about a guy who worked temp jobs in Wisconsin until his bosses decide to shoot him into space and force him to watch bad movies to see if he'll go crazy. The guy, orginally Joel Hodgeson, later replaced by Mike Nelson, builds two robots named Crowe and Servo, and together the trio makes fun of old sci-fi movies.

Not the most belivable premise, granted, but the show tells you to suspend belief at the beginning. In the opening songs the phrase "If you're wondering how he eats and breathes/and other science fact/just repeat to yourself/it's just a show/I should really just relax."

While watching these old episodes I wondered why I was still so attached to the episodes five years after it was taken off the air. Then it hit me: this show is one of the most influential things in my life.

I started watching the show when I was in eighgth grade. Not having a "mainstream" sense of humor I was unamuzed by the antics of Tom Green and the rest of the MTV puppets. When I flipped to this show, it was something different.

The humor was really caustic. The characters in the show did some pretty fucked up things to each other. For example, in one of the later episodes the ship Mike and the 'bots live in is infested with aliens. Mike is the only one at risk since the aliens can't eat robots. Mike starts cooking the alien eggs and feeding them to the 'bots. Servo obeys, but Crowe dresses up as a food critic and starts judging Mike's cooking ability right in the middle of the alien invasion.

Since I didn't have many friends in middle school, I spent my Saturday nights between ten and midnight watching the show. Since this show came at such a pivitol point in my life, it became permanently engrained in my mental processes.