Mystery Science Theatre 3000

## Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (1988-TV Show)

***Mystery Science Theater 3000*** (abbreviated as ***MST3K***) is an American television comedy series created by Joel Hodgson and currently produced by Alternaversal Productions, LLC. The show premiered on KTMA-TV (now WUCW) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 24, 1988. It later aired on The Comedy Channel/Comedy Central for seven seasons until its cancellation in 1996. Thereafter, it was picked up by The Sci-Fi Channel and aired for three seasons until another cancellation in August 1999. A 60-episode syndication package titled *The Mystery Science Theater Hour* was produced in 1993 and syndicated to stations in 1995. In 2015, Hodgson led a crowdfunded revival of the series with 14 episodes in its eleventh season, first released on Netflix on April 14, 2017, with another six-episode season following on November 22, 2018. As of 2019, 217 episodes and a feature film have been produced as well as a live tour.

The show initially starred Hodgson as Joel Robinson, a janitor trapped by two mad scientists ("mads") on the Earth-orbiting *Satellite of Love*, and forced to watch a series of B movies in order to monitor his reaction to them. To keep his sanity, Joel crafts a number of sentient robot companions—including Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot, and Gypsy—to keep him company and help him humorously comment on each movie as it plays, a process known as riffing. Each two-hour episode would feature a single movie in its entirety, sometimes preceded by various old shorts and educational films, with Joel, Tom, and Crow watching in silhouette from a row of theater seats at the bottom of the screen. These "theater segments" were framed with interstitial sketches called "host segments". The show's cast changed over its duration; most notably, the character of Joel was replaced by Mike Nelson (played by Michael J. Nelson) in the show's fifth season. Other cast members, most of whom were also writers for the show, include Trace Beaulieu, Josh Weinstein, Jim Mallon, Kevin Murphy, Frank Conniff, Mary Jo Pehl, Bill Corbett, Paul Chaplin, and Bridget Jones Nelson. The 2017 revival features a primarily new cast, including Jonah Ray as the new human test subject, Jonah Heston, along with Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt as the mads and Baron Vaughn, Hampton Yount, and Rebecca Hanson voicing the bots.

*MST3K*'s original run did not garner high viewership numbers, but the show's popularity spread through word-of-mouth over the Internet from its fans known as MSTies (or "Mysties") who would remind others to "Keep circulating the tapes," frequent repeats and syndication, and home media offerings produced by Rhino Entertainment and currently Shout! Factory, who along with Hodgson now own the rights to the show and supported the revived series. *MST3K* was listed as one of *Time* magazine's "100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME" in 2007, and *TV Guide* has noted *MST3K* as one of the top cult television shows. The show won a Peabody Award in 1993, was also nominated for two Emmy Awards in 1994 and 1995, and for the CableACE Award from 1992 to 1997. The show was considered highly influential, contributing towards the practice of social television, and former cast members launched similar projects based on the riffing of films, including The Film Crew, RiffTrax (ongoing as of 2020), and Cinematic Titanic. *MST3K* also brought to light several older movies that had fallen into obscurity or had received little or no public attention when originally released. Many of these films were subsequently identified as among the worst movies ever made, most notably *Manos: The Hands of Fate*.

## Episodes

During MST3k's original run between 1988 and 1999, a total of 197 *MST3K* episodes across eleven seasons were produced. This does not include *The Green Slime* pilot episode, which was used to sell the concept to KTMA but otherwise was never broadcast. The revived show currently consists of two seasons of fourteen and six episodes respectively, bringing the total episode count to 217.

None of the KTMA episodes were rerun nationally or have been released onto home video, primarily due to rights issues. For many years, the first three KTMA episodes were considered to be "missing episodes", as no fan copies are known to exist, but master copies of all these episodes still exist according to Mallon. In November 2016, Hodgson reported that master copies of two of the episodes, "Invaders from the Deep" and "Revenge of the Mysterons from Mars", had been found. The episodes were made available to Kickstarter backers of the new series on November 25, 2016.

The credits in the first four seasons on Comedy Central included the phrase "Keep circulating the tapes" to encourage fans to share VHS tapings they made with others (as Comedy Central was not widely distributed then), despite the questionable copyright practice. Though the phrase was removed from the credits due to legal reasons, the concept of "keep circulating the tapes" was held by the show's fans to continue to help introduce others to the show following its broadcast run.

### Turkey Day marathons

An annual event in the Comedy Central era was the Turkey Day marathon that ran on or near the Thanksgiving holiday. The marathon would show between six and twelve rebroadcasts of episodes, often with new material between the episodes from the cast and crew. While the show was on Sci-Fi, one Thanksgiving Day marathon of *MST3K* was held during its first season, but lacked any new interstitial material.

Following its acquisition of the series rights, Shout! Factory has streamed Turkey Day marathons on Thanksgiving since 2013, broadcasting six of the *MST3K* episodes and wrapped with introductions from Hodgson alongside other cast members at times. The event was intended to be a one-off, but the fans' reaction to it led Hodgson and Shout! to continue the tradition in subsequent years. The 2015 Turkey Day coincided with the Kickstarter for the show's revival, while the 2016 Turkey Day includes the revival's new host Ray co-hosting alongside Hodgson. The 2017 Turkey Day was hosted by Hodgson, Ray and Felicia Day, and concluded with a surprise announcement that the show had been renewed on Netflix for another season.

### Home media

Main article: List of Mystery Science Theater 3000 home video releases

Home video releases of *MST3K* episodes are complicated by the licensing rights of the featured film and any shorts, and as such many of the nationally televised episodes have not yet been released onto home video. Through the current distributor, Shout! Factory, over 100 of the films have been cleared for home media distribution. With Shout's release of the 39th volume of *MST3K* episodes in 2017, the company anticipated that only about a dozen episodes out of 197 from the original series' run will never make it to home video due to licensing rights issues of the movies featured.

Original home media releases were issued by Rhino Entertainment, initially starting with single disc releases before switching to semi-regular four-episode volume sets. According to Hodgson, the people at Rhino who were involved in the distribution of *MST3K* eventually left Rhino and joined Shout!, helping to convince that publisher to acquire the rights from Rhino. Since 2008, all releases of *MST3K* have been through Shout! (including some reprints of the first Rhino volume set) and have typically been multi-episode volumes or themed packs.

In 2014, 80 episodes of the show were made available for purchase or rental on the video streaming site Vimeo. Shout! has uploaded some episodes to YouTube with annotations, as documented by *The Annotated MST* fansite, to explain some of the sources of the jokes in the riffs. In February 2015, Shout! launched its own streaming service, Shout! Factory TV, of which selected episodes of *MST3K* were included on the service. Selected episodes were also made available on demand through RiffTrax starting in November 2015. Twenty episodes from previous *MST3K* seasons were released by Netflix in all regions in anticipation of the revival series.

All episodes of Season 11 were released on a DVD/Blu-Ray box set on April 17, 2018, which includes a documentary behind the making of the first revival season.