Mystery Science Theater 3000

Nexas - You’re welcome. And yes, it would be interesting… :wink:

By the way, what are MSTs? :stuck_out_tongue:

– Mitch

Not Nexas, but I can explain. MST is short for Mystery Science Theater, which is short for the rather long show title Mystery Science Theater 3000 (also abbreviated MST3K, as seen in my previous post). The basic premise is that your basic Joe Average (named Joel, later replaced by Mike) was marooned in space by mad scientists bound to take over the world. Their idea: use bad movies. We’re talking bad writing, bad directing, bad acting, bad editing, if you name it, it could be done horrifically.

So they subjected poor Joel/Mike to horrendous movies and had managed to project these “experiments” (their name for episodes) through a robot named Cambot onto a cable channel to share the experiments to the world (and hopefully “stupid” it into submission). Later on, the original “mads” left the show, and the new plot was something more along the lines of simply torturing them - by this time it was Mike - with movies and while the new “mads” still wanted to take over the world, they tried more random things, like taking over the world one person at a time.

Except… Joel was smart and creative, and used random parts of the ship he was stranded on to create three robot friends - Gypsy, Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo - to keep him company. Gypsy helps run the ship while Joel/Mike, Crow and Servo sit in the theater and - as a means to keep sane - crack jokes about the movies. The show ran for ten years, and it’s absolutely hilarious. A bit crude sometimes, but overall it’s hilarious.

You can find out more at www.mst3kinfo.com

KE - Dang. That’s too cool! It sounds like something my sister and I would create and participate in… :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for the information and the link! I’ll check the latter out. :smiley:

– Mitch

Well since it’s already explained…I’ll just give my two cents.

I have to admit the show itself is hard to find nowadays, from what I know. You can still buy it and all though, as well as the movie. Watching old films with the feeling of “entertaining commentary” is just something worth some time :slight_smile:

Start at the catalog page of www.mst3kinfo.com - they have some of the single DVD releases for sale, as well as some sweet merchandise (personally I’m saving up for the t-shirt with all of the 'bots on it, as well as the shadowrama window cling, cast poster and bumper sticker set - yeah, I’m a big fan).

Also, you might want to try Best Buy or FYE or some place that sells lots of the more obscure DVD sets (i.e. not Wal-Mart), as they might have the newer Rhino volumes. Act fast, though, since movie right issues often force Rhino to take some of the volumes off the shelves. Volume 12 should be released sometime this fall.

A word of warning, from someone who knows: check out some of the fansites (mst3kinfo.com has a links page called “The Umbilicus”) for reviews of the episodes you are about to see. Some of these movies are sure candidates for the worst movie ever made - one movie left me slightly psychologically traumatized. In the end, I believe it’s totally worth it, but at the same time, I don’t want to send newbies into this unprepared.

EDIT: I get it now. :stuck_out_tongue: