by Esmeralda Draic

Created on: May 22, 2009

I absolutely love Mystery Science Theater 3000. I regret that I never got to see it when it was still running. Living in the UK and not having satellite TV, I had just vaguely heard of it but didn't know what it was until I finally stumbled across some episodes a few years ago on YouTube and Google Video. I was quickly hooked and set about obtaining as many episodes as I could find, to feed my new addiction.

For those who don't know, Mystery Science Theater was a hysterically funny cult TV series that ran from 1988 to 1999, debuting for its first year on a small local station in Minnesota and then later on The Comedy Channel and The Sci Fi Channel. It was in the format of a comedy show with hosts who presented a cringemakingly bad old movie each week, usually of the Sci-Fi genre, sometimes also with a short feature (often a really corny educational short from the 1950s) preceding it.

The premise of the show was that it was about a man who had been unwillingly shot into space in a satellite as part of an evil experiment by two mad scientists, Dr Clayton Forrester and Dr Laurence Erhardt (in Series 2, 'Dr Erhardt' left and was replaced by 'TV's Frank', evil henchman to Dr Forrester). The experiment consisted of forcing the unwilling victim to watch really bad movies in order to monitor his reactions to them.

As the captive man in the satellite, Joel's only companions were two small robots he created from various spare parts around the ship, whom he named Tom Servo and Crow T Robot. He also created two other robots to help maintain the ship: Gypsy the navigator, and Cambot who sent and received visual transmissions to and from his captors. When the week's movie is screened, Tom Servo and Crow accompany Joel into the screening room and share his torture, and the three of them appear onscreen in silhouette sitting in a row of cinema seats superimposed over the bad film of the week while it is playing. While watching the film, the three of them heckle it mercilessly with a continual stream of the wackiest and most off-the-wall remarks, and this is where the zany rolling-on-the-floor humour element comes in that makes this show so hilarious.

As an excellent example of the what the show was like, Episode 24 of Series 3 was one of their finest and most inspired, a real classic Joel-era episode. The featured film on that episode, 'Manos: The Hands of Fate' (1966), has definitely got to be a strong contender for the very worst film ever made, possibly even surpassing

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