Comedy Central Years

What made them great? What didn’t? For me? The Comedy Central years evolved, improved, and endure as the essence of the show I have in my head. Bad movie no matter the genre, kind yet goofy treatment, strange sincerity throughout, and a lark from beginning to end. This was the Comedy Central period in a nutshell. I feel. You?

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I think the Comedy Central years, the show was still this niche little show. (I never had cable so I relied on a friend to share the tapes). As a result, the gang could be more weird, take more chances, and just be more silly (in a good way).

When it moved to Sci-Fi, it became a little less risk-taking. And the Netflix seasons were a completely different vibe.

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As I’ve said before, I think that seasons 3-6 were the Golden Age of the Show, in no small part due to Frank and Trace’s influence both on and off the camera.

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Yeah. The CC years are the essential years of the show. They were the years of “The right people will get it” and voluminous pop culture references (though those have largely returned with the reboot).
Trace and Frank were a great comedy team by any measure - I’d put them up against the vast majority of TV/movie comedy teams.
Based on what happened to the writing after they left, I feel safe presuming that they were the most valuable writers the show ever had.

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Season 2-7 are the Golden Age for me. Beginning when Nelson and Conniff joined and lasting up until the Sci-Fi move and the advent of Network Meddling. That said, though, there has been no era of the show I haven’t enjoyed.

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For me, what made the Comedy Central years great can be summed up in a song that is forever etched into my brain:

We gather together to watch cheesy movies

On Comedy Central on Thanksgiving Day

It’s Mystery Science

[inhale]

Theater 3000

It’s thirty straight hours, and it’s called Turkey Day

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I wouldn’t alter a word. The CC Age hardened what we identify as MST. Were it not that relationship at that time, would we be talking MST3K today? Beats me.

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In the UK MST3k was hard to come by, it was randomly on our version of the Sci-fi channel, between adverts for the best blender ever or the 8 CD album set called “Best rock songs ever” or somesuch that didn’t even have Radar Love on it, and there wasn’t really any defining of when the Comedy Central to Sci-fi switch happened.

If I’d only seen it on TV I’m not sure I’d really have noticed any real differences, because they were all out of order anyway.

I did get into the tape trading scene, and that did make it clear that the earlier episodes were wilder, usually because the range of films was wider on Comedy Central, and had more of a scattergun approach, as if it was live improv, the Sci-Fi episodes were much more focused and concise, the scriptedness (not a word I know, but you know what it means) more obvious.

I’m not down on either version, I really love the tightness of the Sci-fi years, the polish made the stupidity funnier, to me.

I suppose it’s like a band you like going from an indie label to a mainstream one.

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I’m so pedantic, my immediate response is: do you mean the Comedy Channel/Comedy Central years or just the Comedy Central years? Because there are distinctions. On the Comedy Channel, they were one of a dozen plus shows trying to make their mark, slowly rising to prominence among them. On Comedy Central, they were (at least at first) the jewel in the crown, chosen to be the first thing shown as the network officially rebranded after the “CTV” debacle.

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For purposes of brevity and not to get lost in the weeds, I omitted the distinction of The Comedy Channel making and airing Seasons 1 and 2 of MST3K only then to merge with Ha! to form Comedy Central to produce Seasons 3-7 of MST3K. Season 2 episodes emerged on Comedy Central afterward and therefore the rights of the earlier shows fell to them. Yes there were distinct variations between The Comedy Channel and Comedy Central and those may be parsed here in relation to the seasons of MST before and after the merger. Sorry on not getter super specific, I longed to confront the 90s era of Mystery Science pre-Sci-Fi and I decided on Comedy Central as the catch-all.

That’s what I figured, but I’m pedantic, as I mentioned. Hence why I run the wiki. (It wasn’t that long ago that I split the Comedy Central article there into two, they had been conflated for so long.)

So, I would say you get a full creative arc from the National, pre-Sci-Fi era. They find their feet, grow into greatness, have the big, series changing event, which is followed by (not, necessarily, causing) a decline and an ending. (Though, of course, it didn’t prove to be a final one.)

The Sci-Fi Channel is the first of, now, many rebirths. But I don’t think we’ll ever see an evolution like we did from Season 1 to Season 7.

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Having started my MST3K experience in the early Comedy Central era (Nov. 1991), I remember Season 1 shows sprinkled through the reruns there as well. Though not airing in chronology (except new episodes),

MST had a similar first 3 seasons trajectory as, of all things, SNL and the Flintstones: Raw early s.1, growing pains (but still great) s. 2, and more fully developed s. 3. One difference for me is that the other two shows’ first seasons are my favorites, whereas MST3K I love s. 3-6 best (though a huge fan of all others, including KTMA). Interesting to notice this watching reruns out of order. Some of the episodes stood out early on from s. 2 & 3 as all MST3Ks were new to me then.

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Lost my virginity during Turkey Day '93. That was pretty great. Not sure if Comedy Central was necessary however.

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In part it’s the fact that those were the shows I got to see. Comedy Central ran them all over the place. The network change happened as my life went through many changes, and I wasn’t able to keep up. People who discovered the show during the scifi years tend to be more devoted to that era.

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What really lit the fire in my head for the CC era, was Penn Jilette’s voice over. Promoting the show, calling Larry a fake Frank, and the iconic outro “This has been a presentation from Comedy Central”.

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Reminds me of simpler times… those were the days.

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I didn’t have Comedy Central until the summer between seasons 4 and 5, so I’ve got a soft spot for those specifically.

As someone who joined the party mid-run I always saw Season 1 as the time when they were learning how to make a TV about riffing, Season 2 was polishing everything that worked in S1, and from Seasons 3 on it was practice making perfect.

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I don’t remember exactly when I first watched, but I think I remember stumbling across it in 1990 when we rented a cable box to catch a free Disney weekend. My sister and I were scrolling through the channels and we found this show. No idea what episode it was (I was only 7) but I was hooked. I remember seeing an article about it in the TV guide and was like “THATS IT! THATS THE SHOW!” and was extremely excited when we got cable permanently a couple of years later and I could watch it regularly. Mostly I got my fix of it with the Mystery Science Theater Hour after school… Mike’s Jack Perkins is probably my favorite recurring character.
I remember my sister being pro-Mike in the Mike V. Joel debate, but I never engaged with that, I am someone who can like both Star Trek and Star Wars, no need for infighting.

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For me the Comedy Central episodes were like these forbidden treats because my cable company didn’t get Comedy Central until after that run of the show had ended and I couldn’t watch it regularly until we finally got the Syfy channel.

I think all the eras of MST3K have their strengths but what I like about the Comedy Central episodes was that the network seemed to be giving them free reign to do what they wanted. So you had a extremely wide variety of movies riffed from the kind of vintage scifi that would become the show’s bread & butter to Cold War relics like Space Travelers, to weird one-offs like Catalina Caper. Also the network added freedom of the hosts to have their own peculiar sensibilities to their respective riffing style (Joel really loved vintage comedy/TV references while Mike made lots of midwest-specific comedy.)

Both Syfy and Netflix had more specific restrictions on the kind of films that could air. Syfy wanted to stick into the kinds of films that were specific to the channel’s genre while Netflix wanted films that looked good in HD which restricted their use of older films.

I love all three eras but Comedy Central is sort of Prime MST3K for me.

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I think another aspect of why the Comedy Central years were so great is that the show had a subtle, but very real subversive edge to it. A lot of us Gen X-ers/Millennials grew up in a environment where the Eisenhower/Kennedy years as “The Good Old Days” and MST3k slowly dismantled that one awful movie and one riff at a time. Think about it, the terrible advice of those 50s mental hygiene films, the unhinged paranoia of a film like Rocket Attack USA, the cringe inducing ethnic caricatures, and the awful treatment of women.

As the show turns it’s targets to more recent films I’d love to see the Reagan/Bush/Clinton skewered in just the same fashion, but I imagine we’d also have a lot of people freaking out about "Oh so MST3k’s gone woke now…"the moment a few jokes about Reaganomiccs get told.

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