I could swear I never watched Syfy until I was in my teens, and certainly never caught MST3K on it or CC. In fact, I didn’t watch Stargate, BSG, Farscape and such until streaming and Comet. Didn’t catch Doctor Who until it was on BBCA and even missed my intended jumping on point by half a series (Asylum of the Daleks instead of Let’s Kill Hitler). Futurama’s revival was either what lured me to Comedy Central or sometime before then? So yeah, missed it on those stops probably by a tremendous while.
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When I was a kid/teen in the 90s, it was my job to do the dusting on Saturday mornings before I was allowed to go play with my friends… This all worked out for my household because my mom got her living/dining room dusted and I got to watch all the cartoons I wanted while I putzed around dusting all her knickknacks and our wooden furniture stuff. Once I was in my teens, I still loved all the looney tunes shows and stuff that were on on Saturday morning and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, but the junk that aired after noon was awful… I don’t remember any of these shows, but didn’t like em…
I started switching through the channels and happened across “Night of the Bloodbeast” on Comedy Central and realized that this show was hilarious…
My friends and I had often turned down the volume on bad TV to make up our own versions of the movies and junk we would find before I had any idea that this was going on for 6 or 7 years before this day. Finding this show was like hanging out with my own friends in a way. That day, I sat with the dirty dusty rag and Pledge in my hands laughing then entire rest of the episode. I realized that this show was broadcast every Saturday at 11am or noon during this time they were reruns, but all new to me. I started to make sure I was able to watch it almost every Saturday. It was a gem to find.
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Comedy Central in the 90’s even though I was a teenager and some of the jokes was over my head I still throughly enjoyed the show I live in Detroit so I get the Lions at home every turkey day plus the MST3K turkey day marathon its just my favorite holiday
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Welcome to the family!
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Well I was in the Yukon wailing on some snowy cliff face when I brought the pick ax up to my mouth and licked it. Nothin’. I wailed some more, and licked again. Nothin’. Then a television fell from the cliff and konked me on the noggin. I woke up to a gossamer melody as if from the angels themselves. Twas the “la la la” that finally cleared the cobwebs from my brain and, truly, it was somethin’.
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One fine day I went to my local public library to rent some X-Files videos. I look up, and there was; encased in that stiff plastic sleeve thingy they used to put VHS tapes in, was Joel and the Bots! I haven’t looked back since.
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I believe it was through an ad for the Essentials collection. My brother and I then noticed MST3K: The Movie at a rental store and checked it out. We both enjoyed it and a little later The Essentials became the first in a collection.
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I think I must have seen it referenced a few times online, and once saw one episode go by in the Netflix listing. But it wasn’t until my first semester of college that I decided to look it up, needing something to relieve class-induced stress. Thankfully, the People of YouTube had diligently circulated the tapes. After that day, and all the way through graduation, I had a weekly ritual of watching an episode while either working on homework or doing a Sudoku puzzle.
It can be comforting knowing that no matter what life throws at me, at least I not trapped in space and being experimented on by mad scientists, even if it feels like it some days.
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I was going through an RHPS phase. I had the movie memorized verbatim and the riffs. We were at Blockbuster when the box caught my eye. It sounded just like going to RHPS but with different movies. My mum let me rent it. I fell in love. Unfortunately, they only had Pod People and The Movie. It was about 1997 at that time. It didn’t air on any of the channels we had. The internet was still pretty lame then. It took a long time until I found it again. Thanks to the internet I have watched probably every episode available except KTMA at least once. I have severe arachnophobia, and I don’t want to see some again.
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I was just 19 when MST3K premiered and I remember seeing it briefly on the small black and white TV that had a UHF knob and it was still barely visible. I was working and busy with life so I never saw it again until later. We never had cable and I ended up leaving home at 21 to get married the next year. Towards the end of my marriage in 1996 we moved into an apartment and got cable and I found it on SciFi I think although I made my ex-husband take me to see the movie and had a Toblerone bar. 
I may have watched some on Comedy Central but I watched it all the time on SciFi.
I lost track again due to life and didn’t really get into anything else until more recently.
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(shrug) I just looked outside and there it was.
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Today is the 30 year and one day anniversary of my 1st MST3K episode, Sidehackers. After years of new interest in B movies but not how to indulge in that. Didn’t have the internet in the very late '80s-early '90s. Once I got cable for myself and seeing Comedy Central, it was perfect.
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It was the summer of 1991. I was fresh on the heels of completing my 2nd semester of college (1st complete year) and it was a heady time. Away from home, the summer stretching before me and the neon 90s were just beginning to erupt with a flood of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pies, Pizza Hut Bigfoot deals, and no responsibilities.
A friend of mine and I were bored on an afternoon in June and were flipping through the cable offerings that came with the off-campus apartment’s utility package. As it so happened, one of those channels was the Comedy Channel … and it was showing Cave Dwellers.
It was love at first sight. Cave Dwellers to this day remains one of my favorite episodes to introduce a new person to the show with because the movie is so ridiculous and the riffing is so on point that it shows what MST3K is really capable of. To a bunch of college boys who already had a bit of a nerdy bent it seemed like the show was channeling us. Kept watching the show faithfully from that point forwards.
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In my case, it was through Sci-Fi airings in the UK in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
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Comedy Central was going to have a Police Squad! marathon that I was going to tape and I got the time wrong by an hour, so I got the tape ready, but instead of Police Squad!, there was this Japanese monster movie and guys making fun of it. I was hooked almost immediately.
The episode was Gamera vs. Barugon by the way.
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I heard about it from a co-worker in 1993 or 1994, but I did not get access to Comedy Central until July of 1995.
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For me it was probably in 1990, I read a short article in TV Guide about how much they loved the show. It sounded right up my alley; quirky, pop culture references, old movies. I was a fan without even seeing the show.
At the time I did not have cable, too expensive. It was probably two years later that I finally saw the show during a trip to Minneapolis. Not long after that cable was installed in my home and I began taping as many episodes as I could, still have many of those old VHS. I also started to collect the Shout factory DVDs.
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And here’s where I read about it!
It was a pop culture article in an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly. I bought it because the cover promised a way to play as the bosses in Street Fighter II for the SNES (it was a Game Genie code that was glitchy as hell, but still). It was a copy sealed in plastic, so I couldn’t very well read it in the store and get the code on the spot, which means I had to buy it.
So I did. And I saw that article, and RIGHT FROM THERE, I freaked out over a show I haven’t even seen one second of on TV. It just sounded so awesome, and I NEEDED to see it, even if my cable company didn’t share my “YOU HAVE TO GET COMEDY CENTRAL NOW” views.
It was that article that made me a hardcore MSTie right away!
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MST3K never aired in Australia, and therefore the first time I discovered it was back as a high school student, browsing the shelves of our local Blockbuster to find some terrible movies for an all-night movie marathon I was holding at my home with a bunch of friends. I spotted the MST3K: The Movie cover (the only MST3K thing to get an international release at the time) with the text “Every year Hollywood makes thousands of movies. This is one of them.” That tagline spoke to me, and hooked me instantly.
None of us had any exposure to even the silhouettes at that point, and all went into it blind as the second movie of the night, following a terrible direct-to-video Jackie Chan film. It set a new tone for the rest of the evening, and put us in vocal heckling mode all night for subsequent films.
After that, I went online and learned that it was a TV series, spent a gruelling eight hours downloading a random episode (Terror From the Year 5000) over a 56k dialup modem, and the rest is history.
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Worth it.
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