How did you discover MST3K?

I’m pretty sure my uncle told me about it and introduced me to it. So I’ve always been aware of it. But I guess I would say I officially “discovered it” thanks to the revival and rifftrax. Now I have been slowly able to watch more classic episodes from other sources. Can’t wait for the classic episode packs to come and obviously the new episodes.

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Stayed at a beach House that had
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Comedy Central . First episode I saw MST3K 212 - Godzilla vs. Megalon January 19 1991

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Grew up in a sci-fi-riffer community, so it was like coming home. My dad and I would watch it together a lot and riff along!

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My local Blockbuster had MST3K: The Movie and one of the Rhino DVDs (I think it was The Beginning of the End, but I’m not 100% sure). I rented them both multiple times before I discovered that I could buy them (and a few more episodes) from this weird new place called amazon.com. Then my family finally got cable approximately 6 months before Diabolik aired and I caught what I could on SciFi.

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I was still up at 2:00 AM on a Saturday in 1995. Local NBC affiliate was showing this strange movie called “Pod People”. I quickly noticed some funny commentary in the corner of the screen and watched it all the way though.

Intrigued, I purposely stayed up to 2:00 AM the following Saturday. “Cave Dwellers” was the offering and it didn’t take me long to realize this was the show for me!

(WHO-TV13 for those curious)

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As with a lot of early fans, we didn’t get the Comedy Channel on our local cable provider, so my earliest experience was over at a friend’s house with one of those massive satellite dish setups when Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster came on while we were getting ready to leave. (It was the “Kabob… and KaSteve” bit with the wind-up canoe.) As a fan of late night monster movies, I thought it was hilarious, but because it was just the theater silhouettes and I only caught a few minutes of it, I figured it was just a recurring bit from a sketch comedy show or something like Kentucky Fried Movie, that I hadn’t seen before.

I was, however, lucky enough to jump on again with the first episode of Season 3, Cave Dwellers, on or very shortly after it premiered, and this was the episode that made me a life-long fan.

Comedy Central was brand new, and the timing was perfect because it was the middle of summer, and I was a pimply teenager without a job spending a lot of time sitting on the couch channel surfing to kill the time. Since Comedy Central was so new, I had no idea what was on, and frequently switched over to it during commercial breaks in between old episodes of ‘Get Smart’ or whatever else was on Nick at Night, just to see what my alternatives were. I must have switched over to Cave Dwellers about half an hour in, because the first scene I remember was Ator and Thong (Dong?) wandering around in the fog. The line that won my heart was “Whose woods these are, I think I know… will watch these woods fill up with fog” which at the age of 13 seemed like the most obscure reference ever.

I hadn’t seen comedy like this before, and it immediately ticked all the boxes of things I love; Cheesy movies. Absurdist humor. Esoteric references. Talking back to the screen like a smart-ass. From that point forward, I never missed an episode, and it became the starting point for many a lifelong friendship (finding out that someone in school liked MST3K was like flashing a secret masonic nerd handshake that instantly meant you could relax and this person probably wasn’t a jerk.)

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We had some friends who had just bought one of those satellite dishes bigger than the sun who told me about this “robot show” we had to see. We watched an episode about cotton picking delinquents (Untamed Youth) and I was hooked from the moment Crow told those yutes to hide behind the credits. When I got married in 1991 (my wife and I are celebrating 30 years this year) I was elated we had cable at the apt we moved into so I could continue to watch.

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Summer 1992. I’m 12 years old. We moved to Lubbock, TX and got Comedy Central. I don’t remember the first episode I saw but the first one I recorded was Teenagers from Outer Space. Some of the first episodes had to include a Hercules movie because I remember a “Pizza! Pizza!” joke and the Master Ninja episode that had the host segment featuring different variations of nunchuks. We only lived there a couple of months before settling in Big Spring, which didn’t have Comedy Central. Thankfully the MST Hour started coming on regular TV a few years later.

Our brief stay in Lubbock is also when I discovered The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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Back in the early 2000s, one of my dad’s friends gave him a few kooky videos burned on to a DVD. One of them was Eegah. We watched it, it was ridiculous and made us kids giggle a bit but we didn’t get it much, just chalked it up to another of my dad’s goofy tastes.

Well, fast forward to 2017. I went to my pregnant best friend’s house to help her paint the nursery. Her and her husband said “You HAVE to check out this new show on Netflix — it made us laugh so hard we couldn’t breathe.” They pulled up the newest episodes of mst3k and I had a vague moment of “Wait, this looks kind of familiar.” Then they put on Cry Wilderness and it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. I LOVED it. We had it on the rest of the weekend while we finished the nursery. And Mystery Science Theater has been a staple in my life ever since.

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At 8 years old, I was channel surfing (ask your parents) and happened to come across the original Gamera episode, during the Tibby song. So there I was, watching a gumball machine singing a love song about a turtle with absolutely no context, and so I stopped right there, needing to know what the hell this show was. And of course, once I saw the actual movie riffing, I got totally hooked.

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I read an article in a newspaper about the show and instantly thought it was the sort of thing I’d love. Unfortunately, our cable company split Comedy Central and VH1 and 8 times out of 10 they forgot to flip the switch on Saturdays, so it took me several weeks to finally catch an episode. I don’t remember which one it was, but I was instantly hooked and never looked back. Luckily they eventually gave Comedy Central its own channel and I never missed a week after that.

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Ok, some set up, I came from a very jokey family, lots of self depreciating humor, teasing, general silliness. My grandmother was the first riffer I ever knew (before there was a name for it) she was a sweet, quiet woman, so that made us kids laugh even more when she take a shot at a show (or even a preacher, like Oral Roberts, on TV).

Anyway, fast forward many years, and I’m gabbing with my sister on the phone and she tells me about this hilarious show and it has these puppets (which almost lost me, I’m not really a puppets person) but she says this is right up my alley, this is what you and (my brother) do when you watch bad shows or movies, it’s what grandma started.

They didn’t have the show where I lived, but I always had it in mind, and when we got it, and when the VHS were released, and I finally got to see these things… yup sis was right, this is exactly our kind of humor. Like a show made just for us (which lead me to other like-minded folks on forums and such)

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Channel flipping in June of 1991, I didn’t even notice what channel I was on but I spotted an Ator movie and stopped – nothin’ like cheesy '80s peplums. I didn’t even notice the guys at the bottom of the screen until one of the movie characters said quite woodenly, “I wonder if it’s worth the risk of counting on that,” and the comment was “Or the risk of acting!” and it was love at first riff. :smiley:

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i was like 6 and flipping through the channels and was delighted to find a Godzilla movie playing, but i couldn’t figure out why there were shadows riffing on it. i didn’t understand 80% of the references, but wow was i hooked.

28 years later and i’m down to only not understanding 20% of the references :upside_down_face:

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I was in my freshman year of hs about 20 years ago, somehow I had managed to crawl out of bed before 12pm (a rare feat for me at that age) and was channel surfing early in the morning. Back then the Sci Fi channel was among my favorites so I popped that on to see if anything good was on and there was MST3K. These were just reruns at this point, I think the series had ended a year or two before I had found it, and they only regularly showed the reruns earlier in the morning.

I have no idea which episode it was, but it was definitely the right one because I became instantly hooked! I would do my best to get up early enough to watch an episode, or set my vcr to record episodes if I couldn’t get up. Whenever I had friends over for sleepovers on Fridays that year I would have them watch the show in the morning, and it was honestly just the best way to wrap up a slumber party.

For years my only access to mst3k was just those recorded videos until I came across a few seasons for download, and other scattered episodes on YouTube and streaming services until finally the netflix series came around!

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I don’t have so much a story as fuzzy memories. I think I read an article about the show, but I was growing up in a home without cable so I never had a chance to watch. Later, while staying at my sister’s for the summer, I stumbled across an episode about 2/3 of the way through. There it was, the show I’d read about years before. I recognized this show I’d never seen before, and I loved it. It ended. I wanted more, but something else came on afterwards. I’m not sure what episode it was, but I like to think it was Godzilla vs Megalon, but that’s a guess at this point. Eventually I found the show again, and have been watching ever since.

Now I have a young one of my own, and now that she’s six I’m introducing her as well. Her first episode was Jack Frost, and now we’ve started Godzilla vs Megalon.

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When I was a kid my siblings bought my dad one of the boxsets for Christmas. I remember not wanting to watch it because it looked old (I was like. 7? 8?), but ended up falling in love with it. I know that my first episodes were both Christmas episodes!

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I went to my friends house one day and he told me I had to watch the video he got. It was the Rhino VHS of Cave Dwellers. I was a fan ever since.

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The exact order/timing is fuzzy?

My family replaced the old Zenith TV w/ the ultra-sonic clicker remote with a (slightly bigger) new Sony TV with an IR remote. We also got a new VHF/UHF antenna in the attic…

The next part is where no one can agree on the exact order? No one can agree if we stumbled on MST3K while adjusting the VHF/UHF antenna, or if we read about MST3K in a local paper (Star Trib? Sun Sailor?) … first? I tend to remember seeing it in the paper (MST3K story? TV listing that looked interesting? A movie mentioned that my dad remembered?) and asking if we could try to find the station? But?

Regardless, I remember that we couldn’t get the local uhf station to come in without losing one or two other stations we wanted? So at some point we ran to Radio Shack, added a dedicated UHF antenna to the attic to get MST3K. Even then, the uhf antenna would need almost constant adjustment to get the station to come in clear.

Rediscovered MST3K on cable when I got to college, and had cable for the first time.

Regret never writing in and joining the fan club. Was much more shy back then… well still am, but was really shy then. Always wanted to, kept telling myself that I would… Never felt comfortable writing in. If the old PO Box is ever brought back, may finally write a long overdue letter.

And, yes… when I share stories like this with some of my SCCA friends, they blink at me and say, “Damn, you’re old!” “What’s an ultrasonic clicker?!” “Two antennas, and you still only had 7 stations ?!” “You’re really old!”

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[blink]
“Damn, you’re old!”
“What’s an ultrasonic clicker?!”
“Two antennas, and you still only had 7 stations ?!”
“You’re really old!”

And I should know as I am quite familiar with your scenario but with one antenna and fewer stations.
(the point is…I’m old, too :grinning:)

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