I’m clearly not the target audience for that show, but I didn’t miss any episodes either.
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YES
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I’m not gonna lie, this is probably the most insightful thing I’ve had to say in… Like, ever. I need to work on that.
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I had heard about the show for a long time before seeing it, as it was largely unavailable in Canada. Eventually, I managed to get my hands on the Rhino VHS tapes and I was soon hooked. I knew it was for me because I thought b-movies were interesting and I like comedy but I feel like there’s a certain language to it that very much informed my sense of humour and also how I react to movies. But don’t worry, I only talk over them with friends and in the right circumstances.
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It was a happy memory between me and my father
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I explained to a fellow MSTie once that MST3K is one of the most hopeful optimistic shows ever made.
Because we’re surrounded by garbage, every day. Not just cheesy movies but all sorts of stuff seems like it comes at you from every angle all the time and it’s easy to want to close yourself off and collapse inward because of the cumulative exhaustion.
But MST3K takes the bad things we’re given and laughs at it. It’s all about making the best of a bad situation; making friends (literally–thanks, special parts!) in a bad situation; and finding things to laugh at and even have a weird affection for.
In a strange way, it’s this thing that says you’re not alone in being beleaguered, but here’s a way to keep your sanity, made by people who are on your wavelength, enjoyed by people on your wavelength, and this has been around for more than 30 years. It’s evergreen. It’s not going anywhere.
It’s one of the most delightful ways to be reminded that we’re none of us alone.
Or, to be more succinct: “waffles.”
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I discovered MST3K around 14 years ago. My first run through was just a blast, all these movies I’d never seen paired with really deep comedy - chef’s kiss
As time went on I started to deal with anxiety and depression and here is this monumental thing that takes me out of reality for a couple hours… I don’t know what I’d do without it!
Is watching the MST3K Twitch channel as I type this
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My answer to the prompt is a bit more prosaic than the above, I’m afraid. For me, MST3K was and is a great show because it legitimizes something very near and dear to my heart:
Talking during the movie!
My brain is a busy one, and unless what I’m watching is really compelling, I often find myself with cycles to spare. These turn into meta-observations, random connections, or absurd juxtapositions in a desperate attempt to stay entertained – and the best thing about watching bad TV with people is that you can share them. (Unless you’re around those spoil-sports who insist on total silence so that can follow the plot of, say, Entourage. But I don’t last very long in that company.)
So huzzah forever to MST3K for showing the world that, when a piece of entertainment isn’t getting the job done, we’re all entitled to attack, deconstruct, and rework it for the sake of our own amusement. If it’s gonna torture us, we’re gonna torture it right back!
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My father and I shared several MST3K watching moments when I was a teenager as well. I remember an episode we were watching and it was the hardest I’ve ever seen him laugh! Wish I could remember which one it was.
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I can honestly say that MST3K has made me a smarter person. When I was younger, I used to spend hours researching and studying the references and it developed into a love of trivia and knowledge!
Even to this day, it is still such a delightful feeling when I finally get a riff that used to go over my head!
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Like many others have said MST3K gave me proof that there was a place for a weird anti-social geeky kid with a slightly dark and strange sense of humor.
It also helped me replace my harsh critical attitude with my love of all things cheesy and just have fun.
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I used to go to a private Catholic school for less than two years in middle school before my mother pulled me out because I was doing very poorly in that environment; as a result, when I went back to public school everything was very different than it had been in elementary school with many of the same people I’d gone to school with before. I didn’t have many friends at the time, to the point where shortly after Columbine happened, I got singled out by a guidance counselor for sitting alone while eating lunch, reading Stephen King novels. I didn’t make the connection that she thought I was a potential threat until years later. It was bad.
I was also still into Pokemon in 7th grade and got bullied for wearing a shirt with Pikachu on it. But there was one girl in a grade above me who told me that she was also into Pokemon, as well as a bunch of other video games and anime. She became my best friend, and I would visit her house often, gazing upon her collection of rare, imported Japanese figures of characters from Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII. She was also a talented artist, better than I was, and I thought she was the coolest person ever because she’d show me all this weird, obscure media I’d never even heard of before, including a lot of video games like Monster Rancher, Puyo Puyo Sun, Ehrgeiz, Cubivore, Bloody Roar, Worms, Clock Tower, Fatal Frame, the original DOOM, and even Seaman. One night, when I was spending the night, probably in the spring of 1999, we walked over to Blockbuster, and we rented the MST3K episode of “Manos” The Hands of Fate on VHS. I had no idea what I was in for. That was my first experience with MST3K and it blew 13 year-old me’s mind. We were laughing so hard, I remember having tears in my eyes. I’d never seen anything like this.
Over the years I’d still visit her, watching more episodes of MST3K, playing video games I’d never heard of, watching fansubbed anime she downloaded off the internet a few years before it made its way stateside, and just hanging out in her room while drawing and subjecting her to my very early 2000’s taste in rock music (lots of Rage Against the Machine, which she wasn’t super into, but she was very polite about it). We watched so many episodes together that they’re at the core of that friendship for me. The last time I saw her was in 2004, shortly after graduating high school, when she informed me she’d be moving out of the state soon with her mother. We didn’t watch MST3K the last time we hung out, and I lost touch with her in the following years; I probably last talked with her online through AIM in 2007 or 2008, and she’d since joined Something Awful while I’d dove headfirst into 4chan and YTMND. She doesn’t really have any presence on social media attached to her real name, and probably no longer uses any of her old internet handles.
I’d end up introducing MST3K to my younger sister, who also loved it, and frequently when we’d spend the weekend at our dad’s house twice a month, we’d get up early to watch MST3K reruns on Saturday mornings on SciFi. Our dad also got into it a little bit, but not as much as we did. Over the years, I’d end up introducing the show to many of my friends, and then it got to the point where most of the new friends I made already knew about the show, and through MST3K, I discovered my love of cheesy and trashy cinema in general. This made it very easy to get into the horror movie fandom, since most horror movie fans are also usually into shlocky cinema just out of a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. (I once had a college professor say that the two kinds of movies that are the cheapest to make for aspiring filmmakers are horror movies and martial arts movies, and I think that goes a long way into explaining why there’s a ton of bad or just really bizarre movies in both genres.) I’ve made so many friends through not just MST3K, but through cult cinema and horror/sci-fi movies in general, and I really feel like MST3K, and my best friend in middle/high school, is what got my foot in the door and introduced me to the wider world of geekery.
So yeah. MST3K came to me in a very difficult period in my life where I didn’t have many friends and very few people who understood me, except for one, who showed it to me. I hope she’s doing well; I miss her a lot, but I worry that we may not connect the same way we did back in 1998 on the school bus, when she’d asked me if I ever heard about a game called Final Fantasy VII, and that it was one of the greatest games ever made. I doubt she’d ever see this message; maybe she’d recognize some of the stories about her mother’s seeing eye-dogs, big ole’ golden retrievers, sitting right in my lap and finding myself having no choice but to pet them, or her showing me her piggy bank that was a little robot that flipped coins into its mouth and ate them, or her modding DOOM just to make one of the pinkies blue and using the sprites in a sprite comic because early 2000’s. I kind of doubt it, but man… I miss you, dude. You had such a positive impact on my life and I feel like a better person for having met you, and not just because you introduced me to MST3K and FFVII, but also because you were a genuinely kind, funny, talented and compassionate person with some baller taste in video games, anime and TV shows.
Thank you for everything.
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When very young, I was a voracious reader and movie watcher. Like a lot of young girls, I wanted to dance and sing (like poor Eunice of Carol Burnett Show fame) but I really had no skill for those things. So then I wanted to move to Hollywood and write screenplays. I would even sometimes scribble notes for how I’d make certain favorite book scenes work as movies. I’d stuff the notes in the books for posterity.
What MST3K did for me a couple of decades later was confirm that it was a terrible idea, and I would’ve ended up like the poor title character of Barton Fink, but worse. 
Thanks, Best Brains.
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I’m a creature fueled by nostalgia – the older I get, the better things used to be. MST3K is one of the rare exceptions; it’s been with me for a very long time and continues to be a beacon of light and hope.
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I love to riff, but nothing can compete with the zinger from a casual friend I haven’t seen in eons. (This was a few years before the big scandal with the director first hit, FWIW.)
One day, I swung by her place for a visit. She and 5 or 6 roommates were all watching Mighty Aphrodite together. So I sat quietly and waited since it was almost over. But I snapped to as she took a long drag on her cigarette and said, “Oh, isn’t that nice! Woody left the woman young enough to be his daughter for the woman young enough to be his granddaughter!”
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For me I came to it very late as to my knowledge it never really aired here in the uk. I saw the reboot on Netflix and was hooked. Many moons ago when I was at college an old friend and I used to rent the worst looking horror or sci-fi films blockbuster had to offer and riff on them. This was one of my favourite times of life pre family and the nostalgia I get watching the bots and the hosts is through the roof.
I can never get those times back but this is a great second best.
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I was a weird shy geeky kid when I found MST3k in 1991. I could tell right away that the MST3k team’s sense of humor matched my own, but there was one early moment in the series run that really spoke out to me.
In 1992 (at age 13), I was watching the final host segment after The Human Duplicators had concluded. Crow and Tom Servo have decided to “come out” as robots to Joel.
Crow: Joel… Tom and I have something to tell you.
Joel: You two got into my sewing kit again?
Crow: Joel, Joel, Joel… I wish things were still that simple. But, well, I think this is something we’ve all known for a long time. You know we’ve alluded to it: a stilted joke here, a fleeting doubt there, yet… never have we actually said, “Joel, Tom and I are…”
{crow swoons}
Tom: Oh, for cryin’ out in the beer - Joel, Crow and I are robots - and we want the world to know!
Joel {doing a take at Cambot}: Well Tom, I knew that. Now can we get on with this letter?
Tom: But, sure, but, Joel, how did you already know?
Joel {rolling his eyes}: Tom, it’s more than a little obvious, all right.
To most folks, this thinly-veiled metaphor might elicit a little chuckle. But it was a notable moment to a closeted kid coming up in a pretty traditional upbringing. Joel was nonchalant and supportive, and it was all no big deal. And in that moment, I knew I had found my people. MST3k meant a bit more to me from then onward.
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That’s a FANTASTIC story. Thank you for sharing.
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It really just became a habit, and now it’s almost an addiction!
Watching an unriffed movie just seems so…unriffed! Incomplete! Lacking! Intolerable! Inhumane! Not kosher! So plain!
So most times I’ll just rewatch a riffed movie (RT or MST3K) if I feel like zoning out and having a few laughs.
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Couldn’t have said it better myself.
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