I Attended the MST3K Reunion Show, and It Was Everything I Wanted It to Be

Before I just melt into a fangirling puddle, a little backstory. (Do the wavy lines thing here to indicate a flashback.)
As a native of Minneapolis, I don’t necessarily find many opportunities to go full hipster (“I was into it before it was cool!”). Arguably, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (or MST3K to its devotees) was never cool, more the purview of dorks at home on a Sunday night, but I can still say I was there for the show’s humble beginnings on local UHF channel 23. I remember channel surfing with a high school boyfriend (remember when you did stuff like that?) when he landed on a grainy old movie with a silhouette of theater seats along the bottom of the screen. “What the heck is this?” I asked.
“Oh, there’s this janitor who was shot into space by mad scientists,” he said. “He and some robots watch a terrible movie and make fun of it.”
I thought that was so strange. What kind of premise is that? (To this day, I still find its long-lived success somewhat surprising.) But by the time the show moved to Comedy Central, I was hooked on the wide-ranging pop cultural humor, the low key Midwestern passive-aggressiveness (my people!), and prop comedy. When I went to college in a neighboring state, I sought out a group of MSTies who time-shifted the show via the low-tech method of knowing a student who was also a townie. He got his mom to tape it for us. We watched it in the TV room while cracking our own jokes.
It was all very meta.

Which is the thing about Mystery Science Theater 3000. I know I’m waxing nostalgic, but hear me out. The show was at the very vanguard of what we now call social media. The showrunners always took a liberal view of copyright law, and each episode ended with the exhortation to “keep circulating the tapes.” When I’d run into other MSTies, there’d always be a discussion about what episodes you had and how you might arrange a trade. Sure, it was low tech—VHS tapes moving hand to hand—but I had the intense feeling of being part of a much larger group, one that spanned the entire country. It was my first experience with fandom. Though Mystery Science Theater 3000 didn’t strictly riff on science fiction films (at least until its move to what was then called the Sci-Fi Channel after cancellation on Comedy Central), the fandom had an SFFnal sensibility. It’s made up of the enthusiastic edge of a group of people who like things that maybe other people don’t get. How else does one explain Manos, The Hands of Fate?
These days, much of the blogosphere runs on something akin to the MST3K model, providing up-to-the-minute commentary, jokes, and riffs on, say, the reanimation of Jon Snow, or whether an all-girl version of an ’80s movie will ruin your childhood. There’s even a name for this phenomenon: social television, which Wikipedia defines as, “the union of television and social media.” (Younger me is currently cringing that I just cited Wikipedia, but whatever; old joke: in high school, students start papers with, “Webster’s dictionary defines antidisestablishmentarianism as X.” In college you learn to start papers thusly: “The Oxford English dictionary defines antidisestablishmentarianism as Y.”) Back when the Internet was nothing more than electronic bulletin boards and maybe email if you were in academia, MST3K was training us in the recursive, social, and postmodern enterprise of our collective engagement with pop cultural detritus. (I told you I was nostalgic; I didn’t read all that Walter Benjamin for nothing.)
Put more simply, MST3K showed us the art of the loving sendup, the transformative work. If you’ve spent any time at all online (hello!), you know how hard it is to strike that balance between genuine cleverness, kindness, and criticism. It’s easy to veer into either snark or smarm, the vicious takedown or unqualified adoration. Mystery Science Theater 3000 dumpster-dived into the cinematic wasteland and turned the unwatchable into the hilarious. And they did it with a good humor that feels strangely mature, given its often juvenile sensibilities. By all rights, the show should be all id, the cultural hind-brain howling into the void. But it’s something more wonderful than that, something delicate and perfect. I swear, I haven’t even been drinking.

Live shows of internet, podcast, or television phenomenons are inherently odd—that shift from the silent, solitary consumer to a member of an audience isn’t necessarily something that goes smoothly. But MST3K is a horse of a different color, spanning decades and multiple media. Packed into the State Theatre, we oohed and aahed and generally stomped on the floor, playing for the national audience that was watching in a simulcast to movie theaters across the country. There was a costume contest, won by someone in Florida. I have always loved the locality of MST3K, the hyper-local jokes and Midwestern humor that underpin the show. But I also love seeing it go out into the larger world, a comedy accessible to a wider audience than me and mine.
Like all good hipster parents (oh, how I’ve longed to call myself such!), I’ve wanted to indoctrinate the next generation into my childhood obsessions. My mother, sister, and I spent so many Thanksgivings watching the Turkey Day marathons on Comedy Central, forgoing the requisite football. I sat my son in front on MST3K about a year ago, momsplaining that he would absolutely love it. It was such a kick to stand with him in line at the theater, watching him vibrate with excitement for the live show. The audience was so beautifully familiar, all us kids who started with channel surfing local television in the late ’80s, and then graduating to the strange, almost science fictional world we now inhabit. Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been a guide and a touchstone for me, teaching me how to do something that didn’t even exist when they were doing it first. Which is the aim of science fiction after all. Amen.