There was a time when all screens were not created equal. By 1996, Mystery Science Theater 3000 had become a beloved mainstay of late-night cable with a devoted cult following. Its seventh season (eighth, if you count the KTMA episodes) had just aired on Comedy Central. But in the pre-streaming era, TV didn’t count — at least, not in the way movies did.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 began its life on public access in Minnesota, and was about as far from Hollywood as a production could be while still airing on a Time Warner TV network. For the uninitiated, MST3K was the original movie-riffing show, taking a group of smart-aleck puppets and pairing them with an everyman host — creator Joel Hodgson for the first five seasons, followed by Mike Nelson, Jonah Ray, and current host Emily Marsh — who’s held captive on a spacecraft called the “Satellite of Love” and forced to watch cheesy B-movies as part of a mind-control experiment conducted by the show’s coast of mad scientists. It’s where Manos: The Hands of Fate was first introduced to connoisseurs of trash, along with hundreds of other artifacts.
