Paying Snarky Homage to Cinema’s Worst
By JEN CHANEY
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2008
You know that friend who loves to make loud, sarcastic comments while watching terrible films? Congratulations. You just found his holiday gift.
And that present would be “Mystery Science Theater 3000: 20th Anniversary Edition,” the DVD box set ($62.98) that contains four 90-minute installments of the B-movie-trashing cult TV series. The show — about a guy stranded in space and forced to watch some of the worst motion pictures of all time with a pair of sarcastic, remarkably pop culture savvy robots — ran for eleven years, first on a Minneapolis cable channel, then on the Comedy Channel (which eventually became Comedy Central) and the Sci-Fi Channel. Its appeal was not quite mainstream; after all, only a person with a certain constitution can sit through a stinker like “Werewolf,” even when the “Mystery Science” crew lobs comments like, “That jacket makes him look like a werewaiter.”
That riffing not only made some colossally pathetic flicks about ten times more entertaining, it also turned “Mystery Science” into a cultural pioneer of sorts. Long before the Internet turned pop culture snark into a daily ritual, the folks at “MST 3K,” as it’s known in shorthand, had already molded it into an art form. Everyone who has ever posted a smart alecky comment on a movie blog — not to mention every picture-in-picture DVD commentary track — owes the Emmy-nominated show a serious debt.