Movies So Bad They’re ‘MST3K’ Good

Joel Hodgson thinks the concept of a movie “so bad it’s good” is relatively new. Hodgson is the former stand-up comic who created “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” a showcase of wonderfully awful movies, and he thinks the advent of video rental stores and cable TV in the late 1970s is what gave birth to what he calls “ironic viewing.” At that point, he says, “there was an abundance of material.”

“When I was in college, we had art house cinemas showing things like ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space,’” he remembers, “and there was a book called ‘The Golden Turkey Awards’ by Michael and Harry Medved — like the Academy Awards but for bad movies. That was first time I understood what ironic viewing was. And I thought, ‘Why isn’t anybody making a show with these movies? What’s up with that?’”

“Mystery Science Theater 3000” — known by fans as “MST3K” — premiered in 1988 on the local

UHF station, KTMA, in St. Paul, Minn. The show migrated to cable on the Comedy Channel, then to Comedy Central, then Sci-Fi and ran for a total of 11 years, producing nearly 200 episodes and a feature film. It also collected several Emmy nominations and a Peabody Award along the way, before taking a hiatus. A $6 million Kickstarter campaign in 2015 — the most successful crowdfunding campaign so far — brought “MST3K” back to Netflix.

The premise is that a human — originally played by Hodgson — is shot into space and forced to watch bad movies while mad scientists monitor his mind. A cast of lovable robot sidekicks — Crow, Tom Servo, Gypsy and Cambot — join him to riff on the movies from their theater seats at the bottom of the screen.

Nowadays, Hodgson says, the thousands of bad movies made by small-time filmmakers doesn’t necessarily make his job easier. Instead of seeing a movie and wanting it, he says, as chief creative officer of his company, Alternaversal, he works with filmmakers who have a selection of movies he thinks fit the format. He won’t name a favorite film, either.

“I really let the audience decide that. I love the process. And I still love going to the movies — I like to get swept up and forget who I am.”

Courtesy Photos The premise of “MST3K” is that a human — originally played by Joel Hodgson — is shot into space and forced to watch bad movies while mad scientists monitor his mind. A cast of lovable robot sidekicks — including Crow — join him to riff on the movies from their theater seats at the bottom of the screen.