Celebrate Thanksgiving...In Space!

Happy Thanksgiving. Amanda and I will be out of town and maybe you will be as well. Isn't the Internet great though? You can read this from anywhere even as you remember there is a reason you only see these people three times a year.

Thanksgiving used to mean lots of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) and I remember both Comedy Central and the Sci Fi Channel (Now known as SyFy) running all day marathons of episodes on Thanksgiving day and Black Friday. I am not the only person to remember. Bully, a fabulous comics blogger, remembers.

These marathons were very helpful particularly in an era where I had limited access to the Internet. Our meager dial up connection was always at the mercy of my mother's friends calling to chat. MST3K is an immediately likable show, but it has a very high learning curve. We have all seen a bad movie and maybe even been forced to endure it. Everyone riffs on a bad movie, even if its just an eye roll while you walk back to the car from the theater. MST3K turns this into an art. There are eight seasons packed with a dozen or so two hour episodes into each one. There is no plot, so you don't need to scramble through back seasons to understand why Mike's dad owns a mail order burlap store in Minong, Wisconin. But you always want more and Sci Fi didn't have the rights to anything earlier than the seventh season!

This has to be my favorite show of all time. I waver on "My Favorite" quite often. Anyone who has kept up with the blog must have noticed that one day I was talking about comics and then I started pretending to know a lot about politics. There were links to sports sites, comics sites, and news sites. When I listen to my MP3 player I mash the skip button until it gets to Black Eyed Peas, then Silver Sun Pickups, 311, and Jimmy Eat World. Please don't ask me what my favorite kind of music is.

But, MST3K will remain my favorite TV show for life. The show is over twenty years old and Old Man Garik will still guard his DVD player and boxed sets fifty years from now. 'It's funny, dammit! The best," I will say much like our parents scream at us when we ask them why the bought a DVD season of the Dean Martin variety show out of those inserts you get in the paper.

Nearly every episodes of MST3K is up on YouTube. The folks at Best Brains have always appreciated how bootlegging helped spread the word about the show during the early 90s. I shudder to think what would have happened if Viacom had owned MST3K and YouTube was forced to scour its servers of all riffing and references to "Watch out for snakes!"

I don't recall what was the first MST3K episode I ever saw. It was late and I laughed at the silhouettes emanating from the TV. And, as per usual, I am hesitant to name a favorite, even though Space Mutiny comes pretty close. The many names of David Ryder really did it for me, even though they do run it into the ground. Hard.

Enjoy!



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