When Mystery Science Theater 3000 hit the airwaves back in 1988, it was not exactly a tremendous success. Oh, it filled up the two hour slot that it was designed to accommodate, so in that respect, it worked. And, as a declaration — a statement of intent, in fact — it was phenomenal. But as far as ratings were concerned, well, hard-to-describe movie/puppet-show pastiches show during Thanksgiving on independent UHF stations are not known for pulling in big numbers.

It got better, of course — much better. From that tiny kernel of faithful viewers grew a large mass of cult-like proportions. The great and the good from all over took to the show, and supported its (rather unlikely) ten-year run, and followed it from one channel to the next. But why?

MST3K, for all its groundbreaking originality, was not born in a vacuum. To understand this, one must think back (or imagine, if one is too young to remember) that there was a time before “Paid Programming” ascended to dominance of late-night television. In that brief period of time between stations that went off the air between late night and early morning and the ubiquitous kitchen-gadget, male enhancement electronic mega-mall of today, some broadcasters decided to make a go of sending out programs and selling ad time.

And in this effort to monitize purple and grey hours between midnight and dawn, a kingdom of the bizarre was born. Swing shift-workers, truckers in seedy motels, insomniacs, and drunk college students were united — probably for the first time ever, by the secret weirdness of the night that flickered on their televisions. The content pushed out during late night was, frankly, crap.

Thus, the midnight movie was born. They had to be cheap, and they were often terrible. Some people watched them because nothing better was on, and some people watched because, as terrible as they were, they loved them. Ironically, of course. The watched them for their camp value, smug little smiles on their lips, laughing at images not intended to be funny.

To some extent, MST3K was born of this stock. But it was something new in the world — instead simply chuckling alone in one’s studio apartment, laughing in solitude at the trash on television, the shadows at the bottom of the screen represented like-minded (if imaginary) companions, providing solace to the snarky, lonesome wanderer of the midnight airwaves.

MST3K is, in a word, strange. The original premise of the show, that a man had been shot up into space and subjected to constant viewings of terrible movies as a science experiment, was, perhaps, a little over-written. As a matter of fact, considering the engine that drove the show — the movie segments — any sort of wrap-around premise was totally unnecessary. The same thing could have been accomplished by a couple of morning radio DJ’s: “Hi, we’re Dingleberry and the Turd, and tonight’s movie is Attack of the 50-foot Smelt!” The difference, of course, is that this wouldn’t have been a brilliant explosion of mongrel art — it would have been the Midnight Movie with jokes.

What MST3K did was to meet these movies on their own terms. To stand shoddy puppets and cardboard sets up against films often featuring the same laughable budget (or better, in some cases), seems like madness, but it worked. What allowed this dialectic to function was the very simple fact that MST3K had mastered its subjects in one very important respect: it was a joke.

The movies they subjected themselves (and their fans) to were often presented by their original creators as serious works of entertainment. They took that camp aesthetic of the midnight movie lover, the science-fiction as comedy motif of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the “gee, I could do that” sense of a generation of television and movie fans, whipped it around, and, basically, teased the naive and pompous makers of cinema-garbage until the movies almost broke. If the movies had been intended as funny from the outset, they would not have been so easily and hilariously lampooned.

But, more than anything, MST3K attracted people who may not have had a sense of camp or kitsch built-in to their psyches. In a way, the show was a kind of “Camp for Dummies”, where you didn’t have to think too hard about why these terrible movies could actually be a little fun to watch. It was all spelled out for you. And, better still was the show’s inbuilt defense against the harshest accusation that can be leveled against the ironic appreciator: for all the fun and irony involved, you have just spent an hour or two of your precious and finite existence watching the film equivalent of fresh compost. MST3K viewers didn’t have this problem — they weren’t watching Sidehackers, they were watching MST3K, and boy, was it funny.

Tomorrow: The Fans

Special thanks to the folks over at The Satellite News for their brilliant, comprehensive history of MST3K.