MST3K: Mike or Joel?

[Sooga]

This thread is for lovers of MST3K only. If you've been living under a rock the past 15 years and you don't know what MST3K is, then you're really missing out one of the greatest shows in television history.

[Dynasty]

Why would you care about the human characters?

[jay1313]

Crow all the way

[GrandmaStabone]

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Crow all the way

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That is so obviously wrong

[AngryCola]

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Crow all the way

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The original Crow was better, and was voiced by the guy who played Dr. Forrester. I really hated to see him leave the show, especially since he took TV's Frank with him. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

Oh, and the answer to the poll question is definitely Joel. As I remember it, the show was pretty much his creation.

Mike was already one of the main writers before he became the guy stuck in space. He did a good job with the show after Joel left.

EDIT-
Man, this thread reminds me of how much I loved this show those many years ago. I haven't checked out any of the DVDs or even seen a pre-SciFi episode in several years. I'll have to do that sometime soon.

[Sooga]

Yea the show pretty much was Joel's creation, but I still enjoyed Mike a lot better. Joel just seemed a bit TOO dry for me, and Mike just seemed like he was having more fun.

[GrandmaStabone]

On an MSt3K side note...


Last month my Hard Drive fried on me and I lost my 112 episode MST3K collection (out of a possible 176).

Isn't that tragic?

[ChipWrecked]

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On an MSt3K side note...


Last month my Hard Drive fried on me and I lost my 112 episode MST3K collection (out of a possible 176).

Isn't that tragic?

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It would have been tragic if you had also lost your backup. Since you didn't back them up, it's just unfortunate.


(Sorry, too much tech support bitterness [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img])

[Riskwise]

can someone explain for me the greatest show in television history?

[cbfair]

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can someone explain for me the greatest show in television history?

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from: mst3kinfo.com

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Q: What was it about?

A: Although the details of its premise changed radically over its 11 seasons, Mystery Science Theater 3000 was really always about one thing: making fun of bad movies.
In its earliest form on local UHF station KTMA, and in its first season on national TV on The Comedy Channel, the main character was Joel Robinson, a janitor at a top-secret research facility, Gizmonic Institute, who had been marooned on a space ship called the Satellite of Love (hereafter abbreviated as SOL) by two evil scientists, Dr. Clayton Forrester (hereafter called Dr. F.) and Dr. Laurence Erhardt. At first operating from within Gizmonic Institute itself, and later from a cave-like underground hideout called Deep 13, Forrester and Erhardt had an evil plan: They would force Robinson to watch one bad movie after another, in order to study how he would cope with such torture. Joel's only companions on the spaceship were four robots (often referred to collectively as "the bots") he'd built himself: Crow, Tom Servo, Gypsy and a camera robot named Cambot, through whose mechanical eye we see the proceedings. While Gypsy attended to the details of running the SOL, Crow and Tom's functions were to join Joel in the Mystery Science Theater as he watched the movies.
Over time, as performers came and went, there were changes in the characters and the premise. In the CC-era episodes, Dr. Erhardt departed and Dr. F.'s sidekick was his goofy lab assitant, TV's Frank. In the middle of the fifth season on CC, Joel escaped the SOL and was replaced, as Dr. F.'s guinea pig, by unsuspecting temp Mike Nelson. In the final season on CC, Frank had departed and Pearl Forrester, Dr. F.'s domineering mother, moved into Deep 13.
When the series moved to The Sci-Fi Channel, Dr. F. had departed and now Pearl was in charge, continuing to send Mike bad movies. Pearl acquired two sidekicks: a refugee from The Planet of the Apes named Professor Bobo and an omniscient superbeing (whose brain resides outside his skull in a small dish) known as Observer (but who was often called Brain Guy). (By this time, the entire cast of the series when it first debuted had been replaced with new performers.)
During that season, the SOL left Earth orbit and Mike and the bots visited a series of planets, with Pearl and her crew in a small space ship chasing them through space--and, later, time. For the final two seasons of the series, Pearl and her crew made their way back to present-day Earth, and settled at Pearl's ancestral home, Castle Forrester, while Mike and the bots again orbited overhead.
But despite the many changes in the series, essentially the same thing happened in each episode: After some brief preliminaries, Dr. F./Pearl sent Joel/Mike the movie and in response Joel/Mike and the bots yelled "Movie Sign!" and then rushed to their places in the theater as we, the viewers, saw Cambot's path through several strange hatchways to his place in the back of the theater. There, Cambot watched as Joel/Mike and the bots took their seats and the movie began. We could see their silhouettes, sitting in theater seats at the bottom of our TV screens and, as they watched the movie, the three offered riotously funny commentary, satire and general heckling.
The comments from Joel/Mike and the bots, about 700 per episode, were the real heart and point of the show. The comments varied a great deal, from scatological silliness and sarcastic needling one moment, to complex wordplay and obscure references the next.
The show ran two hours, enough time to show an entire horrible movie, and sometimes a terrible one-reeler, as well. And three times (about once every half hour) during the movie, Joel/Mike and the bots came out of the theater to the SOL's bridge for short comedy bits known as host segments -- tomfoolery which may or may not have had some connection to the film they were watching.

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