The Automatik

Hi, I’m Satan. Enjoy the film.
When I was a senior in college, I had a nasty argument with my mom and stepdad. The details are too painful and tedious to relate, but the end result was that I fell victim to a pervasive depression that lasted for several months. This was a depression like the ones in Lifetime channel movies: heavy drinking, eating junk food, sleeping all the time, and sitting around on the couch watching Lifetime channel movies. What stopped me from offing myself was this weird new cable channel: Comedy Central. At this time, it only had 2 or 3 corporate sponsors so I think I saw one million commercials for K-Tel records and Cool Whip Light in a matter of months. And there were lots of cobbled-together shows of bad stand-up and sketch comedy. But every Friday and Saturday, my pathetic, maudlin little world took a back seat to Mystery Science Theater 3000.

This was the show that had been germinating in the collective unconscious of a thousand sardonic outcasts until it sprung from Joel Hodgson’s brain like a comic Athena. I had always liked to watch bad movies and I had always liked to make fun of them. So when Joel, Crow and Tom gushed forth with such hilarious abandon it was proof that I was not alone. Unlike the crude squawkings of Beavis and Butthead, though, MST 3K was damn clever and you didn’t have to be a film scholar of James Lipton proportions to get the jokes. The only prerequisites were intelligence, a sense of humor, and more than a touch of geek.

My friends and I spent hours watching, taping and cracking up over the best quips from the show; in fact, many of them worked their way into our regular vocabulary, where they remain to this very day (“Saaaay, does that TV come with a remote??”). I adored sleepy-eyed Joel and his sly witticisms, I sang along with glee to the theme song, I thoroughly annoyed everyone in my film classes by making cracks during the works of Tarkovsky and Resnais and then one day I decided that I wasn’t going to let my parents and their ridiculous behavior get me down any longer.

Imagine my dismay then, when the news came that Joel was leaving the show. Despite my concerns, in the end Mike Nelson was a fine replacement, and under his leadership the Satellite of Love continued its zany trek through the universe. Eventually Comedy Central, which had once touted the show as its biggest attraction, stopped caring and relegated it to late nights and pre-emptions. The show moved to the Sci-Fi Channel and it flourished for a few outstanding seasons. But many of the cast members moved on to other pursuits, and the spirit of the show began to falter. When the Satellite crashed back to earth after 10 wonderful years the fans were loath to say goodbye, but I think many knew it was time to do just that. We MST-ies will cherish this show for many years to come. After all, we’ll always have Deep 13. And our videotapes.