That’s exciting to me! See, “my” era of the show, the one I have the fondest feelings and the rosiest-colored glasses for, was its three-year run on what was then called the Sci-Fi Channel.
I had originally encountered MST3K during the Joel era, when it was airing on Comedy Central, but most of it went over my head—I liked the goofy puppets and low-rent effects, but during the theater segments, I was mainly watching my dad watch the show so I would know when to laugh.
But my dad eventually stopped watching, and a couple of years later, when I was old enough to want to seek it out for myself, the Sci-Fi version was what I found. Tom Servo (Kevin Murphy) was the same as I remembered, and I had seen episodes hosted by Mike Nelson (Mike Nelson) despite my dad’s clear preference for Joel. But there was a new Crow (Bill Corbett, replacing Trace Beaulieu), new mad scientists (Mary Jo Pehl, plus Murphy and Corbett again), a new Satellite of Love set, and a slightly more acidic sense of humor that meshed well with my teenage sensibilities.
I caught back up with MST3K just as its 10th and final season was airing. And episodes like Time Chasers, Werewolf, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, and Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders became familiar old friends to me, episodes I returned to over and over again even as I gradually expanded my library of old episodes via the tape-trading sites that were still active in the late ’90s into the early 2000s (it’s impossible to this day to own the complete run of the show without turning to bootlegs).
Many of the people involved in the Sci-Fi era of the show had lent their talents to the revival version in one way or another, either in cameo roles or as writers on individual episodes. But there was never a sense that Hodgson or anyone else was interested in doing a “get-the-band-back-together” version of the old show. The RiffTrax version is emphatically a “get-the-band-back-together” moment.
