Post by rowsdowersavedme on Dec 4, 2015 16:09:41 GMT -5
Hey guys, I'm from Australia and I've recently become a fan of MST3K, and I'm considering backing the Kickstarter. It's a shame it's so close to Christmas when money's tied up but hey.
Anyway, I'm aware that it's just a show and I should really just relax, but if you were to come up with a reason why Joel's last name changed in an in-universe fashion, how would you explain it? This thread's just for shits and giggles, obviously it's not important in the long run, but my fan-brain likes coming up with explanations for these things.
We know in the earliest season, Joel Hodgson worked in a Satellite Loading Bay, just polishing switches to pay his way, but he already appears to be a skilled inventor/designer in his own time. According to the unaired pilot, the Satellite of Love was of his own design. Whether or not he actually built it, who knows? But he built the bots, Crow, Gypsy and Beeper, which were also of his own design. At some point, Joel upgraded Beeper into silver Tom Servo, as the novelty of a robot he couldn't understand had worn off, especially since he needed company up there. His bosses at the SLB were Forrester and Erhardt - judging by their first appearance in #K07 and their dismay that the Russians had sent their own comedian into space, perhaps we can surmise that in-universe this is literally Joel Hodgson the comedian trapped in space. Their schtick in the KTMA season seems to be making terrible jokes, so at this point I'm going to assume that they were envious of both Joel's comedic sensibilities and more importantly, his abilities as an inventor. I can imagine them being pretty annoyed that a switch polisher could design a functional Satellite AND have a promising career as a prop comedian, so they engineered their evil experiment under the guise of a TV show, with the SOL's engines specifically said to be powered by ratings.
Given that the SOL engines were powered by ratings, and that the KTMA episodes apparently didn't have much of an audience, I'm going to assume that the SOL started plummeting and started to burn up upon re-entry. This put the show, the experiment, the Mad's funding, and Joel's life in danger. Given that they still needed Joel's technical skill, since the SOL was burning up and they couldn't design a better one, they rescued him and cloned him, creating Joel Robinson. The new name was needed since he was technically a new test case, and filing Mad Science reports is hard enough without having two subjects with the same name. Joel Robinson took longer than expected to grow to full size, and the Mads still needed the new SOL, so Hodgson bargained with them. He would design a superior Satellite of Love in exchange for his freedom, which works, because Hodgson seemed bitter about being trapped in space. The clone Joel was made to be somewhat more docile than the original.
Around this time, Forrester and Erhardt got a job offer from Gizmonic Institute, after their inventors saw the original Satellite of Love, believing that it was created by the Mads. It had crashed, sure, but the idea of a ratings-powered Satellite was a novel one and just what they were interested in. As they set about building the new and improved Satellite of Love (now with Gizmonic's financial backing), they needed to give Joel Robinson something to do until it was built, so they put him to work as a janitor. He did a good job cleaning up the place, but his aptitude for inventing had survived the cloning process, so the Mads were all too eager to put the clone back in space rather than find another test subject. They used it to their advantage though, when they started with the Invention Exchanges, so they could get rich off of Robinson's ideas.
Once Joel Robinson was up in space, he recreated Crow, Gypsy, Servo and Cambot from his patchy memories from the original Joel, with upgrades the original Joel had in mind from before the original SOL started to fall.
Joel Hodgson the comedian remained on Earth, where having seen the Mad's TV Show "Mystery Science Theater 3000", decided to get back at them by feasibly painting himself as the creator of the show, ensuring that at some point he could make money from the idea, since having been forcibly removed from his switch polishing job, he didn't have enough money to pay his way and create new props for his comedy gigs. About 20 years later, he started a Kickstarter fund, but before he did, he sold the rights to a fictional character for big bucks- Kinga Forrester - having noticed that due to the Mad's experiments (having watched the rest of the MST3K run on TV), the line between reality and fictional movie characters had now blurred.
The bots, meanwhile, never really had a functioning sense of reality, so it was easy to wrangle them back into the fold for a new TV show. The new characters from the revival are just actors, excited to be part of a "cult TV show", not realising that it was ever an actual Mad experiment, or that Hodgson himself was actually trapped up there.
........I should really just relax.
Anyway, I'm aware that it's just a show and I should really just relax, but if you were to come up with a reason why Joel's last name changed in an in-universe fashion, how would you explain it? This thread's just for shits and giggles, obviously it's not important in the long run, but my fan-brain likes coming up with explanations for these things.
We know in the earliest season, Joel Hodgson worked in a Satellite Loading Bay, just polishing switches to pay his way, but he already appears to be a skilled inventor/designer in his own time. According to the unaired pilot, the Satellite of Love was of his own design. Whether or not he actually built it, who knows? But he built the bots, Crow, Gypsy and Beeper, which were also of his own design. At some point, Joel upgraded Beeper into silver Tom Servo, as the novelty of a robot he couldn't understand had worn off, especially since he needed company up there. His bosses at the SLB were Forrester and Erhardt - judging by their first appearance in #K07 and their dismay that the Russians had sent their own comedian into space, perhaps we can surmise that in-universe this is literally Joel Hodgson the comedian trapped in space. Their schtick in the KTMA season seems to be making terrible jokes, so at this point I'm going to assume that they were envious of both Joel's comedic sensibilities and more importantly, his abilities as an inventor. I can imagine them being pretty annoyed that a switch polisher could design a functional Satellite AND have a promising career as a prop comedian, so they engineered their evil experiment under the guise of a TV show, with the SOL's engines specifically said to be powered by ratings.
Given that the SOL engines were powered by ratings, and that the KTMA episodes apparently didn't have much of an audience, I'm going to assume that the SOL started plummeting and started to burn up upon re-entry. This put the show, the experiment, the Mad's funding, and Joel's life in danger. Given that they still needed Joel's technical skill, since the SOL was burning up and they couldn't design a better one, they rescued him and cloned him, creating Joel Robinson. The new name was needed since he was technically a new test case, and filing Mad Science reports is hard enough without having two subjects with the same name. Joel Robinson took longer than expected to grow to full size, and the Mads still needed the new SOL, so Hodgson bargained with them. He would design a superior Satellite of Love in exchange for his freedom, which works, because Hodgson seemed bitter about being trapped in space. The clone Joel was made to be somewhat more docile than the original.
Around this time, Forrester and Erhardt got a job offer from Gizmonic Institute, after their inventors saw the original Satellite of Love, believing that it was created by the Mads. It had crashed, sure, but the idea of a ratings-powered Satellite was a novel one and just what they were interested in. As they set about building the new and improved Satellite of Love (now with Gizmonic's financial backing), they needed to give Joel Robinson something to do until it was built, so they put him to work as a janitor. He did a good job cleaning up the place, but his aptitude for inventing had survived the cloning process, so the Mads were all too eager to put the clone back in space rather than find another test subject. They used it to their advantage though, when they started with the Invention Exchanges, so they could get rich off of Robinson's ideas.
Once Joel Robinson was up in space, he recreated Crow, Gypsy, Servo and Cambot from his patchy memories from the original Joel, with upgrades the original Joel had in mind from before the original SOL started to fall.
Joel Hodgson the comedian remained on Earth, where having seen the Mad's TV Show "Mystery Science Theater 3000", decided to get back at them by feasibly painting himself as the creator of the show, ensuring that at some point he could make money from the idea, since having been forcibly removed from his switch polishing job, he didn't have enough money to pay his way and create new props for his comedy gigs. About 20 years later, he started a Kickstarter fund, but before he did, he sold the rights to a fictional character for big bucks- Kinga Forrester - having noticed that due to the Mad's experiments (having watched the rest of the MST3K run on TV), the line between reality and fictional movie characters had now blurred.
The bots, meanwhile, never really had a functioning sense of reality, so it was easy to wrangle them back into the fold for a new TV show. The new characters from the revival are just actors, excited to be part of a "cult TV show", not realising that it was ever an actual Mad experiment, or that Hodgson himself was actually trapped up there.
........I should really just relax.
