Dumb misconceptions you once had about the show

[christmas]

Restated: What was some dumb stuff you used think about the show?

Regarding the theme song: I was very young when I started watching (1991, age 8), and I used to think that the theme song lyric "to make his robot friends" meant that Joel had to use those special parts in order to make his robots BE friends WITH EACH OTHER. As in, his robot friends were always on the ship but they hated each other and the START MOVIE/STOP MOVIE mechanism somehow adjusted their attitudes towards one another.

Regarding the The MST Information Club Address that flashes on screen periodically: I asked my dad what the address on screen was, and he said it was their address, and one could write letters to them. I asked if I could write and ask to be on the show with them, and my dad said "yeah, sure". I took this to mean that not only would they take my request to be on their show as an in-theater riffer SERIOUSLY, but that I ALSO had a fair shot at them saying YES and I'd be obligated to be on the show. This TERRIFIED me, so I never wrote the address for any reason, on the off-chance that it would result in a non-consensual casting on the show. It wasn't until I was older and rethunk all this nonsense that I actually wrote and joined the info club. To this day I kick myself that I missed out on years of newsletters I would have been SO STOKED to get in the mail, especially at such a young age when the mere prospect of an envelope with your name on it for any reason was so mind-mindbogglingly exciting.

WHAT WERE YOURS?

[sb5]

Before I actually saw the show, I thought the comments during the movie were more akin to what Beavis and Butthead (which I was a fan of at the time I first heard of MST3K and when Comedy Central got added to my local cable package) did with music videos - mostly just "this sucks" type of comments, rather than more obscure references and smarter stuff.

[someoneinatree]

Dec 18, 2016 0:59:28 GMT -5 sb5 said:

Before I actually saw the show, I thought the comments during the movie were more akin to what Beavis and Beavis (which I was a fan of at the time I first heard of MST3K and when Comedy Central got added to my local cable package) did with music videos - mostly just "this sucks" type of comments, rather than more obscure references and smarter stuff.

That seems to be a very common misconception about the show. I had to convince a friend that that was simply not the case, that 90 minutes of aimless bullying wouldn't have caught on.

[Treadwell]

Upon first viewing during Season 3, for some reason the cutaways to the Mads struck me as something the network tacked on to the show and thus was not produced by the same people doing the host segments and riffing. Strange misconception...

[Torgo]

For a while I couldn't figure out where Cambot was on the show, since he was in the opening credits but never featured on the series. I had a theory that maybe he was the protectionist in the theater until I heard someone talk to the camera as "Cambot." Suddenly the idea of Cambot started to make sense.

[CrowTrobotfan92]

I remember once thinking as a kid, watching some promos on some of the tapes my dad used to record the show during the Comedy Central days, the "MST Hour" spin-off (if you could call it that) was a completely different show; I wasn't aware it was just made to split the episodes in half.

I also remember seeing a promo for the 1994 MST Fresh Cheese college tour (this promo pretty much had clips from Zombie Nightmare) and thought that was another entirely different show; I was a kid seeing this promo at the time on one of my dad's tapes, and because none of the tapes I knew of had "Zombie Nightmare" recorded on it, seeing an episode I've never seen before made me think it was made on an entirely different show.

Lastly, I recall as a kid watching "THIS IS MST3K" and saw some brief clips of the KTMA episodes and never understood why the set looked so run down and trashy (same with the bots). It wasn't until I discovered the now-defunct DVD selling site Castleforrester.com, saw a clip of the opening and was intrigued to figure out this was their "pilot" season.

[christmas]

The MST Hour! Thanks for jogging my memory:

I didn't know who Jack Perkins was, nor did I recognize Mike Nelson under that make-up. So I thought the MST Hour host literally was just some dumb old guy they got to host the segments for reasons I didn't comprehend. I also didn't see the humor in them at all. To be fair I only caught the MST Hour on actual television maybe once or twice, so maybe I just needed to see more of it to "get" it.

[someoneinatree]

I didn't know how the numbering system for their episodes worked, so I though they did over 700 episodes for Comedy Central

[afriendlychicken]

I had one of the theme song lines wrong. The line "...and we'll monitor his mind" I miss-heard as "...and the monitor is mine." I ended up thinking when I first started watching the show that Joel had some control over the monitoring system so the mads couldn't control him on the SOL. I figured Joel and the Bots watched the film because heck, they were stuck on the ship so had nothing to do. It wasn't until I ended up seeing an episode where Dr. Forrester mentioned monitoring Joel's mind that the miss-heard line clicked in correctly.

[CrowTrobotfan92]

You know, I also happen to recall thinking Tom Servo's doll head in "The Violent Years" (my first Mike episode) as a kid was Tom Servo's real head, the gumball machine was actually a mask he was wearing.

(I later on figured out that it was a replacement head as I got older, lol).

[majorjoe23]

I remember wondering if Mike as Steve Reeves was actually Steve Reeves.

[continosbuckle]

I'm not sure how I got this impression. I think it might be because I started watching MST3k late at night when I was on business trips, and was either watching the Mystery Science Theater Hour or I'd fall asleep before the episode ended, but I used to think that they never finished the actual viewing of the movie. Instead they'd riff on a film, go to commercial after a half hour, then riff on another film, or something. I'm thinking it might be from the Theater Hour because at the very least they *did* cut off the movie halfway through and finish up the episode at a later date in those cases. It took me a while before I realized that an "episode" was in fact devoted to a single film, which they would watch in its entirety, for the most part at least. Perhaps I'd get confused when they'd show something like Commando Cody or Undersea Kingdom, so it'd seem as if they were showing two movies in one episode.

[sol-survivor]

For a few years after I first saw the show in 1990 I thought they had done Plan 9 and that I had seen it. It wasn't until the ACEG came out (1996, I think?) that I realized my error. My excuses are that by that time Season 1 episodes weren't being rerun very often and I wasn't on-line until 2001.

[brandonakaxerxes]

Dec 18, 2016 11:33:47 GMT -5 Torgo said:

For a while I couldn't figure out where Cambot was on the show, since he was in the opening credits but never featured on the series. I had a theory that maybe he was the protectionist in the theater until I heard someone talk to the camera as "Cambot." Suddenly the idea of Cambot started to make sense.

I think that may have been a common question amongst fans, at least during the Comedy Central era. There's at least two episodes (one Joel episode, one Mike episode) where a fan letter asks why Cambot is never seen and Joel and Mike have to explain he's filming the show.

When I first came upon MST3K while channel surfing, all i saw was the shadowrama, and obviously had no idea what Mike, Servo, or Crow looked like (let alone their names), and for some reason i envisioned Servo and Crow being skeletons. For, Servo I *guess* I can see why I thought that, but looking back I don't really get why I thought Crow might have been some weird-looking skeleton too.

[Afgncaap5]

Okay, this is a *weird* one...

My first exposure to the show was The Movie, which I maintain was great. My SECOND exposure to the show was when I visited a grandmother around Christmastime and was flipping through channels and caught MST3K on midway through experiment 801: Revenge of the Creature. Also I was expected to visit family and couldn't give it my full attention.

This led to me getting a mixed interpretation: I didn't see Pearl as "the new villain of the show" as I might've if I'd heard more. Instead, I got the impression that Pearl was just one of a number of villains in a sort of cosmic rogues gallery who all had the capabilities of hacking into and controlling the movie theater, and that they each had their own reasons and purposes for tormenting Mike (and Joel, who I was dimly aware of through hearing other people talk.)

I have to admit that when I learned I was mistaken I was disappointed. And to a degree I still am; that structure for a show doesn't show up very often, and it's always felt more interesting to me in some ways. However, I can't think of MST3K any other way than what it is now.