The Unofficial Mystery Science Theater Encyclopedia

[crowschmo]

There's a book out, The Unofficial Mystery Science Theater Encyclopedia, by John F. Simmons. I saw that it was available on Amazon.

[Afgncaap5]

Huh. Well, looks like there's definitely a lot of material there.

Though some of the material I'm looking over surprises me. "Crow Syndrome", for instance, I'd never heard of before. Apparently it refers to how Crow would say something lewd or offensive, only to have the other characters shout Crow! in exasperation, except it specifies that it's for times when Crow isn't actually involved (so I'm guessing the same basic gag, just without Crow in other TV shows?) Looking up the term online, the only other reference I can find is to a page about Crow on a MST3K wikia entry, which has the same definition of Crow Syndrome almost verbatim as it is in the preview of this encyclopedia. The wiki cited its source as being to an FAQ page on the MST3K Info club which no longer exists.

...so is there anyone out there who can verify if "Crow Syndrome" was actually a thing among the fandom at some point? I could see this being a "before my time" thing from the old, old days of the MST3K newsgroups and bulletin boards that never carried on, I suppose.

-Edit-

And to be clear: not trying to say that this encyclopedia is just making it up to pad space or anything (the entry's short enough that there'd be better ways to do that.) The only potential thing the writer'd be guilty of would be some copy/pasting plagiarism of a fan wiki (and hey, if they wrote they book then maybe they contributed to the wiki too, I'd hardly call that plagiarism, and even if it was it's not like there's many other ways to paraphrase the phenomenon.) I'm just... is it a thing? It seems to have come out of nowhere.