The original run of Mystery Science Theater 3000 ended just before the new millennium, seemingly confining the show’s trademark rapid-fire movie riffing to the 20th century. To classify this as something that depressed me for many years would be underselling it just a little bit. YouTube arrives, and plenty of people tried their hand at riffing on pop culture, both long-form and short-form, and all of them came up short compared to MST3K – many were simply too snarky, too sweary, too mean-spirited, and just missed the point, often by light years. There was only one Mystery Science Theater, and it was gone. And then even a lumpen attempt in the early aughts to revive Mystery Science Theater by its own rightsholders, in a manner that seemed weirdly derivative of Homestar Runner among other things, came and went. Was no one going to do the Satellite of Love justice? Or was the 21st century just too Dark & Gritty (TM, pat. pend.) for the gently-snarky-but-generally-sunny humor of one of my favorite television shows ever?
It turns out I had to wait a bit longer, in fact into the middle of a real personal low point in my life, for the answer: a Kickstarter was launched to bring back MST3K under the aegis of its co-creator, Joel Hodgson, who departed in the mid-1990s as a result of creative differences over a long-simmering big-screen version of the show (which did eventually happen, was better than it had any right to be, presaging another period of near-extinction for the TV series). This incarnation of MST3K won the backing of Shout! Factory and eventually wound up on Netflix, and we got two new seasons and new characters (and new voices for old characters) out of the deal. Many of the new entries were wonderful. And then Netflix, as it is wont to do because of algorithms and accountants and other things that start with A, cancelled that. But not before it made me terribly happy to have an old friend back and, perhaps more importantly, allowed me to introduce my sons to the delight that is Mystery Science Theater 3000.
If one crowdfunding campaign is a success, you can always do another. And this brings us to Mystery Science Theater’s current incarnation, which doesn’t need no stinkin’ Netflix. Mystery Science Theater is, at last, just this side of being a juggernaut that doesn’t need someone else’s streaming service because it is now its own streaming service.
Of course, my luck and timing being what it was, I was saving up for the necessary expenses and deposits of moving out of a terrible place into a new, hopefully less terrible place at the time that this crowdfunding campaign was held mid-pandemic. But I did watch it closely and root for it – and once things had stabilized on my end, I started my own Gizmoplex account and signed up for the Season 13 Digital Collection. There are several tiers of service, but the Digital Collection lets me do two things:
- Stream new episodes on the Gizmoplex sit the moment they’re released, and
- Download copies of the new episodes (with external subtitle files) two weeks after they’re released.
For someone like me who keeps all of his stuff in a Plex media server for their own use, that’s kind of the ideal solution.
The site itself is fairly easy to navigate, and it’s easy on the eye. Each episode is represented by its own marquee graphic (which may or may not be influenced by the styling of the movie’s logo/poster art when it was first released) which makes everything easy to identify. As-yet-released episodes are clearly marked and, helpfully, feature their future release dates.
The streaming experience itself seems to be Vimeo-based, so the streaming interface is as user-friendly as Vimeo’s player interface. I’ve had no issues with streaming quality or bandwidth to date. There has been a little bit of an occasional problem when downloading my personal copies: sometimes I’ll have to restart the download one or more times. The downloaded files are large, but the quality is nothing to sneeze at; you can choose from different resolutions, with the higher-resolution files naturally resulting in larger file sizes. (Totally worth it.) The collection is arranged as most recent feature-length episodes to least recent, followed by most recent short features to least recent.
But that’s not all! The Gizmoplex also offers you nearly every previous installment of MST3K. From the show’s 1990s cable debut all the way to the episodes previously available on Netflix, classic episodes can be purchased for $7.99 each. (Compared to tracking down some of the out-of-print DVDs and DVD box sets that you’d have to find otherwise to legally obtain these episodes, that’s not a terrible deal.) Absent on the site is any trace of the pre-cable episodes from the show’s humble, home-grown beginnings on Minneapolis TV station KTMA. A lot of that material simply doesn’t exist any longer without looking like fifteenth-generation VHS dubs handed down from filesharing service to filesharing service, though at least two pristine episodes – the very first two episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, in fact – did surface during the 2010s Kickstarter as backer premiums, so it’s known that they exist. I would have backed that Kickstarter at the time if I had been in a position to do so, but I guess those recently-rediscovered artifacts are only for those who were there at the time. (Both were also syndicated “movies” made of various Gerry Anderson Supermarionation shows edited together, so there may be insurmountable rights issues between “Satellite of Love LLC” (the successors to Best Brains) and Anderson Entertainment. But hey, if you want to see Cosmic Princess in HD without Joel and the ‘bots, we live in remarkable times.)
There are also live premiere events featuring very busy live chats where the audience tries its hand at riffing while watching the experts do it in the latest episode; I’m still not convinced that every internet video experience needs an audience-participation component in this day and age, so… I’m just going to leave that there. Live audience events do exist if you want to partake of them.
But the most important thing is that MST3K still exists if you want to partake of it, and quite frankly, yes, thank you very much, I do. With tax, the Season 13 Digital Collection tier took $142.66 out of my wallet as an up-front payment, and… I’m cool with that. That’s less than $10 for each new installment of the show (and don’t forget the short subjects that help stretch that schedule out over the entire year). I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth, but there’s more to it than that. Even in this “every subscriber account counts!” epoch in the streaming service wars, Disney Plus, Netflix, Paramount Plus, and Amazon Prime would scarcely notice if I declined to renew their services one day. But even with its somewhat sleeker look these days, Mystery Science Theater 3000 remains a scrappy underdog, and this new solution somehow seems more fitting than the show being in bed with Netflix. Mystery Science Theater 3000 may now be old enough that its talent includes people who grew up on the original standard-definition incarnation of the show, but it still is – and always should be – a bit of an industry outsider. The worst thing that could happen would be for the show to “buy in” to Hollywood – or vice-versa.
The site boldly proclaims “no ads until 2023”, and each new episode of MST3K still features obvious places for commercial breaks, so presumably, somewhere behind the scenes, someone’s trying to sell ads to be shown in the appropriate places for next year, which may or may not bring the price of a subscription down. But if a further $142.66 gets me a whole year of more new episodes, more new shorts, downloadable shows (hopefully without ads), and the continued existence of a show that sometimes seems frighteningly crucial to this reviewer’s mental health at times, I’ll gladly pony up again.
