I discovered Mystery Science Theater 3000 eleven years ago. On Saturday's, I would take Moriah out for the afternoon while Lisa got ready for Sunday service, then come home and relax. Flipping channels I landed on Sci-Fi and saw a bad movie being watched by a man and two puppet robots who tore the movie apart. I laughed so hard tears were coming out of my eyes. I kept saying, "Lisa, you have to come see this. This is me and my brother!" And that's true.
I discovered the show was already past its prime, though, but lucky for me episodes were released on VHS, and later DVD, so I didn't have to worry too much about missing anything. The setting was familiar enough to anyone who sat around on Saturday afternoons or evening as a kid watching Chiller Theater or whatever one's local TV channel called its broadcast of bad horror movies. Except, unlike those old local shows, here folks actually called it as they saw it - and the results were usually very funny.
Along with bad horror movies, bad '70's pictures, bad '80's pictures, and even an Oscar-preview or two, the folks at MST3K managed to take apart short films. Whether produced for industry or education, these shorts are invariably bad; if you are old enough, you might even have been forced to sit through one or two of them. These first two, "A Date With Your Family", and "Appreciating Your Parents", are so filled with horror - suppressed emotion, weird Freudian imagery, the insistence on submission to parental authority - it is really no wonder those who were forced to watch them in school would, upon reaching young adulthood, drop acid, read Herbert Marcuse with approval, and shout the "Fish Cheer" at Woodstock with gusto.
What they did best, though, was rip into "Z"-grade horror films. While I Was A Teenage Werewolf was more a "D" film (there are a couple moments of real tension, such as the stalking of the young woman practicing alone in the gym; Michael Landon's performance as a typical "angry young man" also lifts a truly bad film above the summy floor of late-50's horror schlock), it nevertheless gets the full treatment. Here's a clip from Mike and Crow and Tom Servo making sure we don't take any of it seriously at all.
