What to Binge This Weekend: Spend Labor Day Aboard the Satellite of Love
The arrival of Labor Day weekend means that another summer is in the history books. And it’s not just regular folks who are taking three days off; based on the paucity of new movies and TV shows available from now through Monday, Hollywood has effectively shut down as well. And what little fresh media exists out there — like The Transporter Refueled and Hand of God — sounds mostly bad. Given that, your finest entertainment option this weekend is one that elevates badness into an art form. We’re talking, of course, about Mystery Science Theater 3000, the legendary comedy series that celebrated legendarily awful movies in the best way possible: by ripping them to shreds.
During its decade-long run, which commenced in 1988 on a local Minneapolis TV station before moving to the fledgling Comedy Channel (later Comedy Central) and the Sci Fi Channel, MST3K subjected its human and robotic stars to hundreds of terrible movies. The humans were creator Joel Hodgson and his eventual replacement, Mike Nelson, while the robots included Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot. They all lived alongside each other on the Satellite of Love, an orbiting spacecraft/prison where each week brought a new cinematic atrocity, boasting such titles as Eegah, The Wild World of Batwoman, and Hercules Against the Moon Men.
Since 2008, MST3K’s vast archives have been overseen by the genre geniuses at Shout! Factory, which regularly issued them in collector-friendly DVD sets. Now that the company has also gotten into the streaming game with their online service, Shout! Factory TV, the series is front and center in that venue as well. In addition to its regular library of episodes, the service also hosts two exclusive installments each month. And the September offerings are a pair of fan-favorite MST3K outings: 1966’s Manos: The Hands of Fate and 1975’s Mitchell. Manos was named one of the show’s Top 5 episodes in a Shout! Factory-organized vote, while Mitchell was included in The A.V. Club’s 10 Essential Episodes guide, both for its hilarity and because it was the last movie Hodgson ridiculed before he was replaced by Nelson.
If you’re having a hard time choosing amongst Shout! Factory TV’s offerings, there’s another way to spend some quality time aboard the Satellite of Love. In July, Shout partnered with the television-on-the-Internet provider Pluto TV to launch an all-MST3K-all-the-time network. Click over to Channel 428 and kick back and laugh as the episodes unspool for you. Just remember that you’ll have to go back to work and/or school Tuesday morning.
Select Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes can be streamed on Shout! Factory TV; an MST3K dedicated channel can be watched 24/7 on Pluto TV.
