Joel Hodgson 
Platon
Released in 1966, Manos: The Hands of Fate is a D-minus of a B movie: Its plot, about desert-dwelling pagans, makes little sense. Its cast could be out-acted by the stars of a day care holiday pageant. And the film is paced with the urgency and focus of a box turtle on lithium.
Luckily, no one has to watch Manos alone. It’s just one of the nearly 200 horror flicks, teensploitation romps, and outer-space oddities to appear on Mystery Science Theater 3000, the cult-stoking comedy series that provided awful films with hilarious, sharp, high-speed detractors’ commentary. MST3K is the story of a sarcastic Earth dweller—played initially by series creator Joel Hodgson and, in later years, by head writer Mike Nelson—who’s exiled to a ramshackle spaceship called the Satellite of Love, where he’s forced to watch an endless supply of crapola movies. Our hero’s response to such torture, naturally, is to unleash a torrent of withering one-liners, or “riffs,” that he delivers with the help of a couple of robot pals. “It was all based on this simple idea: that people say shit when they’re watching movies,” Hodgson says.
And the shit-saying on MST3K was brilliant. The show was awash in quick, smart wisecracks, not to mention cultural references that ran the gamut from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Miles Davis to Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. Watching MST3Kwas like hanging out with a trio of underachieving-genius best friends. At a time when depictions of geekery were limited mostly to Urkel and Comic Book Guy, the denizens of the Satellite of Love were brazenly brainy—which explains why MST3K’s fan base reportedly included such meganerds as Al Gore and Patton Oswalt.
As fun as MST3K was, though, life aboard the Satellite of Love wasn’t always easy: The show was never a ratings smash, and tension between Hodgson and producer Jim Mallon led to Hodgson leaving the show just a few years into its run. In later years, members of the show’s Midwestern-based, DIY-determined staff found themselves struggling with the sort of big-TV bureaucracy they’d long fought to avoid.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of MST3K’s national debut, WIRED presents an oral history of the greatest talk-back show ever made. It all begins in the late ’60s in rural Wisconsin, where there was this guy named Joel, not too different from you or me …
Joel Hodgson (creator, writer-producer, host, 1988–1993): I was a TV junkie as a kid. This was when there were three channels, so I’d watch the farm report or this terrible polka show called Dairyland Jubilee. If I happened to run into a Godzilla movie—or a monster movie of any kind—it was like hitting the lottery.
Sometime around seventh grade, I got into ventriloquism and magic. There were these amazing magic catalogs where you could find any trick that you would see a magician do on TV. But because my parents were really big do-it-yourselfers, I started learning to build my own stuff, like magic tables and tricks. Through high school I figured I’d be a comic magician. I thought I’d work on a cruise ship.
Instead, in 1982, after graduating college in St. Paul, Minnesota, Hodgson left the Twin Cities and headed to Los Angeles, where he befriended such comics as Jerry Seinfeld and Garry Shandling and where his clever, prop-filled stand-up act quickly made him a breakout star.