Mystery Science Theater 3000 Quotes

and my editor, Tom Dupree, for his patience, enthusiasm, and shared good taste for loving Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Films like Daddy-O are here to remind us that millennials have been around since long before the millennium. 

We are all obscure references waiting to happen.

One thing I like about the 1950s is that kids were hip without any sense of irony about it.  They were dressing in fifties cool-cat clothing with complete sincerity.  Nobody wanted to be“retro”back then. With the Depression still fresh in everybody’s mind, did anyone in the 1950s dress up as the Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath, and go to Dust Bowl-themed parties because they thought it was cool?  Probably not.  In the past, the past was something you wanted to forget about rather than romanticize.  I really miss those days. 

There’s also the inconvenient truth that I am friends with many millennials and they are actually quite nice and very smart.  They also have a nonchalant and unselfconscious acceptance of all kinds of different cultures and races and sexual preferences; in terms of equality and tolerance they are the most enlightened generation yet.  But on the other hand, they have beards and understand technology, so fuck them. 

Meanwhile, people are busy using fractals to explain any system that has defied other, more reductionist approaches. Since they were successfully applied by IBM's Benoit Mandlebrot to the problem of seemingly random, intermittent interference on the phone lines, fractals have been used to identify underlying patterns in weather systems, computer files, and bacteria cultures. Sometimes fractal enthusiasts go a bit too far, however, using these nonlinear equations to mine for patterns in systems where none exist. Applied to the stock market to consumer behavior, fractals may tell less about those systems than about the people searching for patterns within them. There is a dual nature to fractals: They orient us while at the same time challenging our sense of scale and appropriateness. They offer us access to the underlying patterns of complex systems while at the same time tempting us to look for patterns where none exist. This makes them a terrific icon for the sort of pattern recognition associated with present shock—a syndrome we'll call factalnoia. Like the robots on Mystery Science Theater 3000, we engage by relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined. The tsunami makes sense once it is connected to chemtrails, which make sense when they are connected to HAARP. It's not just conspiracy theorists drawing fractalnoid connections between things. In a world without time, any and all sense making must occur on the fly. Simultaneity often seems like all we have. That's why anyone contending with present shock will have a propensity to make connections between things happening in the same moment—as if there had to be an underlying logic.

When you’ve been traumatized by awful cinema, you need to share the experience and purge your demons somehow; unfortunately, psychological counseling that treats victims of bad movie overexposure is a scarce commodity, so writing this book is the closest thing there is to therapy for me

Could you imagine how much better this film would be if Little Richard was in every scene? 

Perhaps the most frequent question I get about working on MST3K is, “Where did you get your movies from?”  People seem genuinely fascinated by this, as if there’s some mysterious quest involved in finding a not-very-good film, like Indiana Jones traversing a booby-trapped labyrinth to obtain an ancient, priceless idol hidden under a cum-rag in Tommy Wiseau's basement.

That said, Snark can be effective (and funny) when done well, and without clichés. One of the problems with Snark nowadays is that it’s overused, and therefore writers in this category have difficulty standing out from the crowd. Mike Nelson (of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame) has written some very funny essays and books in this style.

But back in the fifties, cool-cat teens who greased their hair and snapped their fingers to Pat Boone’s versions of Little Richard songs didn't understand that they weren’t really that cool at all and were in fact their era’s version of Justin Bieber fans.  Had they known this, they might have developed a self-awareness that would have better prepared them for their eventual deaths in Vietnam.    It’s

In the past, the past was something you wanted to forget about rather than romanticize.  I really miss those days. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that many low budget horror and sci-fi films of the fifties and early sixties were slow and seemingly devoid of action because they were designed to provide a kind of wallpaper for the kids who were only in the theater to make-out. 

Watch out for snakes!

I’m not a “just one of the guys” kind of person—I fucking hate men—but I love eating and marathon television watching and I never met any girls in DeKalb willing to endure six hours on a busted couch with cold cheese fries and reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

That wonderful childlike impulse to loiter and piss your life away often morphs into a lame, conformist need to pay bills and have food to eat. Anytime you see a person with a loving family, a comfortable home, and a substantial income, you can only shake your head and wonder where he or she went so wrong and became such a loser.

And it would have raised a red flag if there WASN'T a Norman Fell reference in this book.

the night of the premiere at the Capri Theater in downtown El Paso. Now here was my dad telling me he’d just seen it on the Comedy Central channel on a program called Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Ed Wood may not have had the talent of an artist, he may not have had the skills of an artist, but he had the soul of an artist.

White people committed more crimes in movies in the 40s, because having a black man committing a crime in a film meant you had to hire a black man to play the role, and hiring minorities was a low priority for The Greatest Generation.

unfortunately, psychological counseling that treats victims of bad movie overexposure is a scarce commodity,

do have a religious background; I began training to become a lapsed Catholic at an early age).

I want to pursue a career in sarcasm,