We’ve got movie sign!
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A complete episode from the first season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, “Star Force: The Fugitive Alien 2,” which hasn’t been viewed by the public since its original air date of November 24, 1988, has been uploaded to YouTube. Reddit user /u/arthurputie acquired the VHS tape, as explained in this post on r/MST3K, sourced from a garage sale.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) has aired on and off over numerous cancellations and returns, across networks like Comedy Central, The Sci-Fi Channel, and a recent return on Netflix. But the series started as a local production on independent Minnesota-based UHF station KTMA in 1988.
As legendary to MST3K fans as the missing Dr. Who episodes, MST3K aired locally in season one (it didn’t get to Comedy Central until season two) and wasn’t publicly made available at the time, but there were other reasons for the episodes from the KTMA years not appearing. In 1995’s The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, these episodes appeared only as a text list with no descriptions. The MST3K team explains: “We don’t talk much of those early days anymore… Why don’t we release these shows and cash in? Well … the shows were seminal and formative, which is to say they weren’t very good.” They go on to explain they don’t have the legal rights to the episodes, and even if they did “there’s a reason why musicians and artists leave a lot of work unreleased, and the typical reason is it’s not very good at all and they don’t want it seen.”
A scrub through the episode (and I cannot WAIT to watch the whole thing) reveals the telltale signs of an MST3K in its rawest, most gestative state: There are different, somehow jankier bots, apparently improvised riffs (they sometimes hadn’t even seen these movies; in later years they carefully wrote and synced riffs to their movies and shorts), and even a different theme song take. Oh, and Joel has long hair.
Despite this particular episode being lost to time, other episodes from this “lost” first season have appeared over the years, including the first two KTMA episodes, “Invaders from the Deep” and “The Revenge of the Mysterons from Mars,” both officially released as part of Kickstarter fundraisers and available now on YouTube.
Further evidence of MST3K’s eagerness to move on from the dark ages of KTMA can be found in the reuse of Star Force II as the movie in episode 318, which aired squarely in MST3K’s golden age.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 is gearing up for yet another a return with a Kickstarter funded season called The RiffTrax Experiments, marking a melding of the classic MST3K casts, which has four planned episodes.
Samuel Claiborn is IGN’s managing editor and a fixes/breaks ancient arcade and pinball machines in his garage. He dusted off The MST3K Amazing Colossal Episode Guide for this story.