The return of the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000, which originally ran on three different networks for roughly 11 years until 1999, is an act of playful subversion. In late 2015 series creator Joel Hodgson broke Kickstarter records with a campaign to fund 14 new MST3K episodes, raking in more than $5.7 million. During a July panel as part of the pop-culture pantheon that is San Diego Comic Con, Hodgson revealed that the show’s reboot had found a home: Netflix. Last Friday the streaming service premiered a new version of the program that unearths stools of the silver screen.
Not all of the movies featured in the new MST3K season are outright failures. Episode three’s Time Travelers (1964) is mostly plodding; episode four’s natural disaster flick, Avalanche (1978), mostly forgettable. But the cast, led by Gizmonic employee Jonah Heston (Nerdist podcast host Jonah Ray), enlivens the dullest moments with a torrent of riffs. The Mads—Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day) and Max (Patton Oswalt)—also get some quips in during the breaks, a holdover from MST3K‘s original runs that can seem gratuitous given the switch to commercial-free Netflix.
