Mystery Science Theater 3000

Mystery Science Theater 3000 began about as humbly as television can: comedian Joel Hodgson launched it on KTMA-TV, a small Minneapolis station, on November 24, 1988. The premise was gloriously dumb and instantly durable — a man trapped on a satellite by mad scientists, forced to watch terrible B-movies with robot pals Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot, the three of them visible in silhouette along the bottom of the screen, riffing on every line. The Comedy Channel picked it up in November 1989, and the show hit its stride on Comedy Central through May 1996 before the Sci-Fi Channel carried it from February 1997 until cancellation in 1999.

The cast changed mid-flight and somehow both eras became beloved. Hodgson left midway through the fifth season and Michael J. Nelson took over in the theater seats, while Kevin Murphy and Trace Beaulieu (later Bill Corbett) gave the robots their voices. The show won a Peabody Award in 1993 and put out a theatrical film in 1996 — Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, riffing the sci-fi picture This Island Earth. But its real engine was the fans, self-described MSTies, who honored the credits' plea to "keep circulating the tapes" by mailing VHS recordings to anyone who couldn't get cable — a hand-to-hand tape-trading network that grew the cult long before the internet could.

That cult never dispersed. In 2015, Hodgson's Kickstarter to resurrect the show raised $5,764,229 from 48,270 backers — at the time the largest film and video campaign in the site's history — and the revival landed on Netflix in April 2017. Every talk-over-the-movie format since, from DVD commentary culture to riffing channels everywhere, owes something to the little Minneapolis puppet show about loving bad movies out loud.