The chief draw of MST3K: The Return, however, is the raw exuberance Jonah and the bots express for every new image and line of dialogue. Yount, Vaughn, and Ray breathlessly comment on everything in the frame at a breakneck pace that would give whiplash to the Satellite of Love crew of the late ’80s. They turn edits, zooms, and reveals into their own form of sight gag, teeing up the movie to complete jokes for them. They’re literally in conversation with the mechanics of the films, alerting viewers to grammar and technique in a way that not even the sharpest Mike Nelson episodes would.
The jokes are less funny because of this hyperawareness, but that was never the point of MST3K, at least not as Hodgson originally conceived the series. The point was to use movies, no matter how dire they seem, as a way to fight loneliness, which explains why a healthy and lasting convention culture grew around the property. Viewers loved chilling on the Satellite of Love with a man and his wisecracking robot friends so much that they wrote in every week. MST3K spoke to the malaise of movie fanatics in a pre-Internet age, after the publication of Michael J. Weldon’s The Psychotronic Film Guide and the first writings of Joe Bob Briggs but before there was any meaningful way for the masses to talk about their favorite oddball B movie. Joel had all the time in the world to watch movies with his best friends. Who doesn’t occasionally wish they had it so good, mad scientists or not?
