For me, being a fan of MST3K actually has roots long before the show ever came on the air.  Back in the ’70s and early ’80s, while I was growing up in Central Florida, one of my favorite shows was something called Creature Feature, which was on a local independent station, WTOG Channel 44, out of Tampa/St. Pete.  The show was hosted by a man in ghoulish makeup named Dr. Paul Bearer (get it?) and it featured cheesy movies like Godzilla, Gamera, The Giant Gila Monster, and Tarantula.  I really loved these movies.  True they were bad, but most importantly, they were cheesy which made them fun to watch.  I personally divide all movies into three basic categories:  the good, the bad, and the cheesy.  The good and the bad movies, well you know what they are, but the cheesy movies almost defy logic – yes, they are bad, but they are also somehow entertaining in their badness, frequently more so than a good movie (the “so-bad-it’s-good” effect).

Anyway, after leaving home for college, I didn’t get to see Creature Feature again (I really wish I had taped it at least once) and except for rare shows that came and went (like Commander USA on the USA Network), I didn’t get to see these cheesy movies anymore.  But then, during my last year at college in 1990, a new network was added to our cable in my college town called The Comedy Channel, and on it was a show with little silhouettes on the bottom of screen that made fun of cheesy movies – I had discovered Mystery Science Theater 3000. (If I recall correctly, my first episode was a rerun of The Corpse Vanishes that was shown just before Season Two premiered).  Watching that show, I began to see the cheesy movies I loved again but with the extra bonus of having someone make fun of the movies at the same time.  I thought the show was absolutely brilliant and it was only later that I found out that it had roots as a local show on a small independent station, much like the Creature Feature show I grew up with.

I was still a big fan of the show after college, and even remember when Josh “Elvis” Weinstein (Larry Erhardt and the original voice for Tom Servo) left the show and was replaced as a Mad Scientist by Frank Conniff (aka TV’s Frank) and as Tom Servo by Kevin Murphy.  I watched pretty regularly as the show’s popularity grew on the newly merged Comedy Central cable network and they started showing the show virtually all the time – it was on six days a week at one point, usually twice a day (something that’s now hard to believe, I know).  Due to this apparent popularity, I mistakenly assumed that the show would always be easily accessible like the old classic sitcoms, a mistake I would later regret.

Then the first big change in my fandom came when Joel left the show and was replaced by Mike in 1993.  I mean Mike was good and all, but to me, he just wasn’t as good as Joel.  I wanted to save some of the Joel episodes on tape, but I didn’t record MST3K very extensively because it was still on all the time and the show seemed like it would be on Comedy Central virtually forever – after all, it was still their best show.  Anyway, although I still watched the Joel reruns, I seldom watched the new shows with Mike and, beginning in 1995, I wouldn’t get the show at all anymore.

In 1995, I moved to Atlanta and the cable in the area of town that I moved to didn’t carry Comedy Central.  I know, pretty shocking that they didn’t carry this popular network, but what could I do?  Due to this setback, I didn’t even get to see the show again until Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie opened over a year later in 1996.  And with that movie, for the first time, I really liked Mike as host.  Although my cable didn’t have Comedy Central, they did however have the Sci-Fi Channel and when the show moved to Sci-Fi in 1997, I was able to receive the show again.  But I just couldn’t get into the new version of the show.  My favorite character on the show was Crow, as voiced by Trace Beaulieu, and when he left the show after the Comedy Central run ended, I just couldn’t adjust to the new voice for Crow or to the missing Dr. Clayton Forrester.  The show just wasn’t the same for me and three months later, in the summer of 1997, I moved to the area of Atlanta called Buckhead, an area of town in which the cable company carried Comedy Central, but at the time did not carry the Sci-Fi Channel.  So I never got much of a chance to try to get into the Sci-Fi Channel version of the show during its original run.

Then, in 1999, after not seeing or really thinking about the show for years, I read in an article that it was being canceled by the Sci-Fi Channel.  Hearing this caused me to think about how much I enjoyed the show in the past, so I re-watched some of my old tapes and my interest in the show was once again renewed.  After this, I began to read the MST3K Usenet groups on the Internet.  For years, I was disappointed that I had made the mistake of not taping more episodes of the show back when it was still on Comedy Central.  I only had about a dozen episodes on tape that I had recorded back about 1993 when Joel left the show, plus only two hours of the MST Hour from when it was available in syndication up until 1996 (something I had discovered too late to record more of).  But on the Usenet, I discovered that I could acquire 2nd generation VHS copies of any of the episodes from sellers and traders.  So I then went out and acquired every extant episode of the show, mainly through trading.  As my collection of episodes grew, I decided to write down on a webpage my reviews of each episode as I watched and re-watched them because this was simply the best usage I could think of for my free ISP-provided Homepage.  

Since 1999, this site has gone through different incarnations.  Originally, it was Don’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 Review List and was built around the reviews and tape trading.  After I quit tape trading, I revamped the site to be only about the reviews in the site’s first major revision earlier in 2001, in which I also shortened the name to just Don’s MST3K Site.  Early in 2003, Forrest Rice and Josh Abbott joined as collaborators on the site, so now that this site was no longer just “me, myself & I”, we revised it again into a better site with a better name: The MST3K Review.  The popularity of this site has completely amazed me – what was just a little hobby site I created really just for the fun of it has grown into something I never even imagined when I typed up the first HTML page for it back in 1999.  Anyway, that’s my history and if you enjoy reading this site, then its purpose for existing has been fulfilled.