Fast forward to 2009, thousands of movies and TV shows have been produced since the shows inception. So why not give it a go one more time. Now for those of you who are familiar with the series then most of this will be review, but there are some changes that make the viewing slightly different. Mystery Science Theater 3000 was really always about one thing: making fun of bad movies.

Initially, the main character was Joel Robinson, a janitor at a top-secret research facility, Gizmonic Institute, who had been marooned on an orbiting space ship called the Satellite of Love (hereafter abbreviated as SOL) by two evil scientists, Dr. Clayton Forrester (hereafter called Dr. F.) and Dr. Laurence Erhardt. At first operating from within Gizmonic Institute itself, and later from a cave-like underground hideout called Deep 13, Forrester and Erhardt had an evil plan: They would force Robinson to watch one bad movie after another, in order to study how he would cope with such torture. Joel's only companions on the spaceship were four robots (often referred to collectively as "the bots") he'd built himself: Crow, Tom Servo, Gypsy and a camera robot named Cambot, through whose mechanical eye we see the proceedings.

While Gypsy attended to the details of running the SOL, Crow and Tom joined Joel in the ship's screening room, the Mystery Science Theater, as he watched the movies. Cambot watched as Joel/Mike and the bots took their seats and the movie began. We could see their silhouettes, sitting in theater seats at the bottom of our TV screens and, as they watched the movie, the three offered riotously funny commentary, satire and general heckling. The comments from Joel/Mike and the bots, about 700 per episode, were the real heart and point of the show. The comments varied a great deal, from scatological silliness and sarcastic needling one moment, to complex wordplay and obscure references the next. The show ran two hours, enough time to show an entire horrible movie and sometimes a terrible one-reeler, as well. And three times (about once every half hour) during the movie, Joel/Mike and the bots came out of the theater to the SOL's bridge for short comedy bits known as host segments.