In the not too distant future
(which is now the not too distant past)...

A guy and his robot friends were sent out to space and forced to watch cheesy movies by a mad scientist and his gang of foolish assistants. But the craziest thing was that from 1988 to 1999 an entire television audience willingly watched the chessy movies with the crew. Yet who was crazier -- the mad scientist, the crew in space forced to watch the movies, or the audience hooked on their sarcastic commentary?

For more about MST3K, check out the following pages:
Satellite News - The Official Mystery Science Theater 3000 site
MST3K FAQ
MST3K at TV.com
The Botspeak Lexicon
Daddy O's Drive-in Dirt: THE HISTORY BEHIND THE MOVIES AND SHORTS SHOWN ON MST3K
MST3K: The Wiki
The Mystery Science Theater Reference Guide

All About Mystery Science Theatre 3000 1988-1999:
A Summary of the Mad Experiment of Dr. Clayton Forrester

In order to measure what it would take to drive someone crazy after watching an intense amount of bad movies, Dr. Forrester, along with his sidekick Dr. Laurence Erhardt, kidnap a janitor working for the Gizmonic Institute, Joel Robinson, and launch him into space. A long, safe distance away from the Satellite of Love (the space ship Joel Robinson now resides) Dr. Forrester watches Joel's reactions to the B-movies closely, monitoring what movie will specifically drive Joel over the edge of sanity. Dr. Forrester hopes to find the perfect B-movie to broadcast as a weapon in his schemes for world domination.
But Joel is a hard guy to break. Trapped on the S.O.L. (Satellite of Love), Joel eases his lonely, tortured existence by creating robot friends; Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot, Gypsy, and Cambot. However brilliant he is at making robots, Joel isn't all that gifted at common sense since the parts he made the robots from were all ones he could've used to steer the ship back to earth and escape the cluthes of Dr. Forrester.

Joel had no control over when the B-movies start and begin, and must watch the movies or Dr. Forrester will cut off his air supply (air meaning oxygen, you know, the thing that supports life, not Air Supply the band). To prevent themselves from going mad (and possibly to anger Dr. Forrester even deeper) Joel and the bots mock the action and dialogue of the movies they watch. As the movies play, the silhouettes of Joel, Tom, and Crow are visible at the bottom of the screen making the television audience feel like they are right there in a theatre with them (since this is just TV, the audience can't truly feel what Joel and his crew are going through, but you get the picture).

Each time there is a commercial, a very special invisible robot consisting of a disembodied female voice simply called, Magic Voice, announces the first commercial break of each episode. Before or after these breaks, Joel and his robot friends perform little skits or sing songs referred to as "Host Segments" which are done to further mock whatever movie they are forced to watch or to show off some of Joel's own mad scientific experiments. At times these segments are guest starred by characters from the B-movies being shown. But before the crew can get too carried away, Dr. Forrester thrusts upon them the "MOVIE SIGN" and thus they all run back into the theatre to begin yet another session of bad movie watching.
Besides bad movies, the crew is also forced to watch terrible, yet hilarious, out dated short films used as propaganda, advertising, training, or personal hygiene.

After Dr. Forrester's primary sidekick, Dr. Laurence Erhardt, took a permanent leave of absence, a doughy-guy Arby's clerk, Frank, soon took up residence in DEEP 13 (Forrester's super secret subterranean mad scientist lab hideout). Calling himself TV's Frank (after the way TV show hosts like to call themselves on their shows), Frank's stint as lab assistant would prove a dangerous profession. From seasons 2 through 6, he would endure beatings and verbal abuse from his boss. Yet, in the end, TV's Frank would also prove that he was, indeed, a masochist...

  Joel Escapes!

During the show's fifth season, Dr. Forrester found himself needing some extra help while being audited by The Fraternal Order of Mad Science by mild mannered temp worker, Mike Nelson. Finding a way to escape with the help of Gypsy, Joel found his exit from the Satellite of Love via an escape pod (amusingly named the Deus ex Machina) in a box marked "Hamdingers" and was soon never heard from again. To punish the boob who distracted him from keeping an eye on Joel, Dr. Forrester sent Mike to replace Joel.

1993: Dr. Forrester's Experiment is Cut in Half!

Mystery Science Theatre 3000 soon becomes The Mystery Science Theatre Hour after the Comedy Central channel gets too popular. Mocking Jack Perkins, A&E's Biography host, Mike, as Jack, hosts 30 episodes of MST3K split into 60 one-hour segments under the show's new title Mystery Science Theatre Hour. It would seem that this new airing of the show would hurt Dr. Forrester's plan to take over the world, but instead these half-shows would be syndicated to local stations from September 1995 to September 1996 -- and thus proved to further his reach into the unsuspecting masses!

1996: The Year Mystery Science Theater 3000 became a Movie

Mystery Science Theater 3000 the Movie was featured on the big screen to the delight of adoring fans and lunatics everywhere (even thought it was only shown in 26 cinemas across the nation at its widest run, but don't tell Dr. Forrester that).  Mike and the bots are forced to watch the sci-fi classic This Island Earth.  The motion picture version of the television show features bigger, closer views of Mike's life in space and Dr. Forrester's lab in DEEP 13.  Crow T. Robot tries to escape to Earth by trying to dig a tunnel through the ship causing a hull breach.  Unexpectedly, Tom Servo saves the day, but you'll have to watch the movie to find out how.  With a movie, there are no commercial breaks, yet somehow the projector breaks giving Mike and the bots a much needed time out.  Later in the film, Servo mentions that he owns an interocitor like the one in This Island Earth. Mike and the bots swiftly sneak out of the theater, thinking that they can use Servo's interocitor to contact someone who can help them get back to Earth, but the Metalunan they contact, Benkitnorf, isn't much help.

After the movie, Mike and the bots unwind with a little "Metaluna mixer" (a This Island Earth-themed party), much to the aggravation of Dr. F before he attempts to use his own interocitor to ruin it, only to end up beaming himself into Benkitnorf's bathroom. Mike and the bots celebrate the fact that Dr. Forrester is out of their hair...then realize that now they'll likely never get back to Earth ("Hey, wait a minute...").

1996-1999: TV's Frank dies and Dr. Forrester does, too (to the delight of his mother)

After a brutal cancellation by Comedy Central, the Sci-Fi channel gets the show back on the screen for the fans. But by the time the show is on this channel, Dr. Forrester himself would remain abscent. Only his dreadfully deranged mother, Pearl Forrester, could fill his shoes, much less put them away in a neat pile, or bury them under a heap of dirty laundry. At the start of the eighth season, Pearl and her strange assistants Professor Bobo, who often addressed her as "Lawgiver" (a Planet of the Apes reference), and Observer (aka Brain Guy).  Having herself cryogenically frozen til the year 2525, Pearl soon became leader of a Planet of the Apes-like future Earth and used a mysterious power to draw the Satellite of Love's crew forward to the future just so she could send them bad movies.  When they somehow come back to the past, Pearl and her assistants take up residence in Castle Forrester, ancestral home of the Forresters, where for centuries the Forrester family has been secretly holding experiments using cheesy entertainment to drive society mad.