MITCHELL?!

If you're like me, all you know about Joe Don Baker's filmography are his two appearances in films that were given the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, where Joe, Mike and the Bots take turns savaging him over everything from his weight issue to his limited acting range. Perhaps that's why I found this footage of Baker being a genuine cinematic bad-ass in the 1975 film Framed so jarring. Also contains one of the most brain-scramblingly dangerous stunts ever caught on camera. It's enough to make you wonder whether the stuntman was able to walk away afterwards.

MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 NETFLIX SEASON 2 GETS GREENLIT!!!

WTF PODCAST WITH MST3K'S JONAH RAY AND JOEL HODGESON

I've been waiting a long time for Marc Maron to interview Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgeson on his WTF podcast, and their rambling discourse (it begins at 33:50) certainly didn't disappoint. The Jonah interview is pretty cool too, for the most part, but I'm not too crazy about the fact that he basically accuses those of us who have a problem with the new Tom Servo, as voiced by Baron Vaughn, are just being RACIST (WTF indeed!).

THE NEW SEASON OF MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 HAS ARRIVED!

Much like the zoster virus--which covers you in unsightly chicken pox for a while before going dormant and laying in wait for years, only to reemerge when you least expect it, stronger and more vicious than ever, covering you in unsightly (and painful!) shingles--the greatest achievement in the history of humor-based televised audio/visual entertainment is back!

I am referring, of course, to Mystery Science Theater 3000, Eden Prairie Minnesota's own little cow-town puppet show made good.

MST3K, as we fans like to call it, premiered on a tiny UHF station in 1988 before becoming one of early cable TV's most critically acclaimed cult sensations. For ten years, it channel-hopped from The Comedy Channel/Comedy Central to the Sci-Fi Channel, producing nearly 200 full length episodes before apparently closing up shop for good in 1999.

Too much has already been written about the phenomenon that is MST3K for me to bother going over it all again for you now. The show's controversially huge Wikipedia entry goes into obsessive detail about everything from Joel Hodgson conceiving it as a way to help breathe comedic life into KTMA's hopelessly dated film catalog, to all the various cast switcheroos, to the show's ill-fated foray into making "cinema", to all the post-MST3K projects (like Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax), to the record-breaking Kickstarter revival that helped bring a full 11th season of the show to Netflix nearly 20 years after the final Sci-Fi Channel episode... so if you're one of those sad, unsullied fools still in need of a refresher course to remind you why this reboot is such a big freaking deal, you can always refer to that.

As for the rest of you--those who share in your humble blogger's absolute and unquestioning adoration of Mystery Science Theater 3000 as entertainment, yes, but also as a potentially powerful paradigm for a positive and progressive postmodernism--you need only know this: the first 14 episodes of the 11th season of MST3K all premiered on Netflix today, April 14th, 2017, one day before your humble blogger's 47th birthday... and you'll have to forgive me for getting more than a little mistie about the whole deal.

And so, as I hunker down to watch the first fresh episode of my favorite TV show of all time since watching the "lost" episode, featuring the film Merlin's Mystical Shoppe of Wonders, which aired on September 12, 1999, I promise to bring you updates, commentary, and bullet reviews for each episode. Watch for them to start appearing here, at the Mediavore, and also at my home base blog, the Daily Dirt Diaspora, seeing as I've been neglecting my duties there of late, due to the unfortunate combination of a paying graphics gig and the fact that Trump's increasingly unhinged behavior has got me so spooked I don't even want to comment on his shenanigans anymore for fear he might read something I wrote and launch nukes at Grenada or some other crazy shit like that.

Keep watching this space! HUZZAH!

MST3K SEASON 11 TRAILER DROPS!!!