Satellite Of Brand

Just Add Money

I remember the first time I was shown an episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000." It was on a VHS tape, in a friend's college dorm room, and I had never heard of the show before. The person showing me the episode was downright evangelistic about it, and within five minutes, I completely got why. There was nothing this smart, this clever, or just so on my comic sensibilities. I wasn't a complete fanatic about it, and there were plenty of episodes where the movie that was being riffed was just too terrible to redeem, no matter how quick the comedians were. But when they hit, my heavens. It hurt, you'd laugh so much.

I became a fan, in a time when sharing such things required work. VHS tapes were fantastic technology compared to the great nothing that were before them, and you could honestly have a party -- ok, a fairly nerdy party, but still, a party -- over who had the cool tapes that no one else had.

There was more to the VHS approach, of course. Small bits of animation from the Spike and Mike festival, odd moments from Japan, redubbed weirdness and sports moments, and some more infamous stuff that we don't need to get into here. Before YouTube, you had to have connections and be proactive about such things. Circulating the tape was social currency, and there was no more valuable token MST3K tapes.

The show ran for many iterations, and moved from network to network, eventually ending in 1999. DVDs of past episodes have been intermittent, due to rights and licensing fees. Both sets of personnel from the show's main run have continued to do the basic gig, under different new brand names. And now Joel Hodgson, the original creator of the show, has worked out a deal with Shout! Factory to buy the rights and make (be still our hearts) new episodes. There's a Kickstarter that, as I right this, is more than 40% of the way to its minimum $2 million goal with a month to go, and given MST3Ks hard-core nerd audience , it's hard to imagine how the target won't be met. If the full $5.5 million target is met, Hodgson hopes to make 12 future-length episodes with the funding.

Personally, I'm a little surprised that this isn't a Netflix experience already, or Hulu, or Amazon Prime. It's not like this is a new brand that needs a great amount of PR; it will generate its own. But maybe this isn't something that needs to be on any channel, especially because every old fan (and the show started nearly 30 years ago; we're all old fans) is going to share this in their social media feed.

That's the power of a real brand. It never quite goes away, and makes the people who identify with that brand root for them. And evangelize.

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