A long-thought lost early episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been found and uploaded to YouTube.
The episode, featuring the Japanese science-fiction film Fugitive Alien II being spoofed, had been the only remaining installment of the show’s original run on the local Minneapolis television station where it originated in 1988 that had not been seen since its original airing.
Created by comedian Joel Hodgson for Minneapolis television station KTMA, Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a parody of local independent TV station hosted movie programs, in which a man (Hodgson) is blasted into outer space by two mad scientists and forced to watch bad movies. To survive, he makes fun of the movies with the help of two robot pals he has built. (The show’s theme song does a much more toe-tapping summation of the premise.)
MST3K, as it became abbreviated by its fans, was quickly picked up Comedy Central, where it became an instant hit and one of the flagship shows for the cable outlet in its early days. Part of the show’s success was built on fans making VHS copies of the episodes and passing them along to friends whose cable providers may not have yet added Comedy Central. The show would continue on past Hodgson’s initial departure from the show in 1993, lasting for another five seasons, a network switch to the Sci-Fi Channel, a poorly marketed theatrical film, a two-season revival for Netflix, a live show and a crowdfunded revival and launch of its own streaming service.
The season of KTMA-produced episodes never received an official release, in part due to Hodgson and the other behind the show creatives were not as happy with those episodes’ quality versus what they achieved after the show moved to Comedy Central.
The show would revisit Fugitive Alien II in the third season of its Comedy Central incarnation.
According to a post on the MST3K Reddit forum, the episode was found in a box of other Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes at a garage sale near Minneapolis. The pristine quality of the recording have lead some to speculate that the VHS recording is actually a dub of the episode’s original broadcast master. The copies of episodes four through twenty-one that are available through various fan-driven channels are all off-the-air recorded copies and contain artifacts from those live airings such as commercial breaks and station ID overlays. Clean copies of the first two episodes were released by Hodgson in 2016 during the initial Kickstarter campaign to relaunch the show. It is hoped by fans that the remaining tapes in the garage sale cache may contain additional KTMA-era episodes with a similar high quality to replace the rough-around-the-edges condition of the currently circulating episodes.
