These are some of the MSTings that have best stood the test of time for me, works I can return to the way I return to Mystery Science Theater 3000 itself. The first three of them also help explain just how I became interested in MSTings.
Where Mystery Science Theater 3000 took on B-to-Z-movies, MSTings started with text available online. This particular MSTing found an unusual source for that text in an adventure game. The original fan-made game was neither well written nor well designed; the MSTing reconstructs it and adds pointed commentary from the Mystery Science Theater characters as the player stumbles towards where a murderer will be arrested with little to get in the way other than sudden, unexpected, and frequent violent death. (One useful hint is to become familiar with the command "UNDO.")
This MSTing also happens to be the first I ever encountered and my real introduction to the show itself. The year I got on the Internet and went looking for information on the rather more polished commercial adventure games I hadn't been able to solve by myself, I found the entries for the First Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. I have to admit this particular adventure was easier for me to play through than the higher-ranked entries, and its humour worked for me. More than that, positive reviews of the game and its own introductory material offered further information on the show itself, although just perhaps that kept me from looking up more about it myself right away. (In any case, the game's own particular configuration of the show's ever-changing cast could have influenced how I wound up populating my own MSTings.)
To experience this particular MSTing does require some basic knowledge of how to play text adventures, and its own bevy of obscure references includes many to previous adventure games. Beyond that, one other perhaps unfortunate thing about this MSTing for me was that only a handful of other interactive MSTings were written, and none of them appealed to me the way this one did.
A convenient supernova just happens to throw the heroes and villains of the Star Wars saga (circa the middle of Return of the Jedi) into the Star Trek universe (circa the end of The Next Generation and the beginning of Deep Space Nine.) Unlike some fanworks of its time, this story doesn't play games hinging on which franchise is the author's favourite, but then little that could be described as exciting happens in it either. Responding smartly to the endless meetings and discussions and the ludicrously short yet still ripped-off battles, the MSTing manages along the way to insult just about every character from all three properties. In that very broadness, though, it still came off as entertaining to me.
I happened on a crosspost of this MSTing some months after playing MST3K: Detective, and enjoyed it as well (although its conclusion wasn't posted at the time, which would have given me a better sense earlier on of how protean the show was.) It didn't quite get me focused on MSTing archives, but that would happen soon enough.
As Mark Sachs himself once wrote:
Action, intrigue, romance, danger, love, comedy, tragedy, fresh fruit, and that uniquely science fictional "Sense of Wonder" -- all of these things are missing from this story, and yet there is so much, much more that it lacks as well.
As for my personal connection to it, I have to admit that (as with a handful of movies in the Mystery Science Theater canon) I'd known about the original Robotech fanfic before happening on the MSTing of an excerpt from it. More than that, I'd read and re-read it, sure there had to be a coherent tale of space war to be deciphered from its jumble of plots and characters introduced at random and abandoned undeveloped. (One character in the text here was introduced and put through enough at the beginning of the story I'd supposed she was the main character. It's not necessary to try and guess who that character is, though.)
Happening on a dedicated directory (the once-famous "Anime Web Turnpike") of links to anime fan sites about two years after getting on the Internet, I looked at the fanfiction sites and was at once curious about one promising "anime MSTings." The Vault of Anime MSTings was much smaller then than it would become, but a MSTing of The Odysseus Epic caught and held my eye. There might have been a trace of apprehension mixed in after all the effort I'd put into trying to unravel the original work, but once I'd read and enjoyed the MSTing that compulsion to sort out its source material had faded, just perhaps replaced by a devotion to reading other MSTings.
This MSTing happened to anticipate a good many other anime MSTings to follow. It features a special guest character who doesn't just appear in the "host segments" in between the commentary, but enters the theatre and quips alongside the characters of the series. With this character being the goddess Belldandy from the manga and anime Oh My Goddess!, though, her personality more or less amounting to "nice" might have left her short on memorable zingers. Mark Sachs did perhaps address that in a later MSTing, Justice and Mercy, which moved that much closer towards anime MSTings that didn't feature any characters from Mystery Science Theater itself at all (although this could make them that much more of an acquired taste).
Moving from the personal to the general, I am still looking at a MSTing of something already notorious. Hack-and-slash sword-and-sorcery in at least an effort at the Robert E. Howard vein, The Eye of Argon was transcribed from photocopies of a science fiction fanzine to float through "fandom" in general for years before Adam Cadre decided to "aim high" for his first MSTing. Without quite as much baggage as more acknowledged fanfiction carries, I've seen this MSTing suggested as a good starting point for becoming acquainted with them as a whole.
The frequent interruptions of a MSTing do make for a somewhat different experience than those of the fans who'd laughed at the original text. This MSTing also has the Mystery Science Theater characters become a bit more overwhelmed by everything than they tend to be in the show, amplified by how the transcriptions of the day just happened to have been made from a fanzine the last page had come loose from. A full resolution to this doesn't turn up until Adam Cadre's next MSTing, which did, however, appear years in advance of the rediscovery of the last page. If greater knowledge about the original story does come with a cost, though, it's that you might have to suppose the "Jim Theis" in mind the "riffing" insults and rages at is someone older than the teenager who wrote that story. With that admitted, I can at least also mention that just about all of the MSTings Adam Cadre wrote before going on to other things could qualify as personal favourites for me.
One of the first major "group MSTings" (the show itself had multiple writers credited for each episode), which takes on a fire-and-brimstone Bible-thumping tract tossed via an "anonymous posting service" into several seemingly unrelated newsgroups. The MSTing's response is more irreverent than impious, but still might require a relaxed attitude towards the subject. I do find something particularly fun about the mad scientist Dr. Forrester in the framing "host segments," which go so far as to include small "promos" leading into the work.
Every so often MSTings would take on movies themselves, or as well as they could in plain text. This MSTing is different for not starting with a film script. It involves an overwrought promotion (in a random newsgroup) of a movie that, so far as I know, never existed, but would have had not just the zeitgeist-worthy subject of cloning but also "naked, big-breasted actresses" guaranteeing both critical and box-office success for its writer, director, and star William Blair. The opening "host segment" does poke fun at the summer movies of 1997, but without the vague sense of bitterness and betrayal that did seem to infect a certain number of other MSTings that so much as brought up similar films.
Mystery Science Theater 3000's original run took on movies spanning five decades of B-movie history, quipping away at the periods and attitudes captured in them. MSTings did tend to be of much more recent works, but some managed to reach further back. The pulp mystery in this MSTing is off-kilter enough to be entertaining, with a detective with a peculiar name investigating a locked-door murder but not revealing his evidence until after he's made his arrest.
This MSTing of a pulp fiction story takes on the Cthulhu Mythos. The most horrifying thing about the original story might be its bland take on H.P. Lovecraft's legacy, meandering towards a less than overwhelming revelation of cosmic evil while dropping names all the way. The story's ostensible yet more or less inactive protagonist takes some lumps in the "riffing," but so do most of the other characters. I wouldn't say this MSTing requires encyclopedic knowledge of Lovecraft's works to enjoy. However, it just might have done more for me than a whole series of sniffy academic prefaces to explain why those academics were sniffy towards the thought of the Cthulhu Mythos being extended by other hands.
Crossovers, some trying to be funny and some taking things in combination rather seriously, provided ample grist for MSTings. This story combined Doctor Who (both the characters and some actors) with Peanuts, and provided grim explanations for some of the distinguishing features of the comic strip and its animated adaptations. Having included Peanuts references in other MSTings he'd written, Joseph Nebus treated this situation with both disbelief and humour.
Fanfics of furry-animal action-adventure cartoons offered material for a certain number of MSTings. Many were of "Sonic the Hedgehog" stories, and I have to admit I wasn't familiar with the original property. There were also some of "Chip 'n' Dale's Rescue Rangers" stories, and I have to admit I was familiar with that original property even if that experience might have been the closest I came to concluding I was getting too old and sharp for cartoons. This particular fanfic is less grim than the lengthy works John Nowak and Matt Plotecher had "MSTed" before (although the "John" who appears in this MSTing was "written into the frame" in their previous work), and briefer than their MSTing of the antique pulp juvenile "Tom Swift and his War Tank." The story was well-suited to make a memorable MSTing even so, including a cluster of new Rescue Rangers who come out of nowhere to more or less run things under the amusing arrogance of one of them.
Another early "anime MSTing," early enough to use the Mystery Science Theater characters rather than the eclectic casts of "riffers" authors got to putting together, happened to inspire a catchphrase or two. More than that, it takes on a blandly named story that starts with Bubblegum Crisis, a formative title for English-speaking anime fans in the early 1990s, but just happens to toss in an overequipped guy who's immediately talked out of hunting down the all-female team who were the protagonists of the actual Original Video Animation and joins up with them. The riffing springboards off heavy implications the guy managed to make one of the Knight Sabers his girlfriend to touch on interpretations of "all-female casts" perhaps more familiar to modern anime fans.
After a short series stretching the boundaries of "semi-standard MSTings" as peculiar casts "riffed" on unusual material, Brendan Herlihy moved towards more familiar settings with this work, if still making some references to what had come before. The four linked Daria fanfics taken on here are disturbing in a different and probably more conventional way than Peter Guerin's memorably distinctive stories. At times the riffing is more or less just wincing at the bland presentation of sexual assault and its consequences. This, though, doesn't stop the MSTing's deft and funny puncturing everywhere else of the detached ridiculousness and the edgy yet inane "cool" new character in these stories.
Picking one MSTing from late in a long-running series "riffing" on the connected works of one author does seem to step back from "you might like it too; it doesn't demand too much foreknowledge" to "saying something about myself." With that said, when I started really reading MSTings plenty of "Marrissa MSTings" had already accumulated. The series began less than a year after the very first MSTings appeared. "Enterprized" wasn't the first fanfic riffed, but beyond the inanities and insanities of the original work with its opening author's note "All spelling errors are to be ingored", there was the simple fact of its author Stephen Ratliff continuing to write.
One of the inanities and insanities of Enterprized, a contrived reason to put a bridge crew of children shown aboard the civilized Enterprise-D of Star Trek: The Next Generation in charge of that starship's "saucer section," became the focus of Ratliff's work going forward. A girl named Marrissa, who'd appeared in a single episode of the actual show, was Captain of the Kids' Crew. Enterprized introduced her as a cold, competent tactician (who ordered "I lost to a bunch of kids" carved by phaser into the hull of the first ship she defeated), and success after success piled up from there.
All of that writing did somewhat improve Ratliff's prose, and that does get commented on in this MSTing. The general standard of riffing had also risen, though, and there are plenty of entertaining quips and "host segment" skits. In between those riffs, not all that much happens in the actual story. Marrissa, now grown up into a married young mother (there is some squirming in the riffs about how the character first seen as a preteen girl is now described as nursing her baby daughter and stripping down to get into a hot tub), gets sent off for enforced leave to recover from the events of a previous story written by an apparently altogether sincere fan of Ratliff's stories. Beyond that sense of all of the stories and MSTings sort of going somewhere, anyway, I might also have liked this MSTing because of one or two Star Wars references that didn't pack post-1999 visceral contempt, and a good bit more evidence that Ratliff at that point was getting into anime...
Quite a few fanfics strove to "fix" Neon Genesis Evangelion. A certain number of them provided raw material for anime MSTings. Neon Exodus Evangelion might have been the best-written of those fanfics, but that might only explain why it was perhaps as divisive as the original anime...
Speaking only for myself, I have to admit that when I first happened on "NXE," my immediate reaction was that it had managed to feel less impenetrable than the much-touted previous works of fanfiction by the online collective calling itself Eyrie Productions and might even help remind me of the original anime, the first episodes of which I'd seen at my university's anime club. It wasn't until a while later that I ran into some "Evangelion fanfic reviews" complaining about just how that story strove to "fix" the anime. This involved replacing the anguished and thoroughly flawed fourteen-year-old main character Shinji Ikari, son of an unpleasant and enigmatic giant robot anime commander, with the swaggering and thoroughly competent fourteen-year-old new character DJ Croft, fruit of a one-night stand between computer game adventurer and sex symbol Lara Croft and Fox Mulder from The X-Files. Those who had found the anime compelling for whatever reason declared more profound than "cool giant robots and hot anime girls" and those who'd been able to groove with the previous pop culture mashups of Eyrie Productions might not have overlapped all that much, and when the two factions did meet it seemed pretty much a matter of mutual incomprehension.
The MSTing community, anyway, tended to the first side of that divide. Perhaps the MSTings of the "1:n" instalments of "NXE" were little more effective than complaining fanfic reviews in swaying those rooted on the other side, but I have to admit that, after pushing at last into some of the previous Eyrie Productions stories only for my general experience with MSTings to leave me rather nonplussed with their power fantasy and wish fulfilment elements, I was ready to appreciate these specific MSTings. The last of them brought in the eccentric style of Mystery Octagon Theater to take on DJ Croft once more piling up honours in a world more stylish than substantial, charming the good and infuriating the unpleasant, and overpowering almost as an afterthought one of the actual challenges of the original anime. Out of the previous instalments I suppose the fourth, fifth, and sixth offered the best blend of MSTing authors up to speed with the story's peculiarities and excesses within the story itself, but the first, second, and third lead into them and the seventh and eighth lead into this final outing. (Afterwards, with the MSTing community itself trailing off, the usual comment was that everyone else in the story had somewhat levelled up themselves such that it didn't feel quite as egregious.)