Watching Every Episode of MST3K

Somewhere around 2000-2003 (college) I resolved to watch every episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000." It was the heyday of file-sharing, in those days, and such a thing was just, at that precise moment, theoretically possible. Big, special shout-out to eDonkey and eMule. "Possible" but not necessarily easy.

To illustrate the effort of watching every MST3K episode, I used to say that it was harder than watching every episode of "The Simpsons" (or basically pick any long running series you want). The reasoning is simple: there were (at that time) about 200 episodes of MST3K and each one was about 1.5 hours long, so that's about 300 hours of viewage. Compared to "The Simpsons", I'll even include all the episodes made since then, the math is: 805 episodes, at 0.3 hours each episode that's about 250 hours of viewage. Note: it's a pretty good metric for comparison because download effort and file availability are generally proportional to the length of material. This metric, of course, doesn't take into account how bad "The Simpsons" has become, though.

Given the disorganized nature of file-sharing, I created a spreadsheet to act as the source of truth, each episode listed, each had a "watched" or "not watched" status. I even added percentage calculation and a countdown to 0 because I had a lot of time on my hands and it seemed cool. But on that spreadsheet there were always 4 blank spots: 4 "lost" episodes that did not exist publicly in any form.

After 1 or 2 years (perhaps more, it was a long time ago), I finished the goal - I had watched every available episode and, by that time, I simply made peace with the idea that there were 4 episodes that just did not exist.

Then, in 2008 the "Pilot Episode" ("The Green Slime") (not really an episode) was shown at a convention and bootlegged on Youtube. Check. Down to 3.

Then, in 2016 two more "lost" episodes ("Invaders From The Deep" and "Revenge of the Mysterions from Mars") were found by the MST3K Producers in their archives and were released to backers of the 11th Season Kickstarter. Check and check.

That left ONE unreleased, "lost" episode.... One episode that no fan has turned up. One episode that even the creators of MST3K confirmed they had no access to.... What are the chances that someone somewhere taped it, kept the tape, held on to it for 38 years and never told anyone?

A few days ago, arthurputie on Reddit posted that his cousin had bought a load of old VHS's at a garage sale in the Minneapolis area and that one of them was labeled with the episode name ("Star Force: Fugitive Alien II"). Arthurputie confirmed it to actually be the lost episode and it has now been uploaded it to Youtube. 

Lost no more.

This is not posted as a recommendation. If you are not a MST3K fan, avoid the early episodes at all costs. If you are a MST3K fan, still avoid this at all costs. This is only posted for Completionists like me with a 25 year old score to settle. That, and it's also a fascinating archeological discovery.

So here's the final word. I have now watched all the episodes of MST3K, it is still difficult and the spreadsheet has not been updated to 0 because it was lost in a hard drive crash 10 years ago. Oh, and new episodes are in the works.