Why MST3K Is Important.
From: Westley Bennett Subject: Why MST3K Is Important
Full disclosure - I am a 35 year old Aspie, someone with a form of high functioning autism called Asperger's Syndrome. I was not diagnosed clinically until I was 25 years old, so I spent my entire childhood and teen years just thinking that I was a weirdo that couldn't connect with other people, and I didn't understand why. I knew that something was "wrong" with me, especially when I said or did the wrong thing that would upset other people, and I didn't know WHY it would bother other people because those things that I did and said  seemed innocuous to me. I would also often times spout random facts that I had learned about things that I felt were appropriate to the current situation, or make obscure jokes that no one else got but me. Growing up feeling like an alien from another planet was frustrating and scary many times.
What does this have to do with MST3K? Well, one day this awkward young teen was scanning the boob tube in the mid-90s when he came across what looked like an old movie with some strange silhouettes at the bottom of the screen. I didn't understand what was happening at first, but after a few minutes of watching, I realized what was happening - those strange silhouettes were making fun of the movie! I watched my first MST3K movie very intensely after that, and to my delight I felt that I wasn't alone in the world, for the first time.Â
There were other people out there like me that had a "strange" sense of humor. There were other people out there that spouted random and obscure information out for the people around them to hear. Of course, being a kid at the time, I didn't realize that it was all scripted and planned. But for that young awkward teen, it was a comfort that I didn't feel truly alone in the world as the only person that was "like me". It helped make it bearable to realize that other people existed out there that also had a love for the strange and bizarre, and that other people were out there that had a warped sense of humor and liked to make strange connections between tenuously connected things.
MST3K is, was, and will be important because there will always be people like me out there. The weirdos that feel out of place. The kids that don't fit in anywhere else. MST3K can provide those awkward and strange kids with a friend, someone that speaks to them in their own language. MST3K tells them... You are not alone.