I’ve been watching a fair amount of Mystery Science Theater 3000 lately. I should say, re-watching it, as I’ve been watching episodes I’ve already seen before, often several times before. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I really prefer later seasons of MST3K. I used to think that I had preferred Mike to Joel as the host, but I’ve discovered that’s a bit of an artifact of how I saw MST3K.

I began watching MST3K in college. I would watch it in the common room of the dormitory I was in, which was how I was introduced to it (someone had put it on the TV in the common room and it caught my attention). This was towards the end of season 8. Later on I started collecting MST3K DVD box sets and that’s where I ran into Joel episodes. With a few exceptions (most notably Cave Dwellers and Manhunt in Space) I didn’t like them nearly as much as I enjoyed the Mike episodes I had seen back in college. I concluded, naturally enough, that I just preferred Mike to Joel.

Then I got even more boxed sets and watched some of the Mike episodes from seasons five and six.

While it is still true that I do generally prefer Mike to Joel, I’ve come to realize that the biggest factor is that the writers just got better over the years. Having watched some special features, they put more time and effort into the jokes as the years went on, which certainly improved the quality. More than anything else, though, the writers learned to work with the movies, rather than working against them.

In the early years, it was not uncommon for Joel or the bots to talk over important parts of the movie, making the movie hard to follow. This made the entire experience less fun, since you didn’t get a chance to enjoy any of the movie, but worse was that it eliminated the possibility for jokes about plot holes. You can’t make jokes about plot holes if no one knows what the plot is.

Allowing the audience to hear the movie had a second benefit, which was that it encouraged the jokes to be about the movie. Obviously, they weren’t always about the movie, and there were plenty of good jokes which were tangential to the movie or just based on visual coincidences or whatever. Still, a lot of the really enjoyable jokes were about the movie that we were watching, and that was a lot more fun.

I don’t want to make too much of this. Cave Dwellers is one of my favorite episodes and it’s from the third season. I also really enjoyed King Dinosaur, which was from the second season. Still, I find that the pattern holds that later seasons tended to be better, and it’s not really surprising that the MST3K crew got better at what they did when they had more practice.