Today in 1993, something very odd happened in a TV show popular with nerds. Mystery Science Theater 3000 is considered an absolute classic in all the dork circles I'm in, and one thing it's known for is its format. There's a guy in space, mad scientists have him up there to watch bad movies, and puppet robots help him riff the bad movies.
But who that guy was changed suddenly in the middle of the fifth season. With their episode on "Mitchell" a bad cop movie, the series regular host, Joel Robinson (portrayed by Joel Hodgson) was put into an escape pod to actually leave the show, with implications that the mads were going to send up a new guy to replace him. And they did, with Mike Nelson (portrayed by Mike Nelson) taking over as the host for another five seasons. A number of fans took it poorly at the time but by now, the two hosts are mostly seen as complementary to each other. That, and the series is up to four different hosts in MST3K tours and reboot land, so anyone complaining about anything changing is now going to go for the contemporary hosts, Jonah Heston and Emily Connor (Jonah Ray and Emily Marsh), instead of old Mike.
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