"Mystery Science Theater 3000: First Spaceship on Venus," Shout!, 2008

Nor have I read a satisfactory explanation of "Mystery Science Theater 3000," which is both a sophomoric trifle, an official codification of amateur real-life couch potato heckling and a bottomlessly fascinating avant-garde process by which forgotten films are repurposed and reinvented, given a new layer of text and mocked in their helpless void. Andy Warhol might've appreciated the series' blithe yet ambiguous notion of authorship -- you try to figure who "made" any given episode, or what its primary subject is, and you enter a hall of goofy mirrors. (The separate sets of credits don't help.) For another thing, few acts of moviemaking empathize so passionately with their audience as the "MST3K" silhouetted front row of jesters.

The new four feature anniversary box set -- complete with plastic robot figure and fake lobby cards -- tosses a re-edit of a West German sci-fi epic from 1960, "The Silent Star," into the mix of psychotronic cheese and crackers. But what movie is on the operating table is beside the point — what we're presented with is a new film every time, an auto-critique made up of borrowed footage, bad werewolf costumes and chintzy get-rich-quick indie movie daydreams. Caught in its own time warp itself, the over-elaborate framing story about space exile, enforced movie-watching, hand-puppet robots, and so on, still smells rather endearingly like post-John Waters, post-new wave '80s pop-ness, which together with the old movies' grey netherworlds and earnest kitsch conjures one of the most alluring escapist experiences of the last few decades. It's not art, but it's hardly just a cheap St. Louis TV show, either.

[Additional photo: "Flight of the Red Balloon," IFC Films, 2007]

"Flight of the Red Balloon" (Genius Products) and "Mystery Science Theater 3000: 20th Anniversary Edition" (Shout! Factory) are now available on DVD.

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