Essential reading for all MST3K fans, if you can find a copy. Sadly, the book only covers the first 7 seasons of the show. What it covers, though, it covers well. Each writer takes turns providing insights and background on each of the first 120 episodes or so. Unfortunately, there are only a few pictures, so that along with the fact that the last 2/3rds of the series is not covered, is the reason for the removal of one star from this review. ( )

Flipping through this episode guide makes me MySTy-eyed with nostalgia. Gotta say, I enjoyed TV in the 90's: Bill Nye, The Tick, Hercules & Xena, a bunch of great PBS shows, and of course Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K). A lot of relaxing and sometimes silly stuff.

Anyway.

Just in case you aren't familiar with the show, MST3K has a poor guy stranded on a space station with his robot friends. Together, they make snarky observations while watching bad old movies and film shorts. And these are very, very…very wretchedly bad movies. "Eegah" and "Killer Shrews" somehow revoltingly come to mind when I say this. Still, the MST3K crew somehow manages to polish these uh, coprolites via merciless riffing. And it's all grist for the crew: awful miscasting, miserable dialogue, poor camera work, dismal film editing, and woeful special effects.

This book was written a while back, so it only covers seasons 1-6 and just touches on the movie. So we miss the Sci-Fi era, but you take what you can get, and here we are (sorry, "Prince of Space"). What you do get is a description of each MST3K show including a synopsis, skit summary including the stinger, and extra observations that generally lament the horror of the movies being riffed on. Sprinkled throughout the pages are tidbits such as a list of particularly disgusting movie moments and poor dialogue quotes. Oh yeah, and there's tributes to Miles O' Keefe (haha) and Beverly Garland. Finally, there's some MST3K history and some silly bios thrown in. The entries are all penned by the show writers and cast.

So what's missing? Primarily, Joel Hodgson. The entries are great, but it would have also been fun have his take on some of these shows included here. It would also be nice to have a table of contents to make it easier to find episodes. But then again, this book targets "MSTies," who'll generally be able to match episodes up with seasons. I don't think any other audience would know what the heck this book is about, anyway.

It's a really enjoyable book for an awesome show, and if by some crazy chance an updated version is published, I'll grab that, too.

Get this book an index or table of contents! It's very annoying to have to flip through every page in order to find a specific episode, thus rendering this guide sort of... un-guide-like. ( )

The only reason I'm docking my rating half a star is because the book has no index. ( )

Being an episode guide to the wonderful TV series. It's better at being funny than being a usable source of information. ( )