The frame of the show was that a poor young man—first Joel, and later Mike—was trapped aboard an orbiting space ship where a couple of mad scientists performed an experiment: they would send him cheesy movies to watch and gauge his reaction to them. To keep his sanity, Joel built a handful of robots—Crow T. Robot, Tom Servo, Gypsy and Cambot. Crow and Tom Servo would watch the movies with him and together they would offer comments and wisecracks regarding whatever horrible film they watched. The bots and Joel (or later Mike) appeared along the bottom of the screen as silhouettes, as if they were sitting in a movie theater watching the movie.
The movies were all very, very bad—mostly old science fiction and horror films from the fifties through the eighties. They were so bad that the only thing that made them watchable were the comments being hurled at the screen by Joel (or Mike) and the robots. Some particularly memorable bad movies include Manos, Hands of Fate, Monster A-Go-Go and Sidehackers.
The show lasted about ten years, appearing on Comedy Central and then the Sci-Fi channel. It was finally cancelled and the last episodes appeared in 1999.
A few days ago, one of the founders and original cast members from the show announced a Kickstarter campaign to bring the show back. The goal is to raise two million dollars minimum to film three new episodes; 5.5 million would get twelve episodes made. The hope, of course, is that by demonstrating a large amount of grassroots interest in the show, they might be able to convince a network to fully revive the show again.
In the first 48 hours of the Kickstarter project (set to run for 31 days), nearly 1.5 million dollars has been raised so odds are that at least three new episodes will actually see production. I couldn’t be happier.