Today we begin a new feature: the weekend discussion thread.

The first topic of discussion: How did you discover/find out about MST3K?

My story can only be told after telling you another story, which is this:
Back in the early ’80s I was just-out-college guy sharing an apartment in Philadelphia with several people, including the woman I would marry a few years later.
One evening four of us, two couples, were hanging out, drinking cheap wine and perhaps enjoying other festive substances (I do not recall for certain, your honor), and somehow or other the little black-and-white portable TV we rarely watched got turned on. Clicking around the channels, what should we encounter but a weird and hilarious movie called “Women of the Prehistoric Planet.” We started watching, and as we sat together on the couch, everybody started throwing out funny comments. It was clearly a you-had-to-be-there situation. We were all –ahem– relaxed and we were all good friends, very familiar with each other’s sense of humor, and we were all just exactly in the mood to be doing this. The result, at least in my memory, was an evening of genuine hilarity, a really golden evening with good friends.
I guess the reason the evening was such fun for me is that I love collaborative comedy. A great standup is fun, but the only thing I enjoy more than watching a group of funny people being funny together is being PART of that group.
Anyway, after that evening, that movie became my “white whale.” I wanted to see it again, to kind of re-live that wonderful evening. I scoured the TV Guide for another airing, to no avail. (This was back in the days before VCRs, when movies were, as James Lileks has observed, like comets with unknown trajectories. They would appear without warning, then go away for a while, then come back…)
Now, flash-forward to December of ’89. I’m living in a different apartment, in a different Philadelphia neighborhood. I had married that lady a few years ago and there was an 18-month-old baby napping in the back room (that baby is now a sophomore in college, who still likes the occasional nap). With the great new job I’d gotten I could afford cable TV (newly available in my neighborhood), and being a comedy buff, one of my favorite channels was “The Comedy Channel.”
One Saturday morning I turned on the TV and what should appear but “Women of the Prehistoric Planet!” I was beside myself. I called my wife in from the other room to show her my find. I reminded her of the golden evening. She sort of remembered, a little. Then she went back to what she was doing.
I settled in to watch and it was pretty much at that point that I began to notice something strange going on at the bottom of the screen. I watched on in gob-smacked amazement. These people were doing the SAME thing WE did with this movie! They were making fun of it! And they were making fun of it really, really well! I was hooked.

That’s my story. What’s yours?