I first became aware of MST back in high school in the early 90's -- a guy I knew frequently explained the concept to me, but high school, after all, is a distracting time. Not that I didn't enjoy awful movies back then - "3 on a Meathook" and "Young Einstein" come to mind, but I wasn't quite ready to watch a show that made fun of them.
It wasn't until college that John, my roomate (where are you John!) fully indoctrinated me with true quality television. Primarily Star Trek (the original series, of course - is there any other?) and MST3K - including such classics as "Manos: The Hands of Fate", "Warrior of the Lost World" and "The Brute Man".
This period also coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web. Since those early days of the web, and great MST content like Deus Ex Machina, the Torgo Screensaver and the r.a.t.m.m newsgroup, we've seen many great MST3K sites rise and fall - good content often disappearing without a trace one day. I always harbored a desire to Keep Circulating the Tapes (well, Links) so this wouldn't happen again.
A few years ago, a friend pointed me to a thread on Ars Technica that had just started up. Apparently someone was interested in digitizing MST episodes for posterity! I had just bought an ATI video card for exactly this purpose, so I joined in the thread, which ballooned into an online community -- and would eventually become the MST3K Digital Archive Project (DAP), an entertaining group of digitally-enclined MST fans dedicated to encoding the entire series. After a while I bought a computer just to encode MST episodes for the DAP (back then, with all the video filters needed to handle the poor VHS-quality sources, it could take over 40 hours to encode a single episode). I'm proud of how the DAP turned out - and hope all the hard work has led to solidifying MST's place on the Internet.
If you want to send me a message, use drParmesanted@booyaka.com (remove the cheese from the preceding link) and include the word MST3K somewhere in the subject line. I'm hoping to come up with a better anti-spam solution in the future - if your email is not responded to, it may have been zapped as bulk mail.
-Al
