We’ve made a lot of jokes about my movie tastes on the podcast over the last year. I will admit to fully enjoying movies like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Howard the Duck. Part of this is how I grew up watching these odd movies, while another part of this for me is the pure joy and imagination the original directors, no matter how horrible these movies turned out, had when originally constructing such travesties. If you have ever seen Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, about the most famous B-movie director, you may also understand this feeling. When Ed Wood made his movies he realized that his funding was not spectacular, and the movie plots were not those that people wanted to see in the theater. A movie about a transvestite with Bella Lugosi’s narration? An escaped convict who dangerously fights a plastic surgeon for a new face? During the 1950s these risqué topics were hardly even thought of as Saturday popcorn movies. Add to that flying saucers that are obviously made from hubcaps with visible cords and special effects that are clearly fake, and you have flop after flop. Despite all this, Wood had passion in his films and refused to let anybody take that away from him.

As a kid I grew up watching movies like these without realizing that they may or may not have been meant to be funny. That is, until I found Mystery Science Theater 3000. While I didn’t understand the concept of making fun of a movie in the theater at the time, I enjoyed the quips the guys made about the films. It wasn’t just the quips however – it was the films themselves. They may be mocked on the show currently, but ages ago when these films were originally made, there was serious intent behind each piece (for some movies, I still wonder where exactly that intent came from). You could make fun of a Japanese space horror movie forever, but obviously at some point that idea was good enough to reach even a VCR before finding its way to the the shelves of MST3K.

When MST3K dropped into the far reaches of space and television cancellation I met 2 new faces of movie mockery – Ghoulardi and The Ghoul. The Ghoul (a tribute and revival of Ghoulardi, Ernie Anderson’s original late-night horror movie host) has recently reappeared on Cleveland television and my father and I had started recording the show and watching the movies together on Saturday afternoons. These movies would sometimes be a bit more recent than the black-and-white classics MST3K would have, but the references and jokes dubbed over them were just as brilliant. With him came Cleveland references I still do not understand to this day but can easily ask my father about and hear stories about Dorothy Fuldheim, Froggy, and Big Chuck and Little John. And with those jokes came a whole new movie watching group. To this day, no matter how many different versions of the original Night of the Living Dead I see, including the recent Rifftrax Live show, The Ghoul’s annual playing of the movie will always be my favorite.

Late-night horror movie hosting is not a recent idea, and it does not seem to have ever stopped, no matter what different local stations may wish. I still catch Elvira on random digital converter box channels, as well as swarms of DVDs of hosts like Ghoulardi at the Hartville flea market.

My joy of these shows was recently returned with the new incarnation of Mystery Science Theater 3000, now with new human hosts Jonah Ray, Felicia Day, and Patton Oswalt. While Mike, Kevin, and Bill are not involved in this project, I still believe this will introduce both the joy of older cheesy movies and movie mockery to a new generation of front-row watchers. For those who have a hard time dealing with such a change in casting, Rifftrax is still around with a constantly growing audio library of movie dubs and live shows in theaters to laugh at. Even though I will be ready to watch the new series as soon as it airs, Rifftrax shows will still be a staple in my viewing habits whenever they appear at local theaters, making me wonder how a movie like Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny was ever conceived.

So the next time I get mocked for my choice in movies, I must remind people that those movies are somebody’s genius vision, no matter what bizzarro universe that genius may have arisen from. And no matter how it may have turned out, it will always have a home in the not too distant future… Next Sunday A.D.