In a cozy suburb of Minneapolis, a guy in a blue jumpsuit is once again stuck aboard a space station with his robot pals, watching the worst movies ever made.

To paraphrase the show's catchy theme song, if you're wondering how that works, it's just a TV show, so you should really just relax.

In May, Variety went behind the scenes of  Mystery Science Theater 3000: The RiffTrax Experiments,  the latest revival of the beloved cult comedy series  Mystery Science Theater 3000,  to get an up close and personal look at how poking fun at bad movies gets done at the highest level.

The series - which features an amiable host and his sharp-tongued sidekicks Tom Servo and Crow riffing on obscure movies like  Manos: The Hands of Fate  and  Space Mutiny  - originally aired from 1988 to 1999, mostly on Comedy Central and the Sci-Fi Channel.

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Joel Hodgson created and starred as that guy forced to screen cheesy flicks; he left mid-run and was replaced by Michael J. Nelson. After the show wrapped, Nelson and fellow  MST3K  writer-stars Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett took the basic idea and launched their own version, RiffTrax, which started as a website and branched out into live performances and its own FAST channel.

Then, in 2017, Hodgson revived  MST3K  at Netflix and launched a related streaming platform called The Gizmoplex, but the RiffTrax team wasn't involved.

That all changed this year. In January, Hodgson sold his ownership in the series to Radial Entertainment and once again departed. Radial then recruited the RiffTrax team to return for four new episodes.  Mystery Science Theater 3000: The RiffTrax Experiments  was born.

The transition of  MST3K  to Radial allowed the company to approach the RiffTrax team (who hadn't been formally involved in any new interations of the show since 1999) about joining forces, which they were eager to do. Fans were in: They raised $2.7 million in a Kickstarter campaign to fund the revival, and  The RiffTrax Experiments  were off and running.

As Variety visits the  MST3K: RiffTrax  set, the cast and crew are nearing the end of a rapid-fire
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