Signs Taken for Wonders

MST3K is the show where they insult American colonialism and take the piss out of Donald Trump repeatedly in the first season in 1989 and then, do racist Asian accents for joke because they do accents for EVERY character so it takes seasons for them to realize that maybe that's not okay. Joel spends several seasons being kind of a hard-core feminist and then when Mike shows up, they do too many transphobic jokes even though Mike will dress in drag in the same episode.

Tom and Crow almost get married and Dr Forrester officiates while wearing rainbows and Mike ONLY disapproves because they jump into it too quickly but then they'll fetishize two women characters who do something queer coded. You have GPC, whose name in the first 12 seasons is literally a slur and is kind of a goofy female character for the sake of having "the girl" and then they slowly add Mary Jo Pehl to the cast of supporters and then have her play Pearl fcking Forrester - a fat, intelligent, devious, commanding badass evil scientist who I kind of want to be when I grow up. They use "Inuit" in a great joke and then in the second joke in the SAME EPISODE which is about how Indigenous culture is valuable, they use the e-slur. How?!

And yet, there's an episode with a movie that merges what is clearly actual stock footage of somewhere in Africa and white people in blackface dancing around and the writers and crew not only point out which is which, but carefully determine which is which so that they're careful not to make fun of the actual footage - just the racist caricatures. Like..??? In 1997???

MST3K is like this beautiful smorgasbord of political takes of the time, of flawed advocacy and allyship, a snapshot of a small group of people who - despite their shortcomings in some ideas - would be shunned as "woke" today by the jokes and criticisms they were making back in 89. And that's not including the changes still being made with Jonah and Emily - and who knows what else when Mike comes back.