How Little Does It Take to Expose an MST3k Nerd?

Just ask him "do you have any first season episodes on VHS?" and let him go. From an actual correspondence with regular reader the Cranpire earlier today:

I do have a lot of early MST3k episodes on video, but the box marked "VHS" is literally the cornerstone on which my furniture is built on in the storage facility. It's actually the hardest box to get to, as it's covered by shelves, plastic bins, other boxes, and dvd racks.

If the "first season" is the one I'm guessing you looked at on IMDB, then that's the KTMA Public Access episodes they did before going to the Comedy Channel. If you're lucky, you can find one or two on YouTube, but there's almost no chance they're coming out because a) half of them are Gamera films, or b) they're licensed by Sandy Frank, who hates Joel Hodgson for making fun of his movies.

Season two, which includes Robot Monster, The Crawling Hand, The Crawling Eye, Mad Monster, and The Corpse Vanishes, are kinda / sorta on various MST3k collections. I have 18 of the 19 boxed sets (waiting on that new one for Christmas) and all of the individual releases, but as it's the only thing I've ever collected in its entirety (to date), I'm reticent to loan them out (they're often VERY expensive to replace and unless I absolutely have to I'll never sell them).

To your Crow question, it's explained in the MST3k Amazing Colossal Episode Guide that he's actually facing forward, but that the basket creates an optical illusion that makes it look like he could be facing forward. If I had the book here, I'd happily scan the picture in (because try as I might, I can't find it online), but here's a link to back me up:

http://www.mst3kinfo.com/mstfaq/bots.html

You can check YouTube; I've seen KTMA clips on there (and the occasional episode), but when a compilation of "Host Segments" from KTMA was on the Twentieth Anniversary boxed set, that pretty much spelled out that they'd never hit DVD. As you can guess from the season two stuff, the show is very much in its formative stages, and they don't really riff much. The show didn't really hit its stride until seasons three, four, and five.

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So yeah, you can see why I had to share that; clearly, I know way too much about a long-canceled series off of the top of my head than any person ought to. But now I have some small satisfaction in knowing that you too have that knowledge.

Your reward? part two of "Last of the Wild Horses," where a mirror-universe puts Dr. Forrester and TV's Frank in the experiment: