In the United States, Thanksgiving is a holiday steeped in customs and practices reaching back to the country’s very origins. It is also one of our nation’s finest television celebrations, a time for turkeys hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement, drunken takeout orders, and festive food fights. However, for the past 15 Thanksgivings, the holiday has been without its finest TV tradition: The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Turkey Day marathon, an all-day feast of MST3K absent since the series’ first fall on Syfy. It’s a hole in the holiday a proud American public has vainly attempted to fill, shouting “I’m huge!” at every balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or watching the only thing more punishing than Monster A-Go Go: The ritual slaughtering of the Detroit Lions.
But all that comes to an end on November 28, as Shout! Factory and series creator/original host Joel Hodgson team up to bring Turkey Day to the place it technically lives the other 364 days of the year: The Internet. Beginning at noon Eastern at mst3kturkeyday.com, Hodgson will mark the show’s 25th anniversary by presenting six episodes of vintage movie-riffing, invention-exchanging, Mads-foiling action from the MST3K archives. Hodgson will select the episodes himself, but fans are encouraged—in the first recorded acknowledgment that Twitter is simply a MST3K-inspired platform for talking back to the TV or movie screen—to tweet their picks at the man who was Joel Robinson. No word on what episodes Shout! can legally stream, but take it from someone who’s done extensive research on the topic: Show 814, Riding With Death, is one of the funniest episodes of the show’s run, a fitting entry point for non-MSTies, and thematically appropriate, what with its visit from Crow T. Robot’s superhero alter ego, Turkey Volume Guessing Man. At long last, we can leave the task of estimating the volume of any space in units of turkeys to the robot that was built to do the job—just as the pilgrims intended.