'Mystery Science Theater 3000' Season 13 release date "on hold"

Attention Satellite of Love: If you miss watching bad B-movies with sarcastic robots on Netflix, well, we have good news and bad news. Bad news: Netflix’s beloved revival of Mystery Science Theater 3000 is “kind of on hold” at the moment. The good news: It might return when the current live tour, “MST3K: The Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour” is finished.

In an interview with series star Felicia Day (currently promoting her new book Embrace Your Weird and Season 2 of the sci-fi comedy podcast Voyage to the Stars) tells Inverse the Netflix series is on a break while “The Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour” takes place throughout the U.S. until March 2020.

“I know they are kind of on hold,” Day says. “They’re doing a live tour that will take six months. It’s [creator] Joel Hodgson’s last tour and it’s a farewell tour. I’m hoping once they get settled a little bit they can turn their eye back to the show, because I love being on it.”

Created in 1988 for the Minnesota TV station KTMA, Mystery Science Theater 3000 — in which a human “test subject” trapped in space is forced to watch bad B-movies and copes by riffing on them with robot companions — exploded into a cult franchise with tie-in books, live shows, and a 1996 feature film.

Following its cancellation in 1999 by the then-named Sci-Fi Channel (now SYFY), co-creator Joel Hodgson launched a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2015 that raised over $5.7 million to fund a total of 14 new episodes. The series landed on Netflix, where it premiered on April 14, 2017. The streaming giant later renewed the series for a six-episode second season, which premiered on Thanksgiving Day 2018.

In the revival, Day plays Kinga Forrester, an evil scientist who subjects Jonah Heston (comedian Jonah Ray) to bad movies aboard the Satellite of Love. Day was cast after Hodgson met her at the Salt Lake Comic Con in 2015.

“We became friends, and she told me how much she liked the show. I started thinking about it, going, ‘Wow, she’s really perfect for Dr. Forrester’s daughter,’” Hodgson told The Verge in 2016. “That was kind of the last piece that fell in to make it happen.”

“I love working with Patton Oswalt and Jonah Ray and all the bots,” Day says. “As a lifelong fan I want to see it come back, but I think the tour kind of waylaid them just a little bit.”

For those impatient for a new Netflix season, tickets are on sale for “The Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour”. The tour will spend the rest of September in the northeastern U.S. doing shows in Massachusetts, Vermont, Brooklyn and upstate New York, Connecticut, and Maryland. If you want to bid farewell to Hodgson, you better (Thick Mc)run fast.