I did wonder if I'm maybe in the same position as fans of 1950s SF movies who would get upset whenever Mystery Science Theater 3000 would take on a movie like This Island Earth, The Black Scorpion, Rocketship XM, or The Magic Sword... a movie that even the MST3K writers would admit in their episode guide wasn't quite as bad as some of the other stuff they tackled. The problem with that, of course, is the definite danger that any derisive take on TPM may start from the position that it has no redeeming features whatsoever, and you wind up with two hours and twenty minutes of insults to George Lucas and Jake Lloyd and death threats against Jar Jar Binks... That, unfortunately, seems to be the starting position of the MSTies I noticed.

Being a Star Wars and a MST3K fan combined may have tied me into odd knots. I admit that I have a slight preference for the later seasons of MST3K specifically because I think the "riffing" got sharper and more cutting... but I've also reached the point where I would prefer to see the show as drawing out the unintended humour in a particular movie, not as some sort of general bulwark against a mass culture dissatisfying in the whole. With that may also come the ambiguous feeling that I simply decided not to be offended by TPM because I saw where that would lead, and that leaves me uncertain if I could actually mount a coherent defence of it.