Joel Hodgson quotes:

South Park started as a little video Christmas card.

The name Crow was inspired by a number of things. I thought it would be cool to have a robot with sort of a Native American feel to it.

Gypsy was the name my brother gave a pet turtle he had. I always thought it was so peculiar.

Mystery Science Theater is really a postmodern show, it's really derived of many influences.

Beanie and Cecil was the first cartoon I remember watching and I think there are analogies.

Well, really the way worked was that I had probably built fifty robots before Mystery Science Theater, and I had sold them in a store in Minneapolis in a store called Props, which was kind of a high end gift shop.

Then a friend of Jim's suggested we make a theme song to explain the story, and this is where the Mads came from. Josh and I wrote it into the theme song.

But if you think you aren't creative that's cool, too. I think being around people who aren't creative is kind of refreshing and nice.

When we did the pilot, I sort of pictured this guy pirating a signal and then this story unfolding of him building this satellite and these robots and watching these bad movies.

A lot of times when I sit down with the other comics and try to talk theory, they say I'm being too serious.

Sometimes I go into my own little world. It's okay, they know me there.

Well, we had more money and more time the first season than we did at TV 23.

The first twenty shows at TV 23 were really a workshop.

So the actual riffing came out of us just sitting there and doing it the way I think some people think we really did it, which is all spontaneously, and it really was.

The internet is a total inversion of television. It's the opposite.

But after that, I was extremely happy with the story and the look of the show at the beginning of season two - everything was working together. I felt like it was finished conceptually.

Eventually I got asked to be in a Michael J. Fox sitcom called High School U.S.A. I didn't think it was funny and said no. They doubled the money, and that kind of offended me. I realized, oh, that's right, my opinion means nothing in Hollywood. I'd seen other people compromise, and I felt that once you gave up on what you wanted to do, you couldn't go back. It was selling out. So I decided to go back to Minneapolis.

If you notice any of the press from when I was with the show, I would always deny it being the year 3000.

A lot of the shows that really become hit shows are often demonstrated, like Mystery Science Theater.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what I do and how it fits into the scheme of things. I won't do something just because it's funny.