From the Otakon booklet:
"Nature abhors a vacuum, and nothing is more abhorrent than the evil Doctor Forrest Clay. Together with his bumbling assistant Anime's Frank, Dr. F. took over the room (and it's immense screen) and used it as the lab for his awful experiments on Joel Saotome, a friendly lunk and an anime fan."
MAT3k is a knock-off of Mystery Science Theater 3000 that is preformed live at the Otakon convention. The idea was created by Jon Kilgannon and is performed by:
- Mark Sacks
- Joel Saotome
- Jon Kilgannon
- Tom1 (puppet)
- Joe F
- Crow
- Matt Pyson
- Dr. Forrest Clay
In recent years they have begun prerecording their riffs which are heavily scripted before-hand. Basically the writers watch the movie over and over again and quickly write down any witty comments they come up with. Then Jon edits all these into a single script.
It is one of the most popular events at the Otakon convention (so show up early!). Because of the low quality of the anime the volume tends to be unstable. It tends to have very many obscure jokes and also more redundancy than MST3k.
1: Frisina reminds me that the name "Tom Servo" is copywritten or something so they just call him "Tom".
Sources:
- http://www.atanime.com/v1/i2/13_mat3k1.html
- http://members.tripod.com/~TechnoServo/otakon.html
(This has been a Node What You Don't production.)