The sloppy joe experiment

A story of how my favorite TV show prompted a culinary addition

One of my favorite, perhaps my all-time favorite, episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 is based on the tedious, near-plotless Air Force drama “The Starfighters.” The movie stars future Congressman Bob Dornan as he learns to fly a specific model of fighter jet, the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, while romancing a corn-fed Iowa girl and resisting his father’s pleas that he seek transfer into a bomber unit. The movie is bad in ways that enable the riffers (Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy as Tom Servo, Trace Beaulieu as Crow) to be very, very funny in making fun of it.

One of the movie’s host segments involves Mike trying to convince the mad scientists (Trace Beaulieu as Dr. Clayton Forrester, Frank Conniff as TV’s Frank) to try his new barbecue sauce, which he assures them is “BOLD!”

The sauce turns out to be … not that bold. A lot of hot sauce enthusiasts go through this, with supermarket or fast food items promoted as “bold” or “spicy” or “hot” which seem tame to our palates.

In a reference to this joke, someone in an MST3K fan group on Facebook posted a photo of a can of Manwich Bold. Manwich, for the uninitiated, is the most…