Mystery Science Theater 3000 Made a DC's Legends of Tomorrow Reference

Russ Burlingame

04/16/2017 10:00 am EDT

Here's a thing that you couldn't have said prior to Friday, for a few reasons: During the newly-released season of the cult classic Mystery Science Theater 3000, Jonah and the Bots made a subtle reference to DC's Legends of Tomorrow.

Legends didn't exist, and most of its characters were not well known to the general public, when Mystery Science Theater last aired, but a reference to the show's famous timeship brought the Legends into the rarefied air of being a joke on MST3K, one of those things (along with latenight monologues, Saturday Night Live sketches and Jeopardy! questions) that tells you that you've made it.

In this case, the joke came when Jonah Ray and the Bots were riffing Starcrash, a 1978 Star Wars knockoff starring Christopher Plummer and a young David Hasselhoff.

During a bit where the trio are joking about a prospective toy line for the movie, they offer a number of mocking names for starships piloted by characters in the film (including "Southern Comfort" and "Thor's dead now," which wasn't a ship name so much as a joke about the fact that they didn't get around to doing the gag until one of the major characters was already gone).

One of the names? "Stella's Permanent waverider."

A permanent wave is the full name for a perm or permanent, a hairstyle particularly popular in the '70s and '80s that uses heat and/or chemicals to create wavy hair in people who aren't naturally predisposed to it.

The Waverider is the name of the time-traveling spacecraft in DC's Legends of Tomorrow, which was in turn named after a DC superhero created by Dan Jurgens and Archie Goodwin in 1991.

(Incidentally, since both Jurgens and Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgson hail from the same state, you could say it took two Minnesotans to make this joke happen.)

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(Photo: Netflix)