Joel Robinson

Joel Robinson was the first human protagonist in Mystery Science Theater 3000. He was originally a janitor at Gizmonic Institute working for Dr. Clayton Forrester and Dr. Laurence Erdhardt (later replaced by TV's Frank). His bosses decided to launch him in aboard the Institute's Satellite of Love so that they could force him to watch bad movies until he went insane.

Joel rebelled against his bosses by building the robots Crow T. Robot, Tom Servo, Cambot, and Gypsy to keep him company. When he is watching the movies, he makes jokes along with Crow and Tom to prevent himself from going insane.

During the episode "Mitchell", Gypsy mistakenly believed that Dr. F and Frank where going to kill Joel so she had him leave the SOL in an escape pod. After saying good-bye to the robots, Joel ended up landing in the Australian outback. He was replaced by Mike Nelson and later temporally returned in the episode "Soultaker", when the SOL suffered a series of malfunctions.