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.

Personality

Joel was naturally very mellow and did not very upset towards his captors, referring to them as "the Mads." He was also a father figure to his robots and would scold them when they were doing something wrong. Due to him having that role, the Bots treated him with slightly more respect than they treated his successor, Mike.

Abilities

Joel, despite being a janitor, has proven himself to be an excellent inventor. In addition to creating the robots onboard the Satellite of Love, he built several inventions to show Dr. Forrester during the Invention Exchange at the beginning of each episode.