Revised Purpose: October 2011

The crew of the Satellite of Love (and it's puppeteer).

Since high school, I have been obsessed with MST3K. For Halloween, I decided to finally buckle down and build my own Tom Servo, to go along with my Crow T. Robot costume. I also harangued my husband and a friend into portraying Mike Nelson and Dr. Clayton Forrester, respectively.

Push the button, Frank.

Little did I realize what a massive undertaking this would be, mainly because the parts are hard to come by nowadays. Instead of dropping a cool bill and a half on a Tom Servo kit like this one, I spent weeks stalking eBay in search of obscure "lamps" (flashlights) that apparently only exist in Australia.


The pieces - that's a barrel of monkeys barrel, a CD spinner, plastic bowl, PVC pipe, and a cut up Mr. McFarty or whoever he was. The slinky arms and plastic tubing were really what I was after.

After sourcing the materials, I followed this online tutorial in assembling a working replica. Yes, the head moves, the mouth opens and the arms flail about as if independent from his robot body.

Becoming Servo.

I ended up ordering the head piece and the vacuum-formed shoulders and skirt decorations online, since they proved to be the most difficult to obtain. The shoulders were from the same headlamp that makes up Gypsy's eye, and which, again, can only be found online in hardware stores in Sydney or Melbourne. Luckily, the kind man I found online who sourced out Servo parts had molds and forms for all of the pieces. The black decorations on the skirt were molds from a train-set no longer in production, and cost I think $6 for all 6 (he threw in some extras since I bought a bunch). The head piece came fully assembled - I just needed to match the paint for the body, which I found at a local hobby store.

My messy garage. You can't work without Dr. Pepper. See Tom's head chilling up on the shelf?

Rare pic of me working. I think I was using rubber cement in my closed garage here, hence the mask.


Getting there - sans hands, hoverskirt and decorative pieces.

Aside from the custom pieces and the head setup, the rest was fairly easy to come by. I had a few plastic bowls on hand, which was great cause I totally botched the first one. The plastic hands and slinky arms came from the pants-dropping doll (eBay purchase), the torso a barrel of monkeys (Parker appreciated playing with the monkeys), and the bowl skirt. Some PVC insulation served as the skirt hem, and PVC pipe went through the body to turn the head which was mounted on the CD spinner. The cord for the mouth was threaded through with a washer, allowing control of the mouth. I found a toy car engine randomly in Toys R Us for about $3. Total cost came in around $60, including custom ordered pieces.