"Caption This": more evidence of my mis-spent youth

My favorite TV show of all time? Mystery Science Theater 3000. I am obsessed with the concept of a human and two robots watching really cheesy movies and saving their sanity by riffing non-stop throughout them. And I always wanted to talk back to the movie screen, too. No, don't get outraged...I'm not one of those little stuffed bulls who would ever talk aloud during a movie. (I usually have my mouth too fulla popcorn.) But MST3K has inspired my sense of humor: I think a really well-phrased joke over a silly visual image is jus' about one of the most hilarious things to me. It comes out today in the mouse-over pop-up tags I frequently add to my blog posts: not in this post or in my reviews or "Ten of a Kind," but mouse over the images in most if not all of my other posts and you'll find me channeling Crow T. Robot with silly pop-up commentary and quips about the jpegs.

While MST3K was running on the Sci-Fi Channel during its last three seasons, scifi.com hosted a webpage game entitled "Caption This!" in which live still images from the Sci-Fi Channel's feed would flash online (refreshed every ten seconds) and the online community was invited to "caption" them as if they were watching the movie alongside Joel/Mike, Crow and Tom Servo. I'd totally forgotten about "Caption This" until today when I was surfing about the wild world web, but I was an active participant in the capper groups running at that time under the oh-so-original handle of "MST4000." When bored or restless when I should have been doing work, I'd log onto scifi.com, fire up my funny bone and think of witty captions for still shots from cheesy SF TV shows of the 1970s and 1980s...sort of a more creative form of a chatroom, with regulars and cliques. It was great fun but truly ephemeral entertainment: your captions would be displayed online for all to see until they were forced off the page by the next twelve cappers. I drifted away from the capping community some years ago.

Imagine my surprise (go ahead! imagine it!) when surfin' around today and actually finding an number of extensive webpages that have preserved hundreds of the comments, saved by some thoughtful soul as screengrabs. (Here's the gateway to a representative set of "Caption This" pages.) And among hundred of caps I re-discovered a handful of mine, riffing on Star Trek, The X-Files, and those cheesy afternoon Sci-Fi commercials. The others are long lost to the ethernet...I remember doing many dozens about Knight Rider, which used to air in the early afternoons when I'd need a self-inflicted humor break...but for your amusement (I hope) and edification (eh, maybe not), as well as a cheap way to fill in a blog post, here's a handful of my salavaged caps from the Internet, where nothing every truly dies and the remnants of a goof-off afternoon can be found even years later:









The "Caption This" game no longer exists on scifi.com. Ironically, all that remains on their website is an assurance that even though Mystery Science Theater 3000 ended, "Caption This" would continue. That makes me a wee bit sad...it was good, dumb, creative fun and I liked the mental exercise and the anonymous personalities of my fellow cappers a lot. But as the late great George Harrison once said, "All things must pass." I think he was prob'bly talking about things grander, greater, and more earthly than typing frantic wanna-be funny captions to a two-inch screenshot of James T. Kirk's butt...but ya never know. Maybe capper "IWuvTomServo" was George Harrison. The world will never know.