We gather together to watch cheesy movies

Thanksgiving Eve and Thanksgiving Day in the Bully household means a lot of lovely things: pumpkin pie with fresh whipped cream, hot oyster stuffing, smashed potaters, Jones Turkey with Gravy soda, giving thanks for all the wonderful people and animals I'm privileged to know, and then there's the grandest tradition of them all: "Turkey Day": thirty straight hours of Mystery Science Theater 3000. As inspired by the great Joel Robinson during his marathon viewing on Thanksgiving Eve and Day 1992, it's the perfect way to spend the next day and a quarter, watching old bad movies along with Joel or Mike and their two robot pals, Crow and Tom Servo. The Bully version of Turkey Day began at 6 PM this evening with Side Hackers, and we're now into one of my favorite bad spy films, Danger!! Death Ray. Watch along for ten minutes or so with me, won't you?:



Even if you're not spending the next day watching your MST3K tapes and DVDs, you'll be pleased to note that it's a good time to be a MSTie—maybe the first good time since the show actually was cancelled by the Sci Fi Channel. Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett are currently releasing a "Film Crew" DVD about once a month, Nelson and various friends continue to offer their downloadable MP3 "Rifftrax" to sync alongside recent popular movies, giving them the MST-style treatment, and Jim Mallon and Paul Chapin, also of the original show, are producing new online Flash cartoons starring Tom Servo and Crow at the Official MST3K Website. Your mileage may vary with any or all of these, as the kids on the internet say, but it's always nice to see new stuff from some of my favorite creators come out, and if you're gonna complain it's not exactly the same as the old stuff, well, you're entitled, but then, what is? Now shut up and watch your "Manos."

Bully-fans with good memories, or those who haven't emptied their browser caches in a while, may remember my post on "Caption This": a Sci Fi Channel era online game that allowed you to post funny comments to accompany as-the-happen screencaps from the Sci Fi Channel's fine schedule of programming. This was the very definition of ephemeral entertainment: since the Caption This screen would only display the most recent dozen or so picture/riff posts, your fast-witting humor would cycle off the site quickly and be lost forever.

This is, if it were not for the aid of "Caption This" fans who saved and preserved many of the CT riffs to their own websites for posterity. (Search around the web and you'll find a nice variety of these sites; here's a representative page which has saved many of the Battlestar Galactica caps. I'd saved a handle of my own caps (I posted under the username "MST4000") as screenshots and showed 'em off to you in my previous post. What I didn't expect from that post was a lovely email from a fellow capper who discovered a handful of MST4000 posts in her Knight Rider collection and thoughtfully passed them back onto me. So here you go—how I used to spend my afternoons: typing furiously to add so-called funny captions to screenshots of Michael Knight and his pals:




















Ah, halcyon days. "Caption This" is long gone, but I still talk back to the television (never at movies; I'm a very well-behaved little stuffed bull, even during Beowulf). But for the rest of my MST3K Turkey Day I'm just gonna curl up on the sofa, munch on turkey nachos, and watch the pros do it:

"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.