Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Keep Circulating The Tapes!


I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I like Saturday mornings. Call me crazy, but it’s more than that; I really love them. I suppose my fondness for them actually goes back to my childhood when a quiet Saturday morning was nothing short of a Shangri-la of six straight hours of cartoons in a darkened room that only ended when sports took over the airwaves. By then it was noon, and I would have no other choice but to stumble out into the sunlight and find something else to do with all the other pale little kids.

One of my very favorite Saturday mornings though, was in 1991 when I was, ostensibly at least, an adult. I was sitting on the couch with a plate of waffles and bacon in one hand and the remote in the other and I happened across what was clearly a pretty bad movie featuring an anonymous would-be starlet and a slack jawed hunk of a leading man who were notable only in that they were wearing animal skins and running around with a elderly wizardy sort of character. “Ah”, I murmured to myself with a mouthful of waffle, “It’s not Bugs Bunny, but it’ll do.”

Then, of course, came the revelation. There was what looked like a silhouette on the bottom of the screen with three small figures. It sounded like they were talking. I washed down the rest of my waffle with some lukewarm Tang and leaned forward. Sure enough the silhouette wasn’t a hangover-induced hallucination as I had first assumed, but was in fact Joel, Tom Servo and Crow busy riffing on a masterpiece of cinematic debris called The Cave Dwellers. Ah, sweet serendipity, thy name is Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

Anyway, Sixteen years, ten seasons, three networks, two hosts and one final cancellation later, the group seems to have split into different camps (I hate it when Daddy and Mommy fight).=But the cool thing for big honking nerds like myself is that each group has a new project in the works. The Joel, Trace, Frank, Mary Jo and Josh camp are producing a live show called Cinematic Titanic, while the Mallon-Chaplin camp has retained the rights to the Best Brains production company and revived Mst3k.com with a lot of pretty sweet content..Did I mention that I’m a huge nerd?, And…, Mike, Kevin and Bill Corbett are producing “Rifftrax.

I guess what this really means is that now I really have no excuse for not rehabilitating my weekend mornings by hooking my boys on sluggy Saturdays spent on the Satellite of Love with Mike, Joel and the bots.


(Oh yeah, and even though I’ve actually managed to collect about fifty or sixty episodes as mpegs if anyone wants to trade, there’s also a really serious trading site here. =“Keep circulating the tapes!”)

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