I watched the film Silent Running with my parents a few days ago, and a couple days after that, we were talking about it in the car. My dad remarked that he didn't find it as good as it was when he first watched it, and this comment segued into a general critique of the movie from all three of us as we noted how the dialogue seemed a bit amateurish and the special effects were a bit dated by today's standards.

Then my mom jokingly said to me, "I bet Mystery Science Theater 3000 must have had a lot of fun with this movie, right?"


Then my personal Irony Meter exploded.






(For those of you not in the know, the general setup of MST3K [one lone guy stranded on a satellite with three small robots as his only companions] was inspired by Silent Running.)

In order to start this entry off on a positive note...

The Top 10 Good Things About Being Part of an Incredibly Obscure Fandom (one which is so small that it makes the adventure gaming community look like Johnny Depp's female fanbase (ugh, I shuddered while I was typing that)):

1. Nobody draws your favorite non-Asian characters in the Anime style
2. Nobody steals any fanart of the characters that you've made
3. A small, close-knit community makes it easy to know and remember who everyone is
5. If you should stea--er, borrow elements from some of the stories idolized by the fandom and implement them into your own work, the odds of someone noticing this are very, very small
6. On the fandom's (only) forums, nobody will yell at you for resurrecting a six-month-old thread (because it's usually on the same page as the three-week-old thread)
7. With no huge, exhaustively researched in-joke/reference guides available, the prospect of slowly figuring out each in-joke and reference on your own becomes an adventure in itself -- it's really a great feeling when the meaning of an obscure in-joke suddenly dawns on you...
8. Since it's a small community, if you happen to make a fool out of yourself, it will only be in front of a few people
9. New fansites, no matter how minimal and sparsely decorated, are so rare that you actually hope for them
10. The company that the fanbase is built around is so receptive that if you send them a reasonable idea, there's a good chance that it will be incorporated into a future project*

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And as long as I'm on that subject, I'll just continue typing about it:

Wow...my second listen to Ruby 2 in several months and I've already discovered something else I've never realized before -- "The Mo and Bil Corporation, Makers of Fine Gas" -- it's mentioned several times in the story and I only just realized that the name is a spoof on Mobil. (I've also discovered a tiny plot hole: in the quick recap in Episode 63, Teru says that And/Or told Ruby that Teru was investigating the MRC, but And/Or never told her that. This makes her knowledge of Teru's last known location in Episode 46 all that more puzzling (unless she asked around between eps or something).)

And wow again...relistening to my all-time favorite Ruby, Ruby 4, I heard this line for what must be the eleventh time...

"...The last time I saw Toots Mutant was in Nulla Central -- what we call the B-side of town, and the further you follow the grooves into the center, the scratchier things get."

...I suddenly realized that this was a metaphor based on the design of a vinyl record. What a fitting metaphor for an audio adventure.

And though I knew about the moderately famous Jerry Nelson (who portrayed The Count on "Sesame Street") playing Father Time** in The Insiders' Lounge***, I didn't realize that his sarcastic daughter was played by Jamie Donnelly of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" fame. Wow once more.

( I think I'll post these dialogue fragments from Ruby 4, as long as I'm on a roll (with plot details filling the gaps between them). )

While I was piecing this entry together, a few ZBS CDs arrived -- a CD version of The Mist, which has some wonderful cover art of giant tentacles "ripping through" the title and a huge spider on the back (but oddly, no ZBS logo is in sight...). I also got a CD version of The Incredible Adventures of Jack Flanders, which has title music that you don't want to listen to if you have a heart condition -- it's like a musical interpretation of a supernova.

Incredible Adventures is one of the most whimsical of the JF adventures, and it combines just about everything you'd expect to find in a traditional fantasy adventure -- wizards, demons, pirates and sorcerery -- in the most unexpected ways. The settings are fantastic as well, and the descriptions of them are just as fantastic and whimsical. At one point, the stars seen from the deck of a winged ship is described as being "like a bowl of celestial tapioca pudding spilled across the sky". It's also one of the funniest stories in the series, which is rather odd, considering how many of the characters die during the course of the story (compared to the other adventures).

Favorite quote of the moment from the story: "It be no joke ta walk the plank from a skyship."

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( And now for a touchy, rather personal subject concerning last year... )


*True story. I wrote an email to the company mentioning how I would be interested in hearing about the Spoolagas of Jazuli III, and -- who'd've thought it? -- they get mentioned in Ruby 6! This isn't the first time this has happened either. Another person recalled writing in because they wanted to see Sam from Land of Enchantment appear again, and sure enough, she appears in Return to Inverness.

**This line from him to his daughter always cracks me up: "Well, just remember, mysterious fruit of my loins, time flies." Naturally, it has to be heard to be believed.

***Surprisingly, ZBS is still selling copies of it, but only on cassette...for $1 each! Sounds like they're desperate to get rid of them...*sigh*.

****Speaking of radio, imagine my shock upon realizing that Peggy Webber, who performed in thousands of old time radio programs (including Dragnet, The Whistler, and Escape, even co-starring in an audio production of "Earth Abides", the mother of all humanity-gets-almost-completely-wiped-out-by-disease stories) and founder of the California Artists Radio Theater (a company whose goal is to help revive radio dramas) was the female lead in the movie featured in the first complete MST3K episode I saw, "The Screaming Skull."

On the first night of rain in southern California in several months, there's little better than watching MST3K episodes on YouTube.

I doubt that there's anyone who's heard of this show and doesn't like it, but I like Mystery Science Theater 3000 because the humor in it is so diverse. It ranges from common slapstick to shrewd pop culture references to sneaky injokes that require some degree of cultural literacy to understand them. Not only that, but the creators of the show weren't afraid to be completely silly. They refused to take themselves seriously, and consequently the in-between segments were sometimes just as cheesy as the featured film.

However, though after seven obssessed years I was able to assimilate all there was to know about ZBS, going through thirty years of stories, growing familiar with all the actors involved in the stories, memorizing the plots and dialogue to the point where I could (and still can) act out entire scenes, sometimes even growing daring enough to use lines from the stories in everyday conversation...

...in spite of this, in four years, I've watched barely two out of nine (?) seasons of MST3K. It's no wonder I'm hopeless at keeping up with present-day TV shows -- I have trouble enough keeping up with ones that were in their heyday five years ago. It's been a long time I first saw that strange logo on the back of a fellow student's shirt in seventh or eighth grade -- a spherical asteroid with a silhouetted row of movie seats in front of it occupied by a humanoid creature and two oddly shaped robots -- and wondered what the heck it was. I may have missed the entire nine seasons the first time around, but I will catch up with them...eventually.

I'm sure all the MSTies have seen this scene before and all non-MSTies will be too afraid to watch it, but I just have to post a link to this. I haven't laughed this much at a set of credits since the ones for Ruby 1 and 2 (oops...there I go again). Maybe that's not a fair comparison, but nobody is liable to notice this except the anonymous poster who seems to be familiar with ZBS (if all these anonymous posts were made by the same entity)...

^{Subject line from Ruby 2}