Years Later

     It's been many years gone since Cinematic Titanic was a thing that was, but luckily the swell of riffing this epoch has brought some heroes back into reach

     And there was even the new guy

Coincidence

I had recently written here about the movie Strait Jacket and I have also been reading a compendium of H.P. Lovecraft stories for a while now, in fact I'm nearly done.  The last one is dedicated to Robert Bloch who wrote Strait Jacket (as well as Psycho, among others).

It seems Robert started his career writing in the fantastic fiction realm and was a big fan of Lovecraft, becoming one of the handful of writers to set their own tales within the mythic realm that H.P. had created and corresponding with his hero about their craft.  The story that I am currently reading is actually a sequel by Lovecraft to one written by Bloch, who then wrote another sequel to follow it.

When I first saw the dedication I had a hard time believing that this could be the same person seeing as how his later work was so much more "real crime" than the more fantastic, but there you go.

Digging for this info I find that he wrote The Deadly Bees which is a movie that MST3K tackled hilariously and he apparently also wrote a sequel to Psycho that had nothing to do with the subsequent movies that were made.  I'll have to try to track that one down......

Nostalgia

Yesterday was the first time in a long while that there was an MST3K Turkey Day Marathon.  Of course this one was online and what with this crazy modern world of ours included thousands all watching at the same time and tweeting live along with it all, expanding the horizons of the fanbase and creating connections across seas and such. Add the fact that the creator himself hosted with new bumpers culminating in him sitting down for dinner with the bots and you've got something very special, a modern outgrowth of a show I've loved for twenty five years.

I figured that I'd take it all back to the beginning for me with this post.  I'd seen Joel on SNL and some good friends of mine had gone to watch him perform standup on Halloween of '87 and they were determined to bring me along for the same in '88. I was attending the U of M for what was to be the first brief foray into my scattered post-secondary education.  The show was at a two drink minimum comedy club that no one remembers, and I was 18 when 18 was no longer the age of imbibing.  Not only was I nervous about being busted, but I ineptly went about trying to look casual by making my first drink non-alcoholic. When I found out that the stiff ones cost the same as the non, my second ended up being a screwdriver.  That seems like the drink of an experienced drinker, right?

I'm pretty sure that both Trace and Josh were also in the lineup that night.  While Joel was on he went into a balloon animal routine and asked for suggestions from the crowd.  I said snake and then someone else yelled snake and Joel brought that person up for a little nun puppet boxing to put him in his place.  That could have been me.  I cannot imagine that Joel would not have called me out if it were, being so obviously not of age.  I consider it a dodged bullet.

Less than a month later I was watching the first episode of MST3K on snowy UHF down in Cannon Falls.  I sat through as many episodes as I could catch which featured Gamera and the Thunderbirds puppets among others.  Then the show moved on to the Comedy Channel, which the shitty cable company in Madison never carried, so I didn't get to see it again until Sci Fi picked it up late in the game.  Since then I've recorded many episodes and bought many tapes and disks.  I also re-upped in the fanclub, though I had joined way back in the day, being member sixty something.  (I actually called in to the club to try to reclaim my original standing but it seems someone else was in my place.  I have only my memory and faded card to prove how I was robbed.)  For a brief time there was even an intern in the credits with my name.  I just assume that it was a me from another dimension doing what it was our destiny to do.

After the show's demise I was still hanging on, visiting the Timmy Bighands site and following the other outgrowths with The Film Crew, RiffTrax, and Cinematic Titanic.  In previous posts I've mentioned seeing a total of six CT shows over time, and that will be it since they are calling it quits.  I always catch the RT shows when they do their thing.  

And now, hopefully, this T-day thing keeps happening and none of it ever ends.

So That's What Those Do

After going back over all of my previous posts and adding labels where I could, my pageviews for that day shot up to over two thousand.  They were all the regular bots, but still, wow.  Now the graph has this one giant peak and a nearly flat line for everything before and after, including my previous peak of over 90.

I've been waiting on a friend to upload some pics that I could steal for a post on last week's Meat Puppets show, but that doesn't seem to be happening so I should just go ahead and say it was awesome.  They played really well and for a really long time and it was one of the best I'd seen from them.  I just wish they'd come through here more often.

Tomorrow is T-day, but I've got this cold that's keeping me from straying too far, so most likely I'll spend most of it at www.mst3kturkeyday.com

About Those Things

So it seems Dario Argento has a new movie out.  It currently has an 8% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and The A.V. Club gave it a D.  Is it good bad or bad bad?  Hard to say.  It's in 3D but the reviews make it sound like it's not used well.  (If you're doing a bad 3D movie, you should really go the Count Floyd route with it, in my opinion.)  I really like some of his earlier stuff but consensus seems to be that he hasn't really made anything worth seeing in a while, and his penchant for shooting nude scenes of his daughter (!) in most of them is weird and confounding.

On the coincidence front, I had a dream this morning, one of many while drifting in and out of sleep contemplating an early rise for Wups practice.  Bill Corbett of MST3K fame gave me a piggyback ride across a footbridge in Madison while we were chased by a couple of kangaroos. Today I see one of his Tweets is:  "Too much coffee, need to box a kangaroo.  Internet:  deliver me a kangaroo, gloves laced, preferably wearing hilarious boxing trunks!"  This is the second time recently I'd wished I was on Twitter so I could respond, but what with the blogging and the Vimeo and all, I really don't need to add another venue where I do next to nothing.

The earlier instance of my Tweetlessness was when Joel Hodgson, creator of MST3K, tweeted a line from Adventure Time.  No one has since responded, so I will bring it up when I see him at the Cinematic Titanic shows later this month.  It's always fun when worlds you love collide!