bloodyrosemccoy | Good Ooze and Bad Ooze

Mozart Day
Thomas Crapper Day
Anniversary - Auschwitz Liberated
Day of Remembrance for Victims of Nazism (Germany)
Holocaust Memorial Day (UK)

Last night, somehow, the theme of the evening for Josh and me was melting brains, and there was good news and bad news.

First the bad news, to get it over with: Terry Pratchett’s brain is melting. No, I’m not kidding: he’s got early-onset Alzheimer’s. This sucks, but he seems to have a pretty good attitude about it, and I hold out hopes that he can hold it off for a while. But still—damn. We should all send him some crossword puzzles or something, athough judging from his books he already exercises his brain pretty well.

Now for the good news: My Cinematic Titanic DVD came! It is called The Oozing Skull, because it has nothing at all to do with an oozing skull.* But more importantly, it had a whole slew of original MST3k dudes making a comeback, and that is really what I was looking for.

Cinematic Titanic’s got some good stuff going for it. Aside from a stellar group of writers/riffers, it takes full advantage of the Theatre Silhouette. The visual jokes come into play often—chandeliers drop for certain scenes, Trace Beaulieu hops in a cherry picker for a little makeup-cleanup job on one of the closeups, and at one point Stephen Hawking rolls through the theater. (I’m willing to bet the actual Stephen Hawking would have totally done that cameo if they’d asked him.)

And if you’re as much a MSTie as Josh and I, when you look at the visual comedy you will think, “That is so Joel.” Because it is. You can’t help comparing the new riffs to the show that started it all, and part of that is the distinction between the two hosts of MST3k.** And this new show is, in fact, so Joel. There’s prop comedy, and a few calls in unison, and a lot of in-house discussion (“I can see I’ve opened up a hornet’s nest here …”) during the riffing. It’s rather surprising how evident it is.

The jokes come quickly and are pretty damn good. The lack of any introduction whatsoever is a little jarring—you get dumped directly into the movie, without any explanation. But the only other real complaint about it is that it’s much too short, and there are not more of them.

The DVDs are also somewhat expensive, and I’m not sure how I’ll be able to afford them.*** You’ll have to decide for yourself if it’s worth the money. But for me, it was a damn good way to spend an evening.

*It did have a brain that sort of fell apart, but it was not in the skull at the time and did not ooze very much. Overall it was a pretty disappointing misnomer.

**We are not here, by the way, to renew the Joel vs. Mike hostilities. I do not care who you think is better. We are going to work on the assumption that they are both awesome.

***It’s a little weird to see a note saying that this s artist-owned and produced and that you should not reproduce it. You want to protest that this is MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, dammit! They wouldn’t have been even known if it weren’t for piracy! And they encouraged it until their lawyers told ’em to knock it off. And after that whole Sandy Frank business, there are some episodes you can only see pirated!

But on the other hand, I like these guys enough to actually pay in good faith.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I've heard that they're coming up with electronics that are supposed to be able to delay the onset of Alzheimer's, but it's probably more preventive than curative, and I'm not sure of just how much it or other chemical treatments can do right now. Terry Pratchett is a writer I've read much too few books of considering how much I liked the ones I did, and I find the irony of someone whose calling it is to set things down on paper so they'll be remembered losing their own memory cruelly humorless. You always fantasize about being able to ask a writer what they meant when they wrote this or that, and you're picturing a writer who can remember what he wrote.

And yeah, Stephen Hawking did his own voice on that episode of the Simpsons and played poker with Newton and Einstein on a holodeck, so...

Stephen Hawking was on Futurama, too! The dude's a sport. I love the fact that he's done voiceovers and voice acting and audio lectures, and he doesn't actually have a larynx.

There's supposed to be some new treatment they're testing that has magical effects on people WITH Alzheimer's, but I don't know how effective it actually is, or how fast it'll get on the market.

It's such an awful disease. I can see why people have such a horror of it. But the thing that makes me happy is that even if he loses his memory, the things will be written down, so that we all will remember it and see how amazing his mind is, even if it does deteriorate.

You know, this way of looking at it hadn't occurred to me, and I kind of regret that it didn't.

Good Ooze and Bad Ooze

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