The Desert Mermaid

Dudes, dudes! I have extremely nerdy news!

I have just hit a milestone.

I saw MST3k 316: Gamera vs. Zigra last night. And with that last movie, I have now seen every single syndicated episode of MST3k at least once. Including the Movie, that’s 177 episodes! That’s like a solid week and a half of TV!

And now, on to the bonus round! Unsyndicated KTMA Season 0, I will hunt you down.

This has been your pointless fandom achievement of the day. Thank you.

I have a strong suspicion that the Rifftrax website is going to exceed its bandwidth next Friday.

Always nice when the boys kick it old school and do truly awful movies. (Which is why I was so happy when they did The Matrix and The Happening.) Reserve your copy of Twilight today! If you’re like me, this is the only way they’d ever get you to watch it.


(I should be getting paid for this.)

I blame neintales for this, but I have just found one of those helpful intersects wherein some spectacularly bad piece of media affords one with some serious insight.*

Yes. I am now addicted to Slacktivist’s Left Behind Fridays.

I was only peripherally aware of Left Behind—pretty much “crazy evangelist books about the Rapture” was it. And indeed, at this point apparently the series is passe in its own subculture. But blogger Fred Clark is still finding a use for this really awful series—in between his beautifully thorough sporking of the abysmal writing, I’m getting some actual insight into evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity—something I’ve never quite understood. Clark’s an evangelical Christian himself—a relatively sane one, even, and so it’s a view by someone who sorta gets where they’re coming from, if not where they end up.

Hell, even the abysmal writing itself is instructive. These authors have got a couple of the most spectacular Mary Sues running loose—Clark immediately identifies them as the authors’ stand-ins. It says a lot about them that they expect us to take a couple of characters named “Rayford Steele” and “Buck Williams” seriously.** (Not only that; they're Rayford Steele, Jet Pilot, and Buck Williams, Greatest Investigative Reporter Of All Time.) But the fact that they clearly believe these guys are heroes, and the subsequent behavior of these heroes (constantly ignoring scenes of carnage around them because they have to get to an internet connection to check their e-mail; assuming they know what women would say if they let them talk, bravely running away, etc.), says quite a lot about the authors' values. Similarly, their abysmal plot points—the lack of any social repercussions to the Rapture,*** the bizarre role of the UN in the Antichrist’s quest for World Domination, and the nature of Antichrist himself comes in. It provides a frame for me to get some Biblical knowledge the way sane and insane evangelical Christians see it.

My only problem is, even though it's passe by 15 years, now I want to write some kind of parody of Left Behind in which the author actually knows how ridiculous the Mary Sue is. I know exactly how to start it:

Dirk Hardpec, greatest astronaut ever to go into space, began to suspect that something was wrong on Earth when he received a panicked message from a senior expert at mission control.


*This is one of the reasons I love MST3k shorts—aside from the incessant snarking, I’m fascinated by the didactic propaganda and what it said about the people who were making the films. This harkens back to my pre-MST days, when I was in the habit of analyzing the videos in eighth-grade health class.

**Crunch Buttsteak! Splint Chesthair! Blast Thickneck! Trunk Slamchest! Punch Sideiron!

***I mean, for crying out loud, dude, regardless of your faith, a suddenly-Raptured world could be one hell of a setting for some cool stories. I could give you any number of plots off the top of my head that could follow the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of adults and ALL THE KIDS. Clark gets a little repetitive in pointing out that HOLY SHIT ALL THE KIDS ARE GONE HELLO, but it’s because the books consistently don’t seem to notice.

My sister discovers the shocking twist in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening.

Now before you ask, “Dear god, woman! Why the hell did you watch that?” I say unto you: if you have watched the MST3k version of Manos: The Hands Of Fate, you cannot judge me!* We were doing the same thing here!

Which turned out to be a good thing, since the movie? Is M. Nigh Unwatchable without the extra audio track.**


*And if you have watched the non-MST3k version of Manos, I say unto you: how is the food at Arkham Asylum?

**My favorite part is the reason the main character and his wife are estranged: she had some tiramisu with some guy who is now STALKING her. Apparently, this makes her a hoor.

I have a new favorite TV sketch! I think this one even wins over Touch The Llama—I can’t remember when something made me burst out laughing at random points all through the next day like this new one:

Count This Penny.

Had to have been a moment between takes or something. But we did decide that John-John—a regular on the show—had clearly gotten the gist of the show’s message and had taken it upon himself to write his own sketches within that framework. That’s right—kid’s got a talent there.

(Entertainingly, John-John was featured on the 20th Anniversary Special. He had grown up and joined the Air Force. That was 20 years ago.)

Create Your Own ’50s B-Movie Title!

(I totally should get partial credit for the column idea. But it was ironychan's originally and she improved it immensely, so she gets most of it.)

Speaking of robots, here’s an interactive post involving robots and shirts for you, since this image is from a shirt, though I actually stole it from kjpepper, who is not a shirt:



They are all there... 51 different robots from film, television, books,toys and one even from a famous classic rock album. Can you figure outall 51? Do you even know who Konky was?

No, actually, I don’t. Who was Konky?

I did, however, spot a good 22 of ’em without any prompting. That’s … mumble mumble carry the two … 43%. And that’s just the ones I know fer certain sure. The rest—maybe y’all can help me fill in the blanks! 

Also, I can't find Data. How can we miss him? 

ETA: Here's the ones I found without help: Crow T. "Art" Robot, Tom Servo, the gynoid from Metropolis, Wall-E, Johnny Five, Tripod from WOTW, Dalek, K-9, Artoo-Detoo, See-Threepio, Optimus Prime, Rolling destroyers from Star Wars prequels, that one Lost in Space robot, Matrix floating squidbot (aka Sentinel; couldn't remember the name), Rosie the Jetsons' maid, Marvin the Paranoid Android, Bender, Iron Giant, Rock'em Sock'em Robots, Robocop, Megaman

Ones I recognized once I got help: The Tin Man, Bomberman, Hal 9000, robot from The Day The Earth Stood Still.