“As far as a unique and embarrassing indulgence, I would say that was setting up a video camera at 17 to “wing it” all the way through Howling V. It wasn’t too impressive, and sure not worth recording. Me and friends still do this occasionally, still improvising, and hopefully we’re a little bit better than we used to be.
If I’m lucky, someone has a more embarrassing admission than mine.”
Meanwhile (and I’ve been sitting on this one for about three years, sorry Blake), alert reader Blake reveals:
Two Halloweens ago, my friends and I drove all the way down to Fouke to try to find set locations from And the Legend Continues…, including the eponymous Boggy Creek. Unfortunately, none of the locals were enthusiastic about our being there for that reason, and the fact that it was Tony Alamo’s headquarters (you might remember him from the news a few years ago as one of a few pastor/cult leaders who married underage girls) cast a weird vibe on the whole trip. Creepy indeed, but creatureless AND creekless.
Which brings to mind a story. It was the first day of the 1994 convention. People were mostly lined up at the registration tables. A buddy of mine had spent the previous evening handing out copies of a neat little homemade episode guide he’d made. It seems that somebody, in the intervening time, had run to a nearby Kinkos and made several hundred copies, which he was now selling. When my outraged friend told me what had happened, the blood rose in my head and, not really thinking, I called out the roomful of people in the registration lines and started to explain the outrage of this freely given booklet being sold, and they they shouldn’t buy from the person selling them. Then somebody in line interrupted me and asked “So where can we get one?” All the blood drained from my head and I realized my friend had given all his copies out already. I slunk away, embarrassed as hell.
Anybody else have an embarrassing fandom-related story?
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I’m from Texas and in 2000-2001 I was in graduate school in London. This was before smart phones and all that jazz and I didn’t have a laptop or anything so my only entertainment (besides doing fun things around the city) was the small TV in the common kitchen in my dorm. There was no cable or DVD player and it wasn’t long before I was jonesing for MST. My mom, who is fantastic, agreed to put on my copy of Mitchell and just leave the phone by the TV so I could listen to it. This was an expensive call but she knew how homesick I was getting so she did it. Here comes the embarrassing part. I didn’t have a phone so I had to use the pay phone in the stairwell. So for an hour and a half I sat on the stairs listening to Mitchell and anytime somebody would come by I pretended to be having a conversation. It was worth it!
I tried to hook a few friends in college, and it didn’t go over well at all. They invited me over for a movie night, and I brought Outlaw and Zombie Nightmare, two of my favorite episodes. One friend said “Oh, let’s put on the zombie one! I love zombie movies!” Thinking, I guess, that it was going to be a George Romero-style gorefest and not a confusing Canadian direct-to-video stinkburger with all the zombie killings cut out for time. And featuring a guy and two robots cracking wise throughout the whole thing.
Within the first five minutes, everybody in the room except me lost interest. One girl pulled out her Nintendo DS and started playing Guitar Hero instead of watching the show, so the music from that drowned out half the riffs. And when Adam West kicked that guy in the face and Crow riffed “Oh, that was easy for him, he just pretended it was Tim Burton,” one girl got deeply offended – she was one of those Hot Topic-prowling die-hard Nightmare Before Christmas fans who thinks Tim Burton is like God or something. By the third host segment, everybody was checked out, with the zombie fan girl even saying “This show isn’t very good, I don’t get any of the things they say.”
Since then, I’ve vowed never to watch the show in a large group again, unless I know that everyone in the room knows what MST3K is.
Not sure if this qualifies, but it sure seems less than mature:
I have a fantasy of constructing a large version of a Nanite. I make it really big, the main part of the body the size of a coffee table. It’s in perfect scaled up proportion to the original movie props and comes out looking great, like a piece of Andy Warhol lawn art if Andy Warhol had made lawn art that looked like giant Nanites.
I take it to an MST3K convention and they gladly welcome it to be displayed in a greeting area so everyone can see it. It’s even velvet-roped off with signs, “Please Do No Touch” and “Not For Sale”.
It has its own track lighting spotlight aimed at it.
Everyone oooohs and ahhhhs over it, appreciating the irony of a “giant Nanite.” There’s the smell of popcorn in the air.
They really “get it.”
Occasionally, someone discovers I am the fan who built it and they whisper, “That’s the guy that built the giant Nanite! That’s him! Man, he’s a true fan.”
Before I leave, we turn it up side down and all MST3K alumni present autograph it with black permanent markers.
Normally, I don’t get that excited over autographs, but “John Hancocks” on a supine Nanite are an exception.
Frank even offers to draw Nanite genitalia on it, but then confesses, “I don’t even know what that would look like.”
I’ve thought of this scenario more than a few times.
I guess I was just nervous to be finally meeting them when I went to a Cinematic Titanic live show in November of 2011 and I didn’t quite think things through. I brought along my MST3K movie poster for them to sign. Joel did not seem to thrilled though.
Fortunately, I haven’t managed anything TOO humiliating that’s MST3K-related as yet. This is a relief since I checked out of comics fandom in a large part because I couldn’t take the preposterous arguments about nothing any sane human being should even care about anymore.
Here’s a lighter comics-related story, though: Some years ago at a comics shop, someone mentioned Stan Lee. In one of my frequent ill-fated attempts to be funny I commented I liked Stan Lee, his wife Sara Lee and his children Peggy, Kathie, and Bruce.
Some stoner type looked over at me in awe: “You KNOW them?”
People wonder why I have a coupon for Torgo’s Pizza in my cubicle. It is sometimes awkward and hard to explain. Sometimes, people think Torgo’s is real, and, want to use the coupon ’cause they are hungry. I don’t tell them about the complimentary crazy bread.
trickymutha, there actually is a Torgo’s Pizza in the game The Sims 3. Love it.
As for the topic, I got almost nuthin’. While not embarrassing, I get frustrated trying to get my husband interested in MST3K. He likes Westerns, so one evening I suggested he might enjoy “Last of the Wild Horses.” He didn’t.
#2 that is soul-crushingly depressing, I’ve had a few somewhat comparable experiences…that’s what happens when you try and share the euphoric treasure that is mst3k with common garden-variety dang smoochers. But it makes up for it when you share it with the right person.
#2: I had a similar experience, when I tried to introduce some people to MST3K during a party. I knew that there would be a lull in the entertainment at some point about halfway through the evening, and I knew that the people there liked science fiction, so I brought a copy of “Space Mutiny” with me on the sly. Even though the movie was from “their genre”, it pretty much went over like a lead balloon: one or two people recognized the footage from the original “Battlestar Galactica”, so that caught their eyes for about five seconds, but it went totally over their heads otherwise. They too were more interested in Guitar Hero, so I eventually turned it off and let them have the TV. That’s the last time I tried to introduce MST3K to someone who hadn’t seen it before. I think it’s one of those shows that people have to find on their own to really get to like, and unfortunately, younger folks don’t seem to have the attention span to let themselves discover it.
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Sadly, the only embarrassing thing I can admit to is that I know where the fish lives…
I don’t know if this exactly qualifies as “embarrassing”, but I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that “The ‘Bots Are Back!”, the short-lived MST3K Flash cartoon series from a few years ago, “inspired” me to come as close as I’ve ever come to writing fan fiction.
I first saw those cartoons some time after they had been discontinued, and I was so disappointed at what I saw as a lost opportunity to bring back MST3K in a novel way. The execution of those cartoons was very poor, in my opinion, but the basic idea seemed like it might have worked with a better approach. I began to wonder how I might have done it differently, and before long I was writing down ideas.
What I came up with was series of animated MST3K mini-episodes, each written around a short film from the Prelinger archives. These would have taken place during the third or fourth season of the original show, and like the flash cartoons, there were to be no human characters. To achieve that, I had the new episodes take place at night: since robots don’t require rest, they could do anything they wanted on the SoL while Joel and the Mads were asleep. The idea was that Servo and Crow would be secretly riffing these shorts in the theater, on their own, all while staying one step ahead of Gypsy as she tried to find out what they were up to.
I had picked out two or three of the shorts, and I had written some thirty-second bits for the beginning and end of each one, but that’s about as far as I took it. I don’t think it was ever good enough to show anybody, but I still think it was better than what we saw in those Flash cartoons. :-(
Waaaay back in the 90s, I was toying with the idea of making an Mst3k chat room. On AOL. I used to look at their movie trivia chat rooms when I was punch-drunk with insomnia. (I know, but I was young.) So, I boldly started one late one night. I named it…Satellite of Love.
I got two responders. One person wrote, “I thought this was about that Lou Reed song.” He/she signed off shortly thereafter.
The second one was cool, though. She and I quoted riffs from “Squirm” to each other. For a few minutes. She wasn’t really all that familiar with other episodes. But it was better than nothing.
I soon realized that if it actually were possible to start such a chat room, it would be like that old Chris Farley sketch: “‘Member when that happened on the show? Yeah. That was awesome.” So I abandoned the idea.
Well, I don’t know if this is quite what I’d call embarrassing, but I’ve had a few “showing it to someone who didn’t get it” experiences, the stinkiest of which was with my dad. While visiting his house with my brother, we all gathered in front of the TV with our pizza and wings to decide what to watch. Ultimately, I suggested Werewolf, and we put it in. About 25 minutes in, dad (who appeared to be mildly amused at best) got up to “use the restroom”. “You don’t have to pause it for me”, he said. I watched for ten more minutes before my brother got up to investigate dad’s disappearance. I paused it around the scene where Yuri drugs the security guard, and waited… and waited… and waited… and, for a change of pace, I waited a bit more. Finally, after probably 15 minutes of silence, I ventured upstairs to see what was going on, and… whaddya know, there’s dad outside on the porch GRILLING! He ditched Werewolf to GRILL! What was wrong with the chicken wings?! But wait, there’s more! When he came back in, food all ready to go, his first question was, “well guys, what should we watch?” WHAT?!?! I didn’t even bring up the fact that we had already started and MST3K episode. He completely didn’t even acknowledge that we had been watching anything! I let it go, and we started something else. The funny thing is, a year or so later, I showed my dad Danger!! Death Ray, and he nearly burst a few organs laughing. I’m still stumped about the Werewolf incident.
What WAS a little embarrassing was an incident that happened to my mom at a Cinematic Titanic show last year. The show was either on or close to February 20, my mom’s and Joel’s birthday. In fact, their birthdays are the same day and year, so they are exactly the same age! My mom has always loved Joel, and was darn near in tears when she met him in the autograph line. She asked him for a hug, but Joel respectfully said no. It made sense, as all the people behind us would probably have seen that and wanted hugs from the cast, but mom took it kind of personal and was pretty embarrassed. My brother and I spent the rest of the night trying to convince her, firstly, that Joel didn’t not hug her because she was fat, and secondly, that she wasn’t fat (which she isn’t). Every once in a while, when I watch a Joel episode, mom walks in and says “he wouldn’t hug me!” Poor mom. ?
Oh, and Luther Heggs… that’s one epic fantasy you’ve got there! I’d love to see a giant Nanite! I actually just completed my 1:1 Nanite replica, fully operational and constructed with almost all the original parts. I REALLY like how he turned out, and your post got me thinking that a giant version could easily (well, somewhat easily) be put together with some plywood and a few other bits and pieces. I say go for it! :-D
“fan fiction”
Fun within a clique. Kind of embarrassing if you share it with others. (And I thought web comics were going to take off.)
I was also for years a gimmick poster who couldn’t shut up about a certain MST3k actress.
@#16: I didn’t really do it as a serious attempt at “fan fiction”; it’s just that “fixing” the Flash cartoons was eating at me, and writing down my ideas was a way to get them out of my system.
One other embarrassing moment occurs to me, when I unsuccessfully tried to recycle an MST3K joke before an audience. I was speaking to some college freshmen about how to make the most of their school years, and one of the points I wanted to make is that not everyone is necessarily cut out for college. I was telling them how there are lots of bright and capable people who are miserably dragging themselves through school, spending a lot of time and money in the process, because they mistakenly believe that to be successful, “everyone has to go to college.”
I wanted to keep things light, so I decided to inject a bit of humor at this point. I said that those people may well be a lot happier (and, in the long run, more financially secure) if they instead use those years to go to work and learn a good trade … “like refrigeration, bookkeeping, gun repair!” (MST3K fans may recognize this as a reference make by Joel in “The Magic Sword” to the old Sally Struthers infomercials of the early 90s). The students stared back at me stone-faced, and a few dutifully wrote it down in their notes as a serious bit of career advice, so I very quickly switched gears and continued to my next point.
I told this story to some teachers afterward, delivering the joke in the same way I had for the students, and they got it right away and thought it was hysterical. It finally occurred to me that most of those kids probably hadn’t been born the last time those infomercials aired, so of course they wouldn’t have gotten the reference.
I took it as a sign that our beloved MST3K is starting to show its age … not to mention those of us who grew up with it! :-(
My successful converts are achieved this way:
I skillfully subject them to a Ballyhoo production “the making of” or an interview from one of the sets. (have had good luck with the interview with director David Worth, Warrior of the Lost World. He’s so straightforward and he explains how funny MST3K is. He hypnotizes them with his voice and the spontaneous removal of his sunglasses. And he looks like and startling enough, sounds like Rambo’s Colonel Trautman.)
On a different day, I have them watch just a short. Not like Radar Men From The Moon… too hardcore. But something like “X Marks The Spot.”
If they like that, then a couple of weeks later, I pop MST3K The Movie in the player.
While the Movie could have been better, it certainly is not bad and seems more palatable to unbelievers. I think the production values and opening SOL footage lull them into a sense of familiarity. (When the time comes, do not bother explaining the Manos hands. It’s not worth it.)
This formula always works better than my choosing a favorite episode to show right out of the gate. That just seems to drive them away.
But starting with something as basic as showing them the Ballyhoo screaming/skeleton logo creates curiosity and can get your foot in the door.
I used to try loaning out discs. That is a big mistake. Do not do it.
Repeat. Do not loan out your MST3K DVDs.
@#18- Years ago, when I hurt my knee playing basketball, I went for physical therapy. I got into a conversation with one of the therapists who loved MST- but had only seen the ones on Sci-Fi. I lent her my VHS of EEGAH!- she came in the next time, told me she didn’t like Joel- and said she’d bring the tape back to me. She quit the next week- and, I never got my tape back. So repeat- Do not loan your MST3K VHS tapes- especially to physical therapists.
A comedian from Minnesota visited my locale and me and some friends took him out for dinner after the show. I HAD to ask him if he had worked with any MST3K-related persons to which he responded that he had briefly worked with Joel (and had VERY nice things to say about him). Someone in our group asked “Isn’t that the Manos guy?” and this guy and I spent the next fifteen minutes quoting riffs from the ENTIRE Mst3k library to each other and correcting anyone who said anything incorrect about MST3K. It was a GREAT moment for us, but extremely confusing for everyone else.
I shared this story about 2 years ago, back when we were on the Episode Guide entry for #509 The Girl in Lovers’ Lane. I’ve also apparently shared it before that, so here it is again for a third time:
Back in college, around 2001, I had a speech class and we were doing persuasive speeches this one week. I gave mine on why MST3k was the best show ever. Other than my one friend in the class, none of my peers had heard of the show. I gave a rundown on the show’s premise, merits, and history, which turned into me geeking out in front of a classroom of people, jabbering on about all the characters and the actors and who left the show when and etc, etc. It got bad; my friend actually gave me the “wrap it up” sign.
Anyway, at the end of the speech, I showed a clip from the show. I chose the opening theater segment of The Girl in Lovers’ Lane, leading up to the credit sequence. It went over well..…for me and my friend (and one other guy) who were the only ones laughing. At the end, my teacher gave me a “uhhhh, huh…thank you.” and the bell rang. Class dismissed. I think I got a B- on the speech, maybe….not sure.
–
Honestly, what I find embarrassing about this is not the fact that I geeked out in front of a classroom of my clueless midwestern peers, but that in retrospect I gave a TERRIBLE speech! It really was bad. Back then, in my early twenties, I don’t think I could articulate how good a show like MST3k really was or really express why it meant so much to me. I just chose MST as my topic because I thought it would be “easy.” I was wrong. I am quite sure that day in class, no one was persuaded by my speech as to why “it’s the best show ever.”
It’s not really all that embarrassing, but I was over at my dad’s house one night and we were watching World’s Dumbest on truTV. It’s usually something like World’s Dumbest Criminals or World’s Dumbest Drivers, but this time it was World’s Dumbest Inventions (essentially informertial clips). One of the clips was for a real-life rolling treadmill, just like Frank’s invention exchange on Lost Continent. I tried to explain to him what MST3K was and what an invention exchange was, but he just didn’t get why I found that so funny.
The reason that came to me is that I just saw a promo for next week’s episode of Outrageous Acts of Science on the Science Channel. Apparently, they’re going to do a segment on the rolling treadmill. One of the quotes from the promo was “Definitely not the answer to all our problems.” You think?
I don’t know if this counts, but I shot a man in Reno just for saying Mike was better than Joel.
For #2, #8, and all the other failed efforts to make fans:
I have tried to make more MST3K fans than I have tried to make guitar players, and it’s always a bewildering experience. When smart and funny people fail to get MST3k, the world always seems a little bit darker. But I can say, I tried to introduce my best friends at 17 to the show with Rocketship X-M, which I found amazingly funny at the time, and though they gave it a lukewarm reception, it does seem like knowing me for 20 years has made them somewhat-more-than-casual fans of the show. So just choose a good episode, then subject them to others constantly over 20 years, and voila! A fan.
I went to see the movie when it played at the Vogue in Louisville (now gone) and was thrilled to see a group of under- and over-grad students there to see it as well. Big laughs, went over well. I had most of the same people over for a party and they asked for an episode, I gave them Village of the Giants, and they seemed to enjoy it. The part where the sheriff confronts Beau Bridges & friends in the playhouse, then turns away and Crow says, “Damn theater people,” that had to be the biggest laugh of the evening. Right timing, right group. That’s a good formula.
#18 has a lot of good ideas for a conversion plan. I find RiffTrax shorts are a lot easier to digest for non- or casual fans, until they get an appetite built. I was an instant fan of The Crawling Eye, so I have never thought of the show as being an acquired taste, but it seems to be for some folks.
As for another embarrassment, I’m not sure, but I think I may have said “I love you” when I got to meet Mike in person in ’95. I meant “I love your work,” of course. Since then I’ve always wondered if his autograph, drawing an arrow to Vampirella and adding “I like her, Jim” had any significance. Whoops.
(Thanks for including me in the intro, Sampo!)
Ugh, at the first Cinematic Titanic show I ever went to, I managed to be awkward in front of all 5 titans while in the autograph line. A little backstory: When I had met Kevin and Mike in Madison when they were honoring Bill Rebane in 2005, it was super laid back and totally not awkward. I was there with a friend, and they chatted with us for a bit, as the line for the meet and greet was pretty short. I took a picture of my friend with them, and Kevin took a picture of me and my friend as a joke. He even recognized that the “RUB” shirt my friend was wearing stood for “Reeve Union Board”, and asked if he went to UW-O. It was really nice and went about as well as an average fan could hope.
I didn’t expect that level of interaction in the autograph line at CT, but I really wasn’t prepared for how tired and unenthusiastic they seemed. I don’t blame them; it was the second show in Milwaukee that weekend, and the line was extremely long. I would probably get exasperated too. I didn’t plan out who should sign what, so when I plopped down a random pile of DVDs in front of Joel, idiotically expecting him to just pick what he liked (I don’t know what I was thinking, really), he was a bit short with me. Then I had Trace sign Laserblast, which seemed to sadden him since it reminded him of his recently passed father who was in the episode. Then I confusingly tried to thank Frank for some of his political jokes that referenced some of the Wisconsin stuff that was going on at the time, but he couldn’t really understand what I was trying to say. Mary Jo was probably the only one I didn’t feel like I embarrassed my self in front of. I told Josh that I got to hold an old guitar of his that a friend of mine had, and he seemed intrigued at first, but I don’t know.
The next two CT shows I saw I avoided the line afterwards. It’s not how I want to see them, and I didn’t trust my self to not act like a dolt again.
Not really embarrassing, really, quite the opposite, rather ego boosting, but it’s the only anecdote I have.
Several years ago at the Atlanta based Dragon*Con, possibly the late 90s when it was airing on SciFi, there were some discussion panels about the show. No, none of the stars appeared at these particular panels. I “think” Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy were booked, but thwere sttaed for the large ballroom panels. This was one of the “small room” discussions.
Anyway, it was basically a question and answer session. No, I can’t even remember who ran it; I don’t think it was anyone directly associated with the series, just well informed fans with ‘connections”. I will admit it was a “trip” to see an authentic Crow and Tom Servo displayed upon a table at the front of the room. (Now I have my very own!)
After the Q&A, the hosts dran a tape of…Dun! Dun! Dunnnnn!!!…BattleField Earth that they intended to riff. we, the audience, were meant to just kick back and passively watch, laughing at the appropriate points. A room full of MSTies with “ripe” material like that? No, we couldn’t “maintain” ourselves. Despite the initial requests for us to remain quiet, fans started “riffing” and soon the hosts gave up doing their prepared material and let us “have at it”.
There came a point where our “hero” is locked within a barred cage and gets brutally pressure hosed. I noticed the audience had gone temporarily quiet, transfixed by the rather intense moment. This was my chance. Recalling a similar scene from a far more famous (and better) film, I shouted in mock gravatous, “It’s a madhosue…A MADHOUSE!!!” There was a split second of even greater silence as my riff sunk in. And then my fellow fans “roared” with laughter, some even applauding! What a glorious feeling! The only thing that would have made it even more enjoyable would have been the presence of one of more of the Best Brains troupe.
Of course, my riff could have fallen “flat” and that would have made for a very embarrassing moment, but I think “Torgo the White” smiled upon me that day as the timing made it “click”. ;-)
Sincerely,
Bill
I attended the Gateway SciFi Convention 2000 in St. Louis when Mike, Kevin, and Bill were featured guests, but the surprise guest was Mary Jo and when she was announced I and the two women who came with me all got really excited. We love all the cast members, but it was just such a thrill when we got an extra bonus star to join us, won’t you?
Later I and my better half, Val, and our friend Marianne were walking around downtown St. Louis looking for a place to have dinner and I said to my two companions as if I were a tour guide, “And if you’ll look immediately to your left you’ll see we are right now passing the MST castmembers!” Mike and Kevin kept walking past us and waited for their friends at the end of the block but we gushed over Mary Jo, and then I realized Bill was standing right beside her and I said, “Sorry, Bill, we don’t mean to snub you; we’re just big fans of Pearl!”
He said, “That’s all right. I’m a big fan of Pearl, too.”
When I went through the autograph line I didn’t have a bowling pin, but I asked Bill to sign my yellow juggling club that’s shaped like Crow’s beak, and he wrote, “This is not a bowling pin, dude!”
Finally, at their last event at the con I asked to get them all to sign the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, and Bill gave me a look because he didn’t really contribute to writing it.
So I managed to dis Bill three times at the same con… and Crow is actually my favorite character!
Wherever you are, sorry, Bill. I really do love ya!
Not really embarrassing, but here you go.
Back in ’98 I visited some friends in Minneapolis. We did the usual touristy stuff in the Mini-Apple area (Mall of America, U of M, St. Paul capital, etc.) but had some time during the week with no real plans. So, I suggested the idea of going to take a tour of Best Brains. They were MST3K fans, too, and loved the idea, so my friend’s wife called and got us on the tour schedule.
We headed to Eden Prairie on the day and entered into MST3K heaven. At the start of the tour, though, the tour guide, Barb Tebben, warned us that if we ran into any of the cast members we were not to talk to them or ask them for autographs or anything. On with the tour, and we got to go into the studio, up on the stage of the SoL (where I shook the hand of Tom Servo standing on the desk), saw the plywood-cut-out chair backs, Castle Forester, the prop workshop (where Patrick Brantseg showed us around and demonstrated Crow), the editing booth, and even the giant spaghetti ball (that thing was pretty darn huge).
After the tour we headed back out to the lobby where Barb was selling MST3K merchandise. While waiting in line to get a Crow “Bite Me” t-shirt, I noticed a tall blonde guy in shorts standing in the doorway of an office talking to someone. “Is that Mike? I’m pretty sure that’s Mike. That has to be Mike.” I wanted to go say hi and shake his hand, but he didn’t look like he was in a very good mood judging by his body language. I hemmed and hawed about it, but finally the warning not to talk to the talent won out. It would have been great to have actually met Mike on that tour, but oh well, it was still a great experience.
I really need to find my pictures from that tour. The one with me holding Crow’s pickaxe from the movie is choice.
In college, I worked at the campus movie theater, which was basically a badly converted auditorium. The movie screen was basically pulled down like a backdrop on the stage. We also had two projectors, a 16mm and a video projector for VHS and DVD. It so happened that the manager was also a huge MST3K fan like me.
One night, we had our regular film showing, and then a midnight film; there was a two hour gap to kill in-between. My manager got the bright idea to bring “Puma Man” to put on the video projector during the gap. About halfway through, I went back into the lobby to refill the drinks cooler and check on the popcorn machine. I went back into the theater, and…no manager. I glance around the seats before hearing a shout. My manager is up on the stage and standing back just far enough from the screen to project his own shadow into the empty “seat” next to Servo. “I’m on MST3K!” he shouted triumphantly.
My response? I run up next to him and grab the final seat. “I’m a robot!” I crow. (Pun intended.) We start jumping around, shouting, and waving our arms like crazy people.
About then, our third theater worker, who was not a MSTie, walked in the theater from his break. “What the heck are you two doing?” he said, as we lowered our arms in embarrassment. We went back to watching the episode normally.
Yeah, super nerdy. But super fun, too.