After a ton of hype and a lot of
well-placed promotion, the MST3K Revival season kicked into high gear this past
April. Now that the season’s been binged
and with a tour waiting in the wings, I
thought I’d peel back the layers of what’s good, bad, and just plain okay about
the new season of MST, as broken down into several different categories.
That Bouvier Girl
Monday, May 29, 2017
Saturday, April 22, 2017
An Extremely Brief Tribute To The Undertaker
I’ve been an Undertaker fan since
I was ten years old. I suppose that’s a
common story. Many of us saw him for
the first time at that age, when he towered over the heads of nearly everyone
in the company, accompanied by a mugging Paul Bearer, rolling back his eyes
like a zombie in heat.
No one pretends that the
Undertaker was an elegant wrestler. He
could walk the ropes and pull off the whole zombie thing, but he was creaky and
imperfect and imprecise. It took years
for him to build up this sort of cool nonchalance, this sort of image that made
questioning his skills kind of a moot point.
The Undertaker was just The
Undertaker: like a pillar or a supporting wall, he was always there if you were
a wrestling fan of a certain age, always solidly available. Performance over athleticism was his
game. For spectacle he was at the top of
his game.
Thursday, April 13, 2017
The Not Too Distant Past: The Top Fifteen Best (Slightly) Obscure MST3K Episodes
If you ask someone where you
should start a binge watch of Mystery Science Theater 3000, they’ll probably
name one of these episode. Or, if they have more
obscure taste they’ll mention “Hobgoblins” or “The Lost Continent”, or anything
that’s gotten some kind of foothold on the fandom or in pop culture because of a meme. All of those episodes are amazing, don’t get
me wrong, but there are some really great
My rules for inclusion on this
list are simple: the episode has to be slightly more obscure than the ones
usually listed in top twenty or top ten MST episode lists; and they shouldn’t
contain a mematic catchphrase. I have made allowances, however, for episodes that contained a short with memetic features when the episode did not.
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Movie Review: Bang Bang Baby: A Sudden and Surprisingly Dark Fable
Bang Bang Baby comes on like a
cross between Top Secret! And Psycho
Beach Party at first. It treats its
heroine’s dream to become a teen idol with absolutely sincerity while
surrounding her with goofy stock characters: the drunken yet eloquent father,
the creepy stalker intended to provide a counterpoint to the dreamy, perfect
hero; the scenery-chewing aw-shucks movie hero stuck in a small town; even a
folksy moonshine slinger.
Blood and Circus: A Retrospective of my Time in Wrestling Fandom. Part 2: Running Away
I was fourteen years old by the
time I went to my first pay per view. It
was the Royal Rumble, and it opened a definitive year for some of the worst years
the business would ever experience. The
Undertaker was barely a babyface, Vince McMahon couldn’t decide between Bret
Hart and Lex Luger for the next Face of the Company, and the steroid trials had
barely vindicated the industry. These
were the years I became a huge fan, the years that I spent, well – spending
most of my tiny income on pro wrestling.
I wasn’t inside of course; not
yet.
Sunday, May 29, 2016
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My first review was just published!
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Blood and Circus: A Retrospective of my Time in Wrestling Fandom. Part 1: In the Beginning
“Would you like to watch
WrestleMania?”
My cousin Kerry was about seven
years old, I was just over ten. We were
at her house, and the charm of playing with her tiny turtle and fish had worn
off. The question left me wondering; I
knew vaguely what pro wrestling was, having seen well-oiled men yelling from
the screen during the business’ boom period during my childhood, but I never
sat down to watch it myself.
Kerry had been a fan for much
longer. “Why don’t we watch WrestleMania
6?” That sounded fine. She turned the TV on and The Ultimate Warrior
was ranting about the skies and the heavens, and suddenly I was hooked.
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