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.