Tonight, while procrastinating on my Judaic Studies homework (after I finished reading The Bishop and loudly ranting over evil cliffhangers), I meandered onto my brother's Facebook profile, where I saw that he'd "liked" the fan page for Mystery Science Theatre 3000, or MST3K for short.
For those of you non-geeks who don't know what MST3K is, it was a TV series that ran for a solid ten seasons. The premise of the series was that there was a human trapped on board a satellite by a mad scientist with two robots for company, and to maintain their sanity, they would riff or mock bad movies. Most of the films that they did were B-grade sci-fi movies, which may help to explain why it's mainly geeks such as my brother and I who know about them.
Yes, nerdiness and geekery run in our family. It's probably genetic.
MST3K stopped airing several years ago, although the producers and actors have since gone on to create the RiffTrax, or MSTs of popular (and sometimes bad) movies. Whilst browsing the site tonight, I came across (and watched) clips of the riffs from Star Trek: 2009 and Twilight, and saw advertisements for other movies such as The Empire Strikes Back, Thor, The Return of the King, and some horrific movies that definitely deserved to be riffed, such as the rest of the Twilight saga and Tommy Wiseau's infamous classic The Room. (I first watched The Room without the comfort of the RiffTrax. If you know what I'm talking about, pity me. I refuse to make the same mistake with Twilight.)
MSTs continue unofficially throughout all of geekdom, ranging from muttered comments in theatres to mockery of certain novels that shall not be named, but which concern sparkly vampires (What makes you think I hate Twilight? *angelic expression*), and having a prominent niche in the fanfiction world. I myself am part of a small group of fanfic-writing nerds who take a sadistic pleasure in taking the worst of the worst fanfictions (usually Lord of the Rings fanfics written by hormone-driven girls without spellcheck and victimizing Legolas) and riffing (or sporking) the crap out of them.
The fine producers of MST3K have created a masterpiece trope that will continue for as long as there are nerds and geeks to appreciate it. On that note, this nerd is going to browse the RiffTrax store and ponder acquiring the MP3s of certain movie-riffs. Like Twilight. Because that is the only way I'm going to watch the movies.
(By the way, if you're interested in seeing what a fanfiction MST looks like, follow the link to the "Sue Free Zone" on the right-hand side of this page and look for the ones written by Xaja Silversheen. That's my alter-ego online.)
(... Oh, the heck with it. Here's the link to one of my earlier Lord of the Rings troll-fics: In the forest)
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