![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
MST3K in the Post-Video-Scarcity Age
Sep. 5th, 2015 06:05 pmNo matter how offbeat or obscure something to be interested in may be, I'm sure there are people interested in it who would like to see other people interested in it too. (This journal itself could be a variety of attempts at that, of course.) Because of the unusual way I became interested in Mystery Science Theater 3000, experiencing varied takes on its spirit and characters through text-based "MSTings" before I even knew what they looked like, I perhaps take a bit of interest in discussions about "how to introduce new people to it." One recent discussion on Satellite News, though, was focused on "millennials," people who might have been too young to have seen the series the first time around. Beyond the obvious issue that the "this reminds me of that" references that might have seemed even more prominent in the "Joel years" might lose their charm with time, there did seem to be a certain "kids these days" undercurrent every so often. I'm now wondering if anyone happened to think of how, back when the show itself was new, there were a certain number of people annoyed it wasn't encouraging the proper appreciation of the old movies they were willing to take a "non-ironic" interest in.
There were some more nuanced comments, though, about how the series was an elaboration of the local "horror hosts" who would introduce old movies on TV, and about how nowadays people aren't stuck just waiting for whatever happens to come on should they be interested in watching TV instead of doing anything else (and there, too, other people might be insistent there are other things to do...) I might have been a bit too young for even that; my family got its first VCR three decades ago, and after that we weren't stuck waiting for particular movies to come on TV. However, I did get to wondering about how, while MSTings might have affected just what I thought of "fanfiction," "fan works" started off a way to vicariously experience things I couldn't tape and couldn't afford. That age too may have passed; I may miss MSTings, but maybe in moving more lightly from work to work there are compensations too.
There were some more nuanced comments, though, about how the series was an elaboration of the local "horror hosts" who would introduce old movies on TV, and about how nowadays people aren't stuck just waiting for whatever happens to come on should they be interested in watching TV instead of doing anything else (and there, too, other people might be insistent there are other things to do...) I might have been a bit too young for even that; my family got its first VCR three decades ago, and after that we weren't stuck waiting for particular movies to come on TV. However, I did get to wondering about how, while MSTings might have affected just what I thought of "fanfiction," "fan works" started off a way to vicariously experience things I couldn't tape and couldn't afford. That age too may have passed; I may miss MSTings, but maybe in moving more lightly from work to work there are compensations too.