In a not too distant timeline, this Frunday K.Z...
May 13, 2021 1:17 AM Subscribe
Is the return of the return of Mystery Science Theater 3000 not enough for you? How about five fan-made MST3K episodes? Or an archive of almost 2000 text-based MST3K fanfics (MiSTings) riffing on bad fanfics and other texts? Or this specific archive of MiSTings of the Star Trek fanfiction of Stephen Ratliff? Or interactive MiSTings of three cheesy text adventure games, playable in your browser (note: third one is not for the childrens)? Or interactive MiSTings of six games made in the text-based ZZT engine, also playable in your browser? (Game tips and more after the jump.)
MST3K had an episode that can only be described as genuinely difficult (*cough*Manos*cough*), so of course this post has a tips section.
The fan-made episodes include prescient riffs of Starcrash and Invasion of the Animal People, and Little Red Riding Hood, an import from kiddie circuit flim-flammer K. Gordon Murray of Santa Claus fame (previously).
Among other iconic MiSTings are the the Peter Guerin trilogy, whose first part, the Misery Senshi Neo-Zero Double Blitzkrieg Debacle, is so huge it had to be collaboratively riffed (in the copy I read, two of the chapters, or 'data', may have been inadvertently switched, so watch out for that). They can be found here (Ctrl+F 'Guerin') and in the great big honkin' archive. Another recommendation is the downright weird That's Just Peanuts to Space, a two-part Doctor Who/Peanuts crossover.
A walkthrough for the first text adventure can be found in mst3k1.zip, linked from here. The third text adventure has a surprising history - originally an absolutely wretched attempt at the Leisure Suit Larry of text adventures (yeah, I know), it inspired an entire series of attempts at making actually interesting sequels starring the protagonist's dynasty begun by the riffing's co-author. (All links in the preceding sentence lead to information about games featuring sexual references.) The games themselves can all be found on ifdb.org.
Due to a mistake, the ZZT MiSTing of Aceland has a review score of 0 when it should be 5, as mentioned in the review. After selecting a ZZT game, click Play Online on its page to play it. If you get stuck (such as on Aceland's in-the-dark first screen), clicking View Files and then the .zzt file will let you poke around in the game's level layouts and code.
MST3K had an episode that can only be described as genuinely difficult (*cough*Manos*cough*), so of course this post has a tips section.
The fan-made episodes include prescient riffs of Starcrash and Invasion of the Animal People, and Little Red Riding Hood, an import from kiddie circuit flim-flammer K. Gordon Murray of Santa Claus fame (previously).
Among other iconic MiSTings are the the Peter Guerin trilogy, whose first part, the Misery Senshi Neo-Zero Double Blitzkrieg Debacle, is so huge it had to be collaboratively riffed (in the copy I read, two of the chapters, or 'data', may have been inadvertently switched, so watch out for that). They can be found here (Ctrl+F 'Guerin') and in the great big honkin' archive. Another recommendation is the downright weird That's Just Peanuts to Space, a two-part Doctor Who/Peanuts crossover.
A walkthrough for the first text adventure can be found in mst3k1.zip, linked from here. The third text adventure has a surprising history - originally an absolutely wretched attempt at the Leisure Suit Larry of text adventures (yeah, I know), it inspired an entire series of attempts at making actually interesting sequels starring the protagonist's dynasty begun by the riffing's co-author. (All links in the preceding sentence lead to information about games featuring sexual references.) The games themselves can all be found on ifdb.org.
Due to a mistake, the ZZT MiSTing of Aceland has a review score of 0 when it should be 5, as mentioned in the review. After selecting a ZZT game, click Play Online on its page to play it. If you get stuck (such as on Aceland's in-the-dark first screen), clicking View Files and then the .zzt file will let you poke around in the game's level layouts and code.
Checked the story archive for The Eye of Argon and didn't see it.
posted by delfin at 5:53 AM on May 13, 2021
posted by delfin at 5:53 AM on May 13, 2021
That’s because you didn’t Ctrl-F ‘argon’. You’re clearly unfamiliar with the tangled nightmare that is internet archaeology, lucky you.
posted by BiggerJ at 6:29 AM on May 13, 2021
posted by BiggerJ at 6:29 AM on May 13, 2021
Hey, I'm actually in those MiSTing archives in a few places. Not going to say exactly where, because some of my stuff is pretty okay and some not so much, but it's nice to see it preserved, at least.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 8:43 AM on May 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 8:43 AM on May 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
some of my stuff is pretty okay and some not so much
Yeah, every few years* I'm reminded that I did some of these and I dip back in. Some of it holds up, some of it I'd make different riffing choices today. Like the bits where the Enterprise Kids Crew travels in time and meets the Clintons - I was basically aping the meaner political humor of the mid-90s, without a POV of my own, so it comes off a bit Gingrich-y.
* prior to this, it was when Ratliff followed me on Twitter 0_0
posted by frogstar42 at 9:19 AM on May 13, 2021
Yeah, every few years* I'm reminded that I did some of these and I dip back in. Some of it holds up, some of it I'd make different riffing choices today. Like the bits where the Enterprise Kids Crew travels in time and meets the Clintons - I was basically aping the meaner political humor of the mid-90s, without a POV of my own, so it comes off a bit Gingrich-y.
* prior to this, it was when Ratliff followed me on Twitter 0_0
posted by frogstar42 at 9:19 AM on May 13, 2021
I consumed these voraciously at the time. I found them very amusing when I didn't think too much about the original authors of the fan-fic (or when they targeted deserving things like hatefully unhinged usenet screeds), but then it also tied into uncomfortable stuff that seemed to be more about provoking fanfic authors like the Gonterman Shrine (there's a name I haven't though of in a while) and soforth. Suffice to say I have conflicting feelings about it these days.
Speaking of The Eye of Argon and MST3K, Rifftrax's Mike Nelson and Conor Lastowka covered it in their book club podcast 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back.
posted by subocoyne at 10:21 AM on May 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
Speaking of The Eye of Argon and MST3K, Rifftrax's Mike Nelson and Conor Lastowka covered it in their book club podcast 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back.
posted by subocoyne at 10:21 AM on May 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
I remember the site where these MiSTings were hosted more than the MiSTings themselves: pinky.wtower.com. When I was a teenager, that site was aspirational. It was part of the community and people visited it! It had a real, honest-to-goodness domain name! It was running on a personal computer sitting on someone's desk in a dorm room!
For a while I so desperately wanted to go off to college and run some sort of site from a computer on my dorm room desk with like maybe a camera pointed out the window or some other kind of gimmick. I wanted to be that cool, aloof guy who was studying CS and just happened to have access to a fast connection and a fixed IP address from which to host webpages for some fandom with quirky url. I so wanted to have a webpage that casually said something like "Welcome to my personal homepage. Here are some links. This page is being served to you from a no-name 486 I bought at the department yard sale and it's running Mandrake Linux 5.3. Here's a picture of it with a pizza box balanced on top taken while we watched the new Red Dwarf on PBS"
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:47 AM on May 13, 2021 [5 favorites]
For a while I so desperately wanted to go off to college and run some sort of site from a computer on my dorm room desk with like maybe a camera pointed out the window or some other kind of gimmick. I wanted to be that cool, aloof guy who was studying CS and just happened to have access to a fast connection and a fixed IP address from which to host webpages for some fandom with quirky url. I so wanted to have a webpage that casually said something like "Welcome to my personal homepage. Here are some links. This page is being served to you from a no-name 486 I bought at the department yard sale and it's running Mandrake Linux 5.3. Here's a picture of it with a pizza box balanced on top taken while we watched the new Red Dwarf on PBS"
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:47 AM on May 13, 2021 [5 favorites]
I also miss pinky.wtower.com, which has a very memorable URL, narf! And too, that seemed like the coolest thing back then, before the internet became all Social Media. I can't help but notice that nothing is actually stopping any of us from making a site like that now....
Thanks for making the post BiggerJ, this is an importance resource for mad scientists everywhere!
posted by JHarris at 11:50 AM on May 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
Thanks for making the post BiggerJ, this is an importance resource for mad scientists everywhere!
posted by JHarris at 11:50 AM on May 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
Oh man, pinky. Yup. That was the spot where I turned many a link purple back when.
posted by subocoyne at 12:32 PM on May 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by subocoyne at 12:32 PM on May 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
oh I remember all this!
Stephen Ratliff seemed like a nice fellowd espite having his creative output shit upon with great gusto by self-assured nineties hyper-aggro internet wits. I hope he's doing well and is not milkshake ducked or anything; Tron Guy and the dilbert guy are in the same zip code and look how they turned out.
posted by Sauce Trough at 2:20 PM on May 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
Stephen Ratliff seemed like a nice fellowd espite having his creative output shit upon with great gusto by self-assured nineties hyper-aggro internet wits. I hope he's doing well and is not milkshake ducked or anything; Tron Guy and the dilbert guy are in the same zip code and look how they turned out.
posted by Sauce Trough at 2:20 PM on May 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
It looks like Mr. Ratliff is still writing fanfics and has published as recently as late last year, so while I can't speak to his personal beliefs it seems like he's doing fine on the "flying his flag" front. You could always DM him on Twitter.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:21 PM on May 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:21 PM on May 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
The archive I linked to is in fact a full dump of the MiSTings from the pinky.wtower.com (aka masemware.com) archive, which was briefly put online and got added to the Wayback Machine by Archive Team’s ArchiveBot.
posted by BiggerJ at 8:09 PM on May 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by BiggerJ at 8:09 PM on May 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
Yep, I noticed, I think the others did too.
posted by JHarris at 9:46 PM on May 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 9:46 PM on May 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
Another archaeological find: the MiSTings by Brendan 'Pink Boy' Herlihy, which are not completely archived in the big dump. (Tip: most are multi-parters; the links under Hot Soup and Main Course lead to pull page link lists.) Don't worry, every single file's been backed up on Wayback.
posted by BiggerJ at 10:04 PM on May 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by BiggerJ at 10:04 PM on May 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
Oh wow, yeah, I'm in a few of those for sure, for sure. I did a lot of Usenet fan MSTings of kooks and fic and took part in some of the Ratliff MSTing collective pieces. The best pieces were done by the groups who treated Ratliff good-naturedly, cause you really do have to admire his tenacity and commitment to his own fan service. He's got his universe and he loves having adventures in it. As it was I fell away from fanfic MSTings when I realized I was growing more mean-spirited with it, and that it felt weird to make fun of one author's presumption to put words in the mouth of someone else's character by putting words in the mouth of someone else's character.
I also did some fan video MSTings, a few of which were recorded guerilla-style at a public access station I had been working at. A group of us would pull all-nighters at the station ("Sure it's fine, I got the closing codes from the chief engineer and promised we wouldn't leave anything on") from Saturday into Sunday, writing and then immediately recording the bluescreen Shadowramma bits with our scratch-built Original Creation puppets. This meant we had a lot of jokes which seemed to us incredibly hilarious at 3 in the morning, some of which I know wouldn't hold up at all today. The host segments were never filmed, though, and I held on to the 3/4" masters for a while until I lost 'em in a basement flood. One of the things we MSTed was Robot Wars, which is now on the crowdfunded MST3K slate, and I'm glad they're getting to it cause it's good for a goof. (One of the other things we did was an episode of Barney, because if you were college kids in the mid-90s you were supposed to loathe Barney, so I don't feel entirely bad about losing those tapes.) I do miss the yellow puppet which I built out of kitchen utensils. The base was two spinach steamers as a spheroid on top of a cheese grater; the head a plastic bottle with bowling pin beak and spatulas for ears. Salad fork/spoon combo for decorative arms.
Some of us from that group went on to do a few years' live fan MSTing at Harvard's Vericon; we did Corman's Fantastic Four adaptation (which is actually great for what it had to work with) and that godawful Dungeons & Dragons film, which is actually not great. I had a lot of fun with those. Later on that material was filmed with the Great Luke Ski. I haven't watched those DVDs in years, but remember they looked really well done.
Geez, that's a lot of creative time put in to heckling cheesy stuff, but it was great fun, I got to work with a lot of cool creative friends, and it served as great practice for writing rapid fire back-and-forth dialogue.
posted by Spatch at 6:52 AM on May 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
I also did some fan video MSTings, a few of which were recorded guerilla-style at a public access station I had been working at. A group of us would pull all-nighters at the station ("Sure it's fine, I got the closing codes from the chief engineer and promised we wouldn't leave anything on") from Saturday into Sunday, writing and then immediately recording the bluescreen Shadowramma bits with our scratch-built Original Creation puppets. This meant we had a lot of jokes which seemed to us incredibly hilarious at 3 in the morning, some of which I know wouldn't hold up at all today. The host segments were never filmed, though, and I held on to the 3/4" masters for a while until I lost 'em in a basement flood. One of the things we MSTed was Robot Wars, which is now on the crowdfunded MST3K slate, and I'm glad they're getting to it cause it's good for a goof. (One of the other things we did was an episode of Barney, because if you were college kids in the mid-90s you were supposed to loathe Barney, so I don't feel entirely bad about losing those tapes.) I do miss the yellow puppet which I built out of kitchen utensils. The base was two spinach steamers as a spheroid on top of a cheese grater; the head a plastic bottle with bowling pin beak and spatulas for ears. Salad fork/spoon combo for decorative arms.
Some of us from that group went on to do a few years' live fan MSTing at Harvard's Vericon; we did Corman's Fantastic Four adaptation (which is actually great for what it had to work with) and that godawful Dungeons & Dragons film, which is actually not great. I had a lot of fun with those. Later on that material was filmed with the Great Luke Ski. I haven't watched those DVDs in years, but remember they looked really well done.
Geez, that's a lot of creative time put in to heckling cheesy stuff, but it was great fun, I got to work with a lot of cool creative friends, and it served as great practice for writing rapid fire back-and-forth dialogue.
posted by Spatch at 6:52 AM on May 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Spatch, all of that sounds great. I do remember falling away from reading USENET MSTings a bit when they started getting more meanspirited (I mean, how much hate can you realistically apply towards Marissa stories), and of course fanfiction twice removed doesn't necessarily have any merit over the plain original. However, there was one particular short piece, pointed out to me by a friend on a long-forgotten early virtual world (hope you're doing well Ivanova wherever you are) making fun of UPN's announcement of Seven-of-Nine in Star Trek Voyager that I loved. I think it's part of the pinky.wtower.com archive. (Turns out, it's on masemware's archive. It's still good generally, although I'm sure Trek fans will say they managed to do better with it than the comments suggest.)
One mutation of the concept is MST on the Ghost Planet (one, two), which is exactly the kind of personal website that the internet used to be about, and now I'm amazed when I find out it still exists. It's a MSTing of fancomics, in particular those of David Gonterman, who was a popular punching bag of fandom scolds (which I'm sorry to say probably included me) back in the day. A lot of kids (and young adults) had (and still have) internet larval states that involved producing questionable material that I'm sure they'd like to see scrubbed from the internet*, with whatever tools and hormones they had to hand, and making fun of that is not cool. But they're funny, for some meaning of that word, at least.
* Exhibit A here is Rebecca Sugar, who went from making painfully sexual content as a teen involving Invader Zim and Ed, Edd and Eddy to creating what is probably the best TV cartoon of the age. Realize, reader, that the production of that earlier material was not a hindrance to the creation of Steven Universe, but possibly helped it, by enabling the young creator to work some things out for themselves.
posted by JHarris at 9:58 AM on May 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
One mutation of the concept is MST on the Ghost Planet (one, two), which is exactly the kind of personal website that the internet used to be about, and now I'm amazed when I find out it still exists. It's a MSTing of fancomics, in particular those of David Gonterman, who was a popular punching bag of fandom scolds (which I'm sorry to say probably included me) back in the day. A lot of kids (and young adults) had (and still have) internet larval states that involved producing questionable material that I'm sure they'd like to see scrubbed from the internet*, with whatever tools and hormones they had to hand, and making fun of that is not cool. But they're funny, for some meaning of that word, at least.
* Exhibit A here is Rebecca Sugar, who went from making painfully sexual content as a teen involving Invader Zim and Ed, Edd and Eddy to creating what is probably the best TV cartoon of the age. Realize, reader, that the production of that earlier material was not a hindrance to the creation of Steven Universe, but possibly helped it, by enabling the young creator to work some things out for themselves.
posted by JHarris at 9:58 AM on May 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
(And say what you want about unsettling fan content made by kids, it still beats them joining up with whatever neo-nazi hate group is most proximate to their interests.)
posted by JHarris at 10:05 AM on May 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by JHarris at 10:05 AM on May 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
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