I'm one of those people who watched MST3K regularly with friends. For us, the movie was the star, not the Joel/Mike and the bots. Some verge on art in the sense that they're very defamiliarizing. Certain titles led my friends and I, believe it or not, to talk for hours afterwards about what we'd just watched.
I remember one such conversation stretching into the early morning about "Monster a-Go-go." Our discussion revolved around whether the movie was, in fact, a "movie" at all. The viewing experience was so strange and elliptical, we had trouble recalling the order of the scenes, the characters, our recollections structured more like those of mundane experiences, like trying to remember what you ate last Thursday.
These conversations could be very rich. We soon abandoned MST3K for movies we discovered ourselves in thrift stores on VHS. Totally forgotten films, mostly stultifying, but occasionally we'd find something very, very strange, even ahead of its time.
One of us nabbed a VHS of a children's show starring Jim Varney as his "Ernest" persona. The show's pace shocked us! Rapid fire skits, made for a minuscule attention span. It was alienating but also somewhat experimental. Culture moved very much in the Ernest direction, short videos and skits ruling the social media roost.
Great read - Gogglebox is on its 24th season and counting and has made micro celebs of some of its stars :)
I'm one of those people who watched MST3K regularly with friends. For us, the movie was the star, not the Joel/Mike and the bots. Some verge on art in the sense that they're very defamiliarizing. Certain titles led my friends and I, believe it or not, to talk for hours afterwards about what we'd just watched.
I remember one such conversation stretching into the early morning about "Monster a-Go-go." Our discussion revolved around whether the movie was, in fact, a "movie" at all. The viewing experience was so strange and elliptical, we had trouble recalling the order of the scenes, the characters, our recollections structured more like those of mundane experiences, like trying to remember what you ate last Thursday.
These conversations could be very rich. We soon abandoned MST3K for movies we discovered ourselves in thrift stores on VHS. Totally forgotten films, mostly stultifying, but occasionally we'd find something very, very strange, even ahead of its time.
One of us nabbed a VHS of a children's show starring Jim Varney as his "Ernest" persona. The show's pace shocked us! Rapid fire skits, made for a minuscule attention span. It was alienating but also somewhat experimental. Culture moved very much in the Ernest direction, short videos and skits ruling the social media roost.