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Mistings

© Mark Silcox

In the mid-1990s, a curious fad emerged. Folk suddenly became fascinated at the prospect of watching other folk watching the televsion. I well remember my first mild pang of incomprehansion when I sat down to an episode of 'Beavis and Butthead,' which my students had urged me was a must-see, to find that it mainly consisted of some heavily edited, sub-par rock videos together with footage of two cartoon characters resmbling the sorts of people who I used to flee from (screaming and waving my arms, if necessary) back in high school, providing 'commentaries' on the stuff that they were watching on their cartoon TVs. How could anyone enjoy this, I thought to myself.

Then came "Mystery cience Theatre 3000." This was a relatively short-lived series on the SciFi channel, the premise of which was that a couple of robots had for some nameless reason been kidnapped and trapped on a world where they were forced to watched reruns of bad science-fiction movies. They kept themselves sane (so the backstory went) by making rude remarks as the images flashed across the screen. For a while the show had a a cult following, and I admit I got a chuckle out of a few of the episodes that I manage to sit through. Then, perhaps somewhat mercifully, the wheel of fortune took a turn and it quietly disappeared from our nation's screens.

But lo! No sooner do such things fade from memory in our nostalgia-obsessed culture than they can be seen resurfacing in a strangely altered form, like Mr. Hyde creeping up from behind the laboratory table where Dr. Jeckyll had stood just moments before. A link on Adam Cadre's webpage took my along a circuitous path to the incredible "Website Number Nine" (see the new links added this week, under "Mistings") whereupon the work of several hundred authors who have taken it upon themselves to write miniature scripts for this show (including the mighty Mr. Cadre himself) can be found scrupulously archived by an obviously loving hand. Apparently "Misting" has become a fairly substantial literary subgenre in its own right, and many of the small, almost Platonically acerbic dialogues that can be found on this site depict the stoical robots from the original series maing smart remarks about everything from SPAM newslatters to famous documents from US history to the scripts of yet other TV shows.

I do not feel qualified to offer any comments about the Overall Cultural Significance of these strange artefacts of the information age. Discovering this webpage felt a bit like looking in one's fridge for a piece of fruit and finding a live iguana. But perhaps I'll have some thoughts on it at a later date. In the meantime, enjoy!

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