I really wasn’t aware that yesterday’s cult attire became this winter’s statement of practicality and comfort. Nothing says “comfort” to me quite as much as sitting in a room with a bunch of folks wearing these Slankets:
These also go under the brand name “Snuggies”, which just seems even more disquieting of a name than the horrifying “Slanket” portmanteau when placed in a certain context:
Join the Cult of Comfort while supplies last!
In a pleasant surprise, Amazon opened up its preorder window for Mystery Science Theater 3000, Vol. 12
Volume 12’s Episode List:
- 419 – The Rebel Set (Short: Johnny at the Fair)
- 504 – Secret Agent Super Dragon
- 612 – The Starfighters
- 811 – Parts: The Clonus Horror
…along with a suitable stable of extras, of course.
On a related note, MST3K-successor The Film Crew has two more releases in the next two months:
- Wild Women of Wongo
- Giant of Marathon
It’s not known if there will be any more releases beyond the initial four, but if sales are brisk enough how could they say no?
Stay tuned for reviews of the first two installments here in the near future.
By now, many on the Internet have heard the story of Nasubi (“eggplant” in Japanese), the Japanese comedian and unwitting game show participant on Denpa Shonen that endured nearly a year of total isolation and nudity during his time on the show. 
Forced to fulfill the mandated goal of winning 1,000,000 Yen through the constant entering of various contests, Nasubi was broadcast on television with little more than an eggplant graphic carefully following his genitals on-screen most of the time. (It should—or maybe shouldn’t—be noted that during the course of the show, however, he did win a contest for women’s underwear which he unsuccessfully tried on.)
Really, though, that’s not the story here. The story is that they actually turned the slowly degenerating mental faculties of this poor guy into a game—and a simulation, no less. Given the high ratings for the show, the bright minds at Hudson (a major Japanese game developer and publisher) decided to bring the experience of slow-simmered insanity to gamers’ homes in 
“Nasubi no Heya” (aka Denpa Shounen-teki Kenshou Seikatsu: Nasubi no Heya, a mouthful to be sure) for the Sega Dreamcast.
Let’s just get this straight; this was a game that mimicked the activities of Nasubi’s day. This generally consisted of a few things (if the show was any indication):
- Entering dozens of contests
- Talking to yourself
- Eating (provided food was available)
- Sleeping
- Finding a suitable place place to defecate
- Writing
- Prancing around in women’s underwear once in a while
- Lots of waiting
Stranger still, the game had an ‘on-line mode’ where if you won items in the game during a specified time and punched in the code number on the Nasubi no Heya website, you too earned the chance win prizes. That is, of course, if you hadn’t offed yourself by then from the sheer banality of it.
Here’s a gem I found tonight while going back through through photos we’ve taken. At 662 degrees Fahrenheit, I’m pretty sure well-done is the only option for these dumplings we purchased from a supermarket some time ago:
As it is, we managed to prepare them to perfection at (a much cooler and surely intended) 350°F.
Let’s face it, if you’re in your mid-20s or older, you probably still remember when card collecting wasn’t just a hobby—it was a cool hobby for millions. In the late 80s and early 90s, 
baseball and football cards were glutting the market as fast as companies could print them in order to satiate the market. Among the more famous errors from that era was a very peculiar one, found early on in packs of 1989 Fleer baseball cards: The infamous Billy Ripkin #616.
If you were among the lucky few to have the first iteration of Billy Ripkin’s card, it seemed fairly innocuous at first; that is, until you actually looked at the bottom of the bat. Right there, in black letters readable to the naked eye, read “FUCK FACE”.
Parents everywhere were stunned, kids overjoyed at their newfound lucre, and Fleer decided it’d make things right immediately. Well, that was the theory, anyway.
Not only was it a massive lack of oversight on Fleer’s behalf (and perhaps one of the greatest errors in baseball card collecting history), it would take upwards of ten subsequent and blundering changes to the card for Fleer to finally correct the error to everyone’s satisfaction.
At first, Fleer used a marker to crudely rush out a new version, then in later revisions used a variety of other techniques (including an airbrush and common office white-out) until finally they decided to stick a black box on it and call it a day. 
So, you’re probably asking yourself at this point, “How could this happen in the first place?” Ripkin finally admitted it was the work of teammates, but even this didn’t convince many that it wasn’t deliberate given the various levels of review each card was subject to. Whatever the case, the error and its variations remain collectible cards to this day.
Sometimes the derivatives of Internet memes are even funnier than the original itself. The “Chocolate Rain” phenomenon making the rounds for the past couple of weeks really failed to grasp my attention…until this bizarre trainwreck involving an old McDonalds commercial surfaced:
Giant of Marathon
View a clip from the upcoming Film Crew treatment (and more) after the cut.
One of the grueling things I do in order to keep XBMC-TV updated is to manually check out the various international streams I have on file. Sometimes, along the way, I’ll come across some peculiar (and at times familiar or even humorous) sights or scenes, as you’ll see below:
The Underwear Gnomes have nothing on these folks (from what was presumably a sex-ed lesson on Korean TV Station ‘EBS’):
…only in human form.
I tend to watch quite a few obscure movies; Road to the Stars (Doroga k zvezdam), a 50-minute Russian documentary about the projected future of their space program from 1958, was no exception. (A distinct lack of English subtitles didn’t help its case, either.) A bit of Futurama
The suit looks a bit familiar… Inspiration, perhaps? Coincidence? Click through to see more.
…you might be interested to know that Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett are back as The Film Crew, which essentially boils down to the tried-and-true Mystery Science Theater 3000 formula with the following exceptions:
- The Film Crew’s releases are strictly DVD-only, rather than televised
- Because of the DVD-only nature of each release, the Crew’s riffs can be a bit more on the mature side (but not quite raunchy)
- All three play as themselves (i.e., sans ‘bots)
- The setting and premise are rather different, but the structure of each episode is more or less the same.
The episodes are, in order of release:
- Hollywood After Dark
- Killers From Space
- Wild Women of Wongo
The fourth DVD episode, “Giant of Marathon”, will come out sometime in October (but isn’t available for preorder yet).
Last week, looking around for a copy of the MST3K Amazing Colossal Episode Guide
Really, you’d think that for being a fan for over a decade and a half now, I would have picked this book up long ago. Sometimes good things really do come to those who wait. Or, more than likely, I’m just being rewarded for my laziness.
Fatal Farm’s “alternate” TV intros from the 80s and 90s is enough to keep one laughing for hours.
The Golden Girls and Alf entries are especially worth checking out.
In not-so-funny news, my Xbox’s partition table decided to take a dive (presumably) the night before last — after a late-night MST3K marathon — forcing me to repartition, reformat, and rebuild the entire box for the first time since I assembled it in 2005. Not a bad run, if I do say so myself. Not only that, I’ve already loaded around 40GB of content back onto it and it seems the system’s more or less stable again. Thankfully, I had most of the media content backed up on DVD (including XBMC-TV).
Some good news in entertainment-land. It looks as if the post-Season 8 crew of riffers from MST3K are coming back together under the same roof to work their magic using the tried and true formula. Check out Film Crew Online for more details — and a bonus greeting from none other than Kevin Murphy, the voice of MST3K’s Tom Servo. While you’re there don’t forget to vote for the first release, coming April 2007.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, you can still catch Kevin Murphy’s Rifftrax, which lampoons classics such as Top Gun and Halloween in MP3 format. Downloaded commentary tracks are then played alongside the movie’s DVD release through your iPod (or whatever MP3 device you have) in order to deliver the riffs.
Either way you slice it — between The Film Crew’s projected release and Rifftrax — the MST3K formula is alive and well 18 years later.
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