A good idea is only an idea…

…Until you do something with it.

I was a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 back in the day, and I remember thinking how cool it would be if only they could use modern rotten movies, and not just the old ones that were cheap enough for them to afford the rights.

Fast forward from there to a few years ago, long after MST3K’s untimely cancellation. I got the idea that it would be cool to get some friends together and make fun of a movie (think “MST3K” as a verb), and record it and post it on the Internet for folks to download to play along with the movie. Problem was, this was back when MP3s were new, bandwidth and storage were still expensive, and most folks still used modems. I just didn’t think the technology was there to support such a thing. So I shelved the idea under the “yeah, that might be cool someday” category.

I forgot about it for a while, and then a couple years later, Apple comes out with this thing called podcasting, and my idea comes rushing back to me. “Podcasting is the perfect medium,” I think to myself.

Of course as I’m thinking this, the Battlestar Galactica podcast starts up, which, while not intended to be funny, is essentially the same idea of downloadable commentary.

At that point, I noticed a few other guys also had the idea, so I figured I’d better get on the ball before the whole world got in on it.

So, some friends and I decided to give it a shot (Star Trek: Generations, if you were wondering), with fairly disastrous results, at least from a technical standpoint. It was very funny, but trying to record a two-hour podcast is apparently an abomination before God, as we had all manner of technical problems. We ended up with almost 20 discrete audio tracks, which proved impossible to stitch back together in a usable fashion.

More time passed… a lot more, and we tried again with The Island. Once more it was funny (though not as much as the first one, IMHO), but we still had enough technical problems to keep us from posting it.

I bring this up now, because today I discovered that one of the actual MST3K guys is getting in on the act, and is even charging money for it. The 800 lb. gorilla of funny movie commentary has arrived on the scene.

I had been more or less keeping the idea to myself (a habit of mine, partially to protect my ideas from being ripped off, and partially to save face if the ideas never pan out), but with this latest development, the proverbial feline is out of its burlap container, so I figured I may as well talk about it some.

Fortunately, I never intended to do it for money. Fame, perhaps but I mostly wanted to just have fun. So having competition really doesn’t matter, as long as we’re having a good time. After all, it’s not like I can begrudge the guys who invented the idea their piece of the pie, no matter how large that piece might be.

It’s hard to say if I’ll try again. I’d like to, and I intend to, but it’s a lot more like herding cats than I ever thought it would be. But it was fun, and maybe like they say, the third time will be the charm.

If nothing else, I’ll see if maybe I can get a clip posted of the usable audio sometime. It’s funny stuff.