Pre-internet this was the only way people could get cute cat videos

December 12, 2024 4:38 PM

Mining Accident Theater is a sequence of fan-made tributes to Mystery Science Theater 3000, all available on Youtube. Bogdan, Catherine and Tom are stuck down in a mine, waiting for rescue, and in the meantime they watch old film reels they find in the mine and comment on them. Most are between 8 and 30 minutes. The newest one is the delightful What Is A Cat? (15m). A few others (there are currently 12 in all) are the one full-length movie so far, Italian sci-fi film War of the Robots (1h42m), for the holiday season the sloooow-paced, but short, Legend of Mary (9m), a kinescope of the early anthology series Lights Out entitled The Angry Birds (25m), and Leonard Nimoy Presents Magnavision (13m).

I posted about their riff of War of the Robots recently on Fanfare, but What Is A Cat? gave me the impetus to make a post here about their whole project.

posted by JHarris (5 comments total)

Mining disasters from 1941.
posted by TedW at 5:04 PM on December 12, 2024

It makes sense now that Garfield & Friends went off the air in 1995.
posted by not_on_display at 7:12 PM on December 12, 2024

"when I see Leonard Nimoy with a big shiney disc in his hand, I think to myself, that technology is wonderful for an episode of Land of the Giants."

-jack handey
posted by clavdivs at 11:20 PM on December 12, 2024 [1 favorite]

Thanks, J.

Lemme tell y'all, we watched that cat one last night during club and it's very funny and the underlying doc is kind of charming.
posted by ob1quixote at 1:18 PM on December 13, 2024 [1 favorite]

When I took Film Appreciation in college we were shown several episodes of a Flash Gordon serial and it was hugely popular. Unfortunately, the teacher didn't show the whole series and everyone boo'd when he said we wouldn't see the whole thing.
posted by neuron at 1:46 PM on December 13, 2024 [1 favorite]