We’re starting 2008 with a double punch of goodness. On the first, we’re continuing our Tuesdays of newness. On the second, we’re introducing Four Star Theater at 8 PM – where we’ll be giving you a weekly blast of the top rated IS Playhouse grabs in the catalog, starting with the wigged out Seussian trailer for The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and the Bonanza episode full of circussionists, The Abduction. I know what you’re asking. The answer is “last door on your left.” As to why Four Star Theater if the scale goes to five stars? Because there’s so little stuff with a five star rating, even rounding up. So, vote for more stuff and maybe we’ll upgrade to five star theater. Maybe even six. What’s more, I’m finally going to start showing one star and two star items less frequently.

[addendum]

Don’t forget, you can check the schedule to see what’s coming in advance, though Tuesdays will be usually only be a week or so ahead, since it’s basically whatever I manage to grab in a given week (plus new grabs for shorts, which don’t show up on the schedule.) Because Wednesdays is stuff that’s already been grabbed, riffed and rated, that’ll be listed farther into the future.

As you’ve probably heard by now, the first episode of Cinematic Titanic, The Oozing Skull (aka Brain of Blood) is now available to order. <kermit>yaaaaay</kermit>. The preview is out (and in lower res on the order page) and it looks great. I’ve previously dismissed the ‘but there’s no Shadowrama’ complaint about other post-mst3k efforts to be splitting hairs, but did it ever feel right to see it again. On the downside, the download option won’t be available until April, and the discs won’t ship for up to two weeks.

[Addendum 12/23]

There seems to be an official version of the trailer on YouTube now:

Over the years, a lot of you have enjoyed, suffered through, endured or just plain missed copious opportunities to riff on stills from the atrocious promotional film, A Visit to Santa on IS. Well, now this string of blown bulbs has gotten the full Rifftrax on demand treatment. [Technical aside: if you installed the divx player as admin on windows, you've got to run it as admin. If it insists you upgrade, that may be the problem.] To celebrate its Rifftraxing, it’ll be running again on IS at 1 PM on Christmas. (more…)

Finally, Inventing Situations has freed the common capper from the twin drudgeries of matching your caption to the grab and actually writing a caption! Just click the magic button – – and the Autocappomatic 4500 will not only write a caption for you, but it will pick an image to go with it; in that order. The cappomatic’s no prima donna either, it shares credit with you by just using your handle its logo right next to it. So, thank the Autocappomatic 4500 for this new progress and thank Competition too, because it was only by shamelessly following the competition that I realized just how much demand there was for this sort of thing.

(Note 12/16: The cappomatic won’t work unless you’ve made a cap that saved your handle lately – that is, you need to cap with cookies enabled first. So there.)

Of course, the Autocappomatic can use your help, so if you have some captions that just need NOUNs, VERBs, PLURALNOUNs, GERUNDs, CELEBRIRTYNAMEs or the like added, suggest them, and the cappomatic might use them.

After a couple of trial runs, Tuesdays from Noon to Midnight (eastern) is now the official premiere time for new grabs at IS. This includes feature films and the like making their first showing on IS and new grabs for old shorts. I can’t guarantee it’ll be 12 hours of new material, but I will aim for ‘fan favorites’ for any old material showing up during that block.

As always, the schedule will get updated at the last minute, and the shorts won’t get pre-announced.