Well, we’ll be starting up again, with what for the sake of argument we’re going to call #18. It will start first thing Wednesday, February 28. If you’d like to join in the fun, there’s still plenty of time to sign up!

Anyhoo, there’s a new a meaty picture set for you to play with called Rah rah rah.

To get the profile link all the time, you need to go to your sector7g-zz9 profile page and select “always” for ‘Display a link to my capper wiki profile”, otherwise I’ll go on assuming you’ve changed handles for anonymity, since I can’t read your minds (yet).  The “when posting with my handle” choice may be a little cryptic, but it just assumes that when you cap with a handle other than the one you’re logged in under, you want to be anonymous. I may be a little crazy for trying to build a system that supports logging in with anonymity, but both bogus handles and insanity are capper traditions, no?

When that where-are-they-now thread over at the egroup first morphed into this reunion, I wasn’t planning to make it IS’ swan song, but as the day came closer, it just seemed like the time to finally bow out and let others keep the torch of capping going, as I’m sure they will with your continued help.

Anyhoo, if anybody gives a rat’s, Wasting Precious Time will keep limping on and maybe even get some of the attention I’ve been giving IS, and I’ll keep on capping (you can exhale now), and IS might be back for Turkey weeks or if the world ‘needs’ it again. Anyway, thanks to everyone’s who helped out over the half decade or so of this site and everybody who’s capped here.

As a parting gift, I give you this AgentQ masterpiece:

“Well, Lieutenant, I’m glad to see your efforts are SURPRISE MARTY FELDMAN IMPRESSION!” “JESUS CHRIST! Man, you always get me with that.”

p.s. this blog will stay open for whatever bees occupy my bonnet.

To celebrate, we’ve even got a special set of pictures from the serial over at Wasting Precious Time – go write a story with them now!

Of course, one serial ending means another one’s starting. And the winner of the vote I held with myself is….The Phantom Creeps, starring Bela Lugosi. All twelve episodes. Not just the three you’ve seen on mst and IS. The others will be coming to the catalog eventually. There’s also going to be a change of time – Thursdays at 4 PM, hopefully to catch more people capping from work. Not that we encourage that. Starting 4/26.

To mark the occassion and the 502nd item available for request, I’ve finally moved the catalog/request system out of beta and set the price at nothing! That’s right, zip, zero, zilch, nada. What the market would bear. Go ahead and make a request for the item of your choice to be capped at the time of your choice.

I’m not going to shut it down all together. I am seriously considering cutting back to just one or two of the so-called ‘random’ picture sets gathered out of the Inventing Situations stock each week. Those are relatively easy for me to do. If anybody out there has some ideas on the future of WPT, let me hear them. Maybe somebody out there has a camera and can start staging photo dramas for us? Perhaps somebody can do a better job of culling images from old movies? Are there previously silent people who want ‘non-random’ sets badly enough to pay for them (thereby revitalizing my enthusiasm)? Maybe there’s some cartoonists out there who could contribute? Maybe you think it’s run its course? Anybody? Bueller?

Random factoids:

• In the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, Mary Jo notes that they agreed to limit themselves to one Brady Bunch joke for Robert Reed. I’m sure the cappers will exercise the same restraint. Just remember, the only funny thing about the Brady Bunch is that anybody over the age of ten ever watched it. And even that’s more ’sad funny’ than ‘ha-ha funny.’
• This movie might feature one of the most sincere readings of the phrase “so long, suckers” in film history.
• Since we’ve already got Uncle Jim’s Dairy Farm this makes nine episodes we’ve got the short and the feature for.
• The jacket of the dollar bin DVD I picked up of this film lists Mike Nelson and Tom Servo in the cast. I can almost imagine getting Mike Nelson on there from some weird cut and paste, but I have to think their was a mstie having fun to get Tom on there.
• Rewatching this episode, it was nice to recall a simpler time when the notion of “Scooby Doo: The Movie” was still just an absurdist notion and the character of Pearl Forrester was still well motivated and remotely funny.

Running at Wednesday the 22nd, 1:05 PM and Friday the 24th, 7:35 PM.