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.

The new site has been advertised as having “Gerson’s Seal of Approval”, which I guess is sort of true. When they asked for my blessing or permission or whatever, I didn’t withhold it, because, well, what skin is it off my nose if you all hate me and would rather caption somewhere else, and even if it was, am I supposed to stop them somehow? Am I from Krypton? Sure I did give them some friendly advice on how to actually make it work and had previoulsy sent them some of my grabber code for another project, but it’s not like I applied any of my professional software testing skills to the site and gave it my seal of monkey safety. Of course, my erstwhile blesing is granted on the understanding that they won’t be killing any monkeys during their first month of operations.

So, there you have it, the year long era of the Caption This! nite shift relocating to Inventing Situations is apparently over. You won’t have GersonK to kick around anymore. Unless of course, their site breaks down under the traffic or they get sued by the Insurance Guy, in which case you’ll all come back to me with their heads between their tails. Mwahahaha!

And unless somebody admits that they were actually coming to these sessions just for Dick, the weekend showings of Dick Tracy are canceled after tonight.

While avoiding any door/ass contact on your way to Caption Crack, feel free to vote in our new poll:

Dick Tracy 4
Zorro 3
Radar Men 2
Undersea Kingdom 2

Admittedly, that’s pretty close for a polling system that would make Diebold blush. That said, we’re still sticking with Dick. And just to change things up, I’m going to show them on Wednesdays at 6 PM eastern instead of Mondays. The first episode premieres on January 10th.

While I’ve only gotten grabs for one episode so far, it looks like it may supply some good capping moments, and the guys in suits running around syndrome manifests itself more mildly than I’d feared. It’s worst symptom is the fact that on wide shots it can be hard to tell if our hero is present. I will say that I’m pretty frustrated by the image quality to file size ratio on the archive files, publicdomaintorrents looks like a viable option though, but that’s my problem.

Since there was no clear loser in the poll, all three non-winners will be up for selection in the next poll, maybe with a new candidate thrown in. Also, Don’t forget to tune in New Year’s Day at 6 PM for the conclusion of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. If you’re too hungover to make it then, it will be repeated on Tuesday the 2nd at 8 PM.

Lastly, I hope to have the WikiMsting completed by Friday at the absolute latest, so time’s running out if you’d like to volunteer to record some lines.

Pros:

• Some cappers may already be kind of familiar with it thanks to its presence on mst3k.
• Goofy looking moon men and cool looking jet packs.
• I’ve already got all 12 episodes grabbed, so I can sit back (though I’ll probably go ahead and redo some episodes and trim the chaff from the rest).
• Grabs coming from relatively decent prints.

Cons:

• The first nine episodes have been part of the last four Turkey Week marathons.
• Suffers from GISRAS (Guys In Suits Running Around Syndrome).

2. Dick Tracy (1937):

Pros:

• I haven’t watched this one, but I imagine it’s fewer goofy suits, if you don’t care for that sort of thing.
• It’s entirely new to Inventing Situations.
• Dick Tracy. It’s a funny name.
• Familiarity born of being on the funny pages for decades.

Cons:

• Looks like chapter two might be missing from the archive.
• Probably also suffers from GISRAS.
• Questionably print quality.

3. Undersea Kingdom

Pros:

• Unspeakably goofy.
• MST-borne familiarity.
• Only two episodes have appeared on IS so far.

Cons:

• Unspeakably goofy.
• Questionably print quality.

4. Zorro’s Fighting Legion

Ok, this one’s a total unknown for me. I just figured it probably doesn’t suffer from GISRAS as badly as some of the others, but apart from that, all I know is I can get the whole thing from the archive.
p.s. Wasn’t it sporting of me not to mention the drama over at that other capping site? Darn. Guess I just did. Ooops.

Flash should take us into 2007, then I’ll probably dip into one of the serials used on mst3k, like The Phantom Creeps, Radar Men from the Moon, or Undersea Kingdom. Be sure to tune in every Monday to see what Flash does next!