Terrible Movie Night: Crowdsourcing the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Vibe
Howard Stern‘s intimately live-Tweeted account of Private Parts this past weekend brought renewed attention to the old, good idea of using social media as a platform for making movie-watching and other entertainment-consumption a more intimate, communal experience. And it just so happens that friend of Geekosystem Philip Bump has recently rolled out a project focused on just that.
Terrible Movie Night is a sort of crowdsourced Mystery Science Theater 3000: Viewers watch a chosen bad movie on Netflix at a predetermined time, and as they’re watching it, they take to Twitter or Facebook to comment as the movie progresses. What differentiates Terrible Movie Night from, say, a bunch of friends deciding to get together and do this informally is its timeline system: Commentary on the movie is archived by time stamp, and so the wisecracks of the users aren’t just a transient communal experience, but are preserved for posterity.
What this means for you is that if you happen to feel a yearning to watch, say, Supercop after TMN has given it the rundown, you can go to the timeline page and either jump around to given times or sync up the timeline to progress as the movie plays. It’s almost like having real friends to watch movies with!
If you’re interested in checking it out, Terrible Movie Night is watching Gojira at 8pm tonight; a longer schedule of movies to be watched is also available on their site.
(Terrible Movie Night | Tumblr page)
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