The Screen Age. Chapter 22: Parts (1977-1979)

Chapter 22: Parts (1977-1979)
The privileged few take to the stratosphere, and pay dearly for it, in SST: Death Flight. For Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, though, Earth’s lofty heights yield richer fortunes.

The Screen Age
The Screen Age focuses only on those years in which a Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie was released, episodes of the show were released, or both. The book discusses these years in the present tense, advancing chapter by chapter, up to the end of the millennium, 1999—the year MST3k was canceled. As part of this conceit, 2017, the year the show was reprised, is spoken about as though a part of a future-shock sci-fi vision. The horrors of the third millennium—the rigged 2000 election, the 9/11 anomaly, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina—are presented as a nightmare dystopia we run the risk, from our implied perspective in 1999, of realizing if we don’t change the path we’re on.