The Screen Age. Prologue: A Message From Tomorrow (2017)

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.

The Screen Age: How Mystery Science Theater 3000 Taught Me to Stop Relaxing and Love Ward E uses the T.V. show Mystery Science Theater 3000 to recount the 20th century as chronology. Its principal conceit is to delve into the movies the show lampooned, one year after the other, alongside discussions of their historical context. This culminates in the millennial bacchanal that coincided with the show’s cancellation.

The principal theme connecting the book’s various historical vignettes is the change that’s come over the collective human psyche as society traverses the Screen Age, this transition from the text through the image to the interactive screen. Here I amplify and expand on the concerns of cultural critics like Marie Wynn, Neil Postman, and Mark Crispin Miller that the primacy of the image and the screen and corporate control of popular media have conspired to make modern life isolated and dysfunctional. But The Screen Age aspires to more than just polemic. The last few decades have been arguably the strangest, bleakest, and most wondrous in human history, and the movies of MST3k prove to be a quirky but fruitful way of organizing and recounting them.