Inspired by the very good Archaeologists of MST3k thread, I found myself wondering what other professions/areas of expertise we have represented here in the forums that show up in riffed movies AND how our fictional counterparts stack up.
For example:
I’ve spent a lotta years doing maintenance and engineering and other biz involving machines and robots and whatnot, so Stumpy holds a special place in my heart. Being a flight mechanic is a tough gig and you don’t get no respect. Everybody’s like “ooh, Mr Pilot, you’re so big and muscly, you wiggled a joystick really good” and the flight mechanic is like “I crawled through a 140 F rattling steel cage with a flashlight in my teeth and no safety equipment during a gunfight to rebuild a wiring harness with bubblegum and human hair to keep the engines from exploding, but sure, he’s awesome”
I’m also a huge fan of the Professor and Doug McClure’s character from At the Earth’s Core. Those guys built a self-contained steam-powered drilling machine the size of a yacht that punched through a few thousand miles of rock in the span of a single afternoon nap. The things they could teach us about material science alone…!
As a quasi-professional artist (I once got paid $60 and another time somebody who wanted some drawings gave me a cool ergonomic desk chair they didn’t need anymore), I’d like to point out that the main villain in Angel’s Revenge can’t paint for… skit.
So he should’ve been much more successful, and never needed that whole organized crime thing.
Most of my career is in komputor masheens so Overdrawn at the Memory Bank links up pretty nicely. Can’t say I’ve ever caused a pudgy man to fart Monopoly cards. Yet. Perhaps sometime soon.
My father did offroad motorcross racing. Not professionally; it was his main passtime but he was at it a lot and built up an impressive record. His side of the family are really into dirtbikes. Maybe that’s why I can stomach The Sidehackers when many find that episode to be unwatchable. It’s weirdly relatable (minus the, you know, shootouts and stuff).
It is not uncommon to see a provisional application filed with drawings that look like scribbles. So, I can imagine some of them being done under such circumstances.
I know it’s not web design, but the tee vee people usually treat all aspects of “does thing with computer” as being interchangeable and this video always makes me laugh, so…
I’ve worked in IT and even now spend a lot of time maintaining field equipment and working on data management and digital archiving, so I feel for the technicians and engineers in fictiondom. Poor Scotty changes the laws of physics to save the day, while Kirk yammers away until the evil robots blow up their own heads to get away from him, but who gets all the credit?
So to all the Stumpys out there, Stumpy Stump, rooty-toot-toot!
Okay, so education-wise I’m a biologist. In most MST3K movies we’re either the ones who figure out the monster and how to defeat it, or we’re the ones responsible for it in the first place. So it all evens out in the wash.
I’m also an amateur philologist, and they’re a mixed bag in their (rare) on-screen representations. Probably the most famous one is Walter Pidgeon’s character in Forbidden Planet, and he has issues. Within the MST3K universe the profession is typically represented by a pompous John Agar character, so not a win for the profession there either.
I’ve shared this before, but I’m a corporate learning & development consultant, and a lot of the how-to shorts are exactly the kind of thing I do. Sales skills (like in the bread truck short) or management and coaching skills (like in Hired!) haven’t actually changed much in nearly a century. I’m teaching those very same concepts at a large insurance company on the daily.
What blows my mind is that, nowadays, such a thing would be a PowerPoint presentation. The notion of creating characters with backstory and motivation, a setting, a plot… and then the production values to make it happen!
It’s 100% still true that telling a story is a great way to engage your audience and help them learn. It’s just amazing to me how much money companies were once willing to spend on it.
