Somewhere I’ve got a notebook from high school and college that is nothing but weird invention exchange doodles. Like, upwards of 50 or 60 of them. I’d love to be able to contribute some of them to the actual show, and if I had the $5000 to spend, I’d be really tempted to take the Invention Exchange class just to be able to show off some of the better ones to Joel.
But since it’s just a pipe dream for most of us to work on the show itself, the next best thing would be if the Gizmoplex included more opportunities for fans to interact and submit content of their own.
And the best way to do that would be if each episode premiere on the Gizmoplex included a half-hour pre-show, similar to what Rifftrax Live and The Mads livestreams are already doing for their events. But rather than just the jazz-scored paper cut-outs, they could fill the time leading up to show start with:
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New fan letters
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Cosplay photos/home-built bots/MST3K themed wedding or pet photos, etc.
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Fan art (the tasteful stuff you can show to your grandma in public that is)
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Trivia questions (not about William Sylvester)
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Explain a MST3K Episode Badly submissions
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Fan-voted “top fives” (ex: favorite skits/songs/invention exchanges, etc.)
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Good Thing/Bad Thing about the previous experiment’s movie.
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Riff This Comic! Basically just our long-running Out of Context Comics thread, but you pick one panel a month, and put the funniest submissions up next to it on screen. You could also do a caption contest for old sci-fi movie stills, but comic panels work a little better because you get a dialogue prompt as well as a visual cue)
and if they want to really get fans involved:
- A monthly Invention Exchange Challenge, based around a new prompt each month (ex: “Invent a new musical instrument,” “come up with a new alternative to texting,” “help bring families closer together,” etc.)
These can be submitted as anything from crayon drawings to CAD designs, photos of physical props you’ve built, or even short videos showing them in action (Just don’t hurt yourself or burn the house down). The top submissions could even be inducted into a permanent “Gizmonic Institute Hall of Inventors” up on the Gizmoplex somewhere.
All of this would be content exclusive to the Gizmoplex, which would give more bang for your buck for Gizmopass holders, and aside from maybe recording a video prompt for the Invention Exchange Challenge, most of what we’re talking about here is just JPEGs and text slides in Adobe Premiere, so minimal effort required from the production staff to put together.