Checking in on old friends…
Readers may have relied, as your correspondent did, on the discerning commentary and trenchant criticism of the team behind (and for that matter, in front of) Mystery Science Theater 3000, the cinematic showcase that ran from 1988 through 1995 first on The Comedy Network (now Comedy Central), then The Sc-Fi Network. Its creators have been for the most part wandering in the limbo of development deals since…
But just last week they unveiled the “proof of concept” of a new project, JollyFilter, which is, in keeping with the responsible repurposing ethic of our time, devoted to revitalizing old films… and which you can see here.
As we consider our own reclamation opportunities, we might pen a birthday verse to Percy Bysshe Shelley, the lyric poet who was one of the leaders of the English Romantic movement… and who had a confident (if not to say exalted) sense of his role in society:
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
