Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 99: "Bride of the Monster: The One-Act Play" (2002)

Tor Johnson and Bela Lugosi tread the boards in Bride of the Monster.

The movie that inspired a writing project.

I've been on the internet since before the internet was any good at all. In the mid-1990s, when I first started posting to Usenet newsgroups, there was no such thing as social media, and most of the platforms we use every day (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) were still years in the future. Even Google didn't start until 1998, leaving AltaVista as the search engine of choice. Back then, I had a dial-up modem, some rudimentary typing skills, and a lot of pop culture opinions.

If all this sounds achingly familiar, it's because I've written about this era of my life before when I posted my Glen or Glenda transcript from 1997 and my Orgy of the Dead script parody from 1998. Well, today, I'm going to share yet another vintage chunk of text from the olden days, though this one at least dates from the current millennium.

In the late 1990s, my online life revolved around a Mystery Science Theater 3000 newsgroup called rec.arts.tv-mst3k.misc. The show was still airing new episodes back then on the Sci-Fi Channel, and fans would regularly post reviews on RATMM. In August 1998, when MST3K premiered its version of the 1961 monster movie Gorgo as part of its ninth season, I decided to upload a short script called Gorgo: The One-Act Play to the newsgroup. This was basically a little comedy sketch featuring characters from the original film, Sam and Joe, discussing the possible consequences of bringing a Godzilla-like monster to London. (Sample dialogue: "Say, Joe, you don't think they're made at us, do ya?")

The response to Gorgo; The One-Act Play was fairly positive on RATMM, so I kept writing comedy sketches based on other episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Thus was born The MST3K One-Act Play Project. Another RATMM regular, Craig J. Clark, started writing his own MST3K-based plays just a few months after I started. Craig eventually put together a now-dormant website collecting both his plays and mine. It looks like the last entry in The MST3K One-Act Play Project was posted by Craig in June 2004. Remarkable longevity for such a gimmicky idea.

What follows is the text of my one-act play based on Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster. It was originally posted just over 18 years ago on March 7, 2002. I was more than a decade into my Wood fandom at that point, but Ed Wood Wednesdays wasn't even a glimmer on the horizon. At the time, I was in my mid-20s and working as a junior high Spanish teacher in Joliet, IL. I can remember writing these plays during my lunch break and then emailing them from my school computer to my home computer. Good times.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this artifact from the semi-distant past.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 65: The 'Glen or Glenda' Transcript

Ed Wood and Dolores Fuller share a tender moment in Glen Or Glenda.

Here's what made this project possible.

Greg Dziawer, that tireless chronicler of all things Ed Wood, is taking a much-deserved week off. So no new "Orbit" or "Odyssey" from him today. He will return next week with more fascinating findings. In the meanwhile, as a poor but ready substitute, I offer a vintage document from my own archives, one that dates back nearly 20 years. Apparently, back in June 1997, I was whiling away the summer days by painstakingly transcribing my VHS copy of Glen Or Glenda from Rhino Home Video. Ah, youth! On the road to ruin! May it ever be so adventurous! 

If I really concentrate, I can even remember exactly how the transcription process went. I recorded the audio from my TV directly onto a boombox with a dual cassette deck. Back then, I had a cassette adapter that could plug directly into the headphone jack on my TV. I took the resulting recording and played it back on my trusty Aiwa Super Bass stereo radio cassette player. (Essentially a Walkman.) The Aiwa did not have a pause button, so I'd play a few seconds, STOP, type what I'd heard, REWIND, play a few more seconds, STOP, etc. Even with a relatively brief movie like Glen or Glenda, this was a slow, arduous task. I was inspired in this madness by a similar transcript of Monty Python and the Holy Grail that had been floating around cyberspace in the early to mid-1990s.

You have to remember, this was in the very primitive days of the internet. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, and even Google were still in the future when I started. The Internet Movie Database, Amazon, and Ebay existed but were relatively primitive. Instead, my online life revolved around text-based Usenet newsgroups. There was even one called alt.fan.ed-wood. Like most Usenet groups, it's all spam and garbage now. Twenty years ago, however, it was actually home to a small but fervent community of Ed Wood fans, trading what little information was available to us in that benighted era. And it was there that I first posted the transcript you are now (hopefully) about to read.

I vouch for the accuracy of none of this. The formatting is atrocious and inconsistent. I'm sure this document is riddled with errors of all kinds. But maybe, just maybe, you will find it an interesting keepsake from a bygone epoch of Ed Wood fandom. Since it's based on the Rhino edition of the film, it contains a few scraps of dialogue that do not appear in the current DVD version. This material is denoted in RED type.

Enjoy with my compliments.