ALL HAIL WHITE DOT: MST3K season 13 premiere

Tonight I got to do something really fun: I attended the livestream of MST3K’s season 13 premiere, Santo in the Treasure of Dracula, as part of their soft launch of the new Gizmoplex. This screening for Kickstarter backers was the first time I’ve ever watched an MST3K livestream, and it was a hoot.

I rarely get to watch MST3K with anyone else. My wife and kiddo aren’t into MST3K, and outside of a few episodes during college — when I was introduced to the show — I’ve mainly watched it as a solo experience. Being “there” with thousands of other MSTies and feeling that connection was awesome.

We’ve got movie sign!

The episode was superb (as was the movie itself; here’s my Letterboxd review), and after some technical difficulties the rest of the stream went great.

My other favorite onscreen message was “We really did test this”

But the breakout star of this whole launch experience was the white dot. (Or egg. Or ellipse. But dot really does sound best.)

Nothing NSFW in the livestream chat, it’s just pixelated to placate my inner privacy fetishist

While they were fixing the projector, several thousand MSTies spent a lot of time looking at the white dot. The livestream chat — already about as legible as a page from a novel taped to a whirring drill bit — was on fire with dot references, and that stayed true throughout the episode and on into the post-episode chat.

The most-voted viewer question was about whether the dot would be returning in future episodes. I sincerely hope it will.

DOT IS LOVE. DOT IS LIFE.

2 thoughts on “ALL HAIL WHITE DOT: MST3K season 13 premiere”

  1. Olivier Albin

    Ha! I Googled “All Hail The White Dot” out of curiosity.
    I somehow expected a few more, but your blog was the only “hit”, though a basic “All Hail the Dot” search did bring up one Reddit post.
    I too was a Kickstarter “Bring Back MST3K” campaign backer and got to experience the livestreamed Premiere of season 13 on Friday.
    I am a bit more fortunate than you as my grownup son is a fan of the show (I introduced him to MST3K through the Netflix “Gauntlet” seasons) so there’s at least two of us watching and laughing our heads off.
    Yeah, knowing that 4K other like-minded people were watching along with us made the experience a tad more special.
    The White Dot “incident” and ensuing live chat was a great intro to the new season, a hilarious moment and, oh so MST3K!
    I don’t know if the entire chat was/could have been screen-grabbed but it would be fun to go over the thousands of comments.
    I now expect t-shirts, coffee mugs and other tchotchkes to show up online.
    Enjoy the rest of Season 13.
    (As an aside, if you want a really “communal” MST3K, experience go to a “Live” show. Highly recommend it. My kid and I went to see the “Time Bubble Tour” last December, where they riffed Roland Emmerich’s awful “Making Contact”, and it was fantastic!)

    1. Martin Ralya

      Thanks for stopping by, Olivier! I too wondered if there was a way to archive the chat; it was just too fast to read in anything more than a cursory fashion.

      A true live show sounds amazing. I had a good friend out of state who attended those, and he always had a good time. I’ll have to see what pops up in the next year or two.

      Happy to be doing my part to help the white dot spread and embed itself in MST3K fandom. :-)

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