Mighty Mayhem breaks onto the YouTube scene with reviews of two-player table top games and three episodes of a brand new Mystery Science Theater 3000-style fan-made video series: Purgatory Theater.
While PT’s title eschews the stereotypically concatenated tri-millenial suffix (i.e. it’s not PT3K), the series embraces the use of a premise and shadowrama and host segments. Which, in recent years, have been missing in many fan-made efforts. As it goes, the premise that is, fake-dead married couple Janet and Brad Mulligan’s (played by series creators and writers, the real-life married couple Kat and Alan O’Kelly’s) journey to a proper afterlife has been derailed by a bureaucratic snafu which is keeping them from reaching their eternal destination. So, they take a number and wait. Because death’s break room is ostensibly off-limits, the ex-Mulligans spend their while-aways in death’s waiting room — a movie theater — “forced to watch endless bad movies” by a grim sort in a floor-length hoodie called The Reaper.
Purgatory Theater’s inaugural triplet of experiments are the public domain shorts Build Your Vocabulary, Sleep For Health, and Basic Brown Basic Blue, respectively. (That last one being narrated by Homer Groening, someone who you never knew about but who was quite influential.) The last few seconds of the John Sutherland produced, cartoon classic, What Makes Us Tick sneaks in at the beginning of the second episode (just before they meet Eyeball, the floating security camera). The implication being that they’ve been watching movies non-stop since they got there. Unlike MST3K, where the protagonists have a week off between.
What else are dead people going to do? Hang out in the break room?
You can see Purgatory Theater on the Mighty Mayhem Youtube channel or be redirected there via their domain, MightyMayhem.com.
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