Cinematic Titanic is a complete hoax

Only TWO days ago, cinematictitanic.com mys­te­riously appea­red. Clai­med to be autho­red by Joel Hodg­son, it goes on to say that he is retur­ning to the making-fun-of-movies thing, along with Trace, Frank, Mary Jo, and JOSH WEINSTEIN. So I think some healthy skep­ti­cism wouldn’t be UNfounded.

Neverthe­less, Slash­dot, Ain’t It Cool News, and doubt­less thou­sands of other blogs are blo­wing up about it, and nobody’s asking any ques­tions. Just faw­ning, eja­cu­la­tory cheerings-on.

The first thing you notice is how POORLY the page is desig­ned. You even see a <meta name=“author” content=“John Stot­ler” /> in the source, that the domain is hos­ted at GoDaddy, and is regis­te­red through a pri­vacy proxy. Okay, fine, so these peo­ple have hired an ama­teur desig­ner. It’s possible.

But the announ­ce­ment just resem­bles too clo­sely every MST3K fan’s wet dream. They’re an easy tar­get for a prank like this. They’ve been chan­ting Joel’s name con­ti­nually for over ten years now, beg­ging for him to come back. Pulling one over on peo­ple demons­tra­ting such obno­xious beha­vior would be funny. What if it even made it on Slash­dot? Or Wiki­pe­dia???

Besi­des the fact that it would be weird for all five of these peo­ple to be simul­ta­neously ins­pi­red to beat that dead horse, Joel left the show because he wan­ted to dis­tance him­self from it. In a press release from 1993 he said,

It’s time for me to hang up my red jump suit and move behind the camera. Besi­des, there’s an old show busi­ness adage I once heard Adam West say: “Stay in the same cos­tume and before you know it, you end up sig­ning pic­tu­res at an R.V. show.” Maybe it was Clay­ton Moore, now that I think of it.

I want to become a behind-the-camera guy. I want to get on to the NEXT weird show. I want to be an idea man.

The new site itself is ugly, yes, but more than that, it’s very un-Joel-like through and through. Joel’s a smart, crea­tive, funny guy. Would he really put his name behind such a stale, mea­nin­gless name as “Cine­ma­tic Tita­nic”? With this logo?:

Would he really say, “Our first release is at this time a total sec­ret, howe­ver – I’m willing to say it makes ‘Manos the Hands of Fate’ look like ‘Santa Claus Con­quers the Mar­tians’ in a car wreck with ‘Eegah!’”? These are the words of a fan, naming his favo­rite epi­so­des, not the words of a guy who wan­ted to move on with his life, four­teen years ago.

The site also reads, “I’ve just been inter­vie­wed by Lucas­film online, in anti­ci­pa­tion of Cine­ma­tic Titanic’s first live show and world pre­miere in San Fran­cisco in Decem­ber.” Lucas­film online? Why haven’t they been tal­king about this? Wouldn’t an exc­lu­sive, rare inter­view with Joel Hodg­son about his new pro­ject be something you might want to men­tion? Where in San Fran­cisco is this pre­mier? Why haven’t I got­ten a con­fir­ma­tion email for sig­ning up for the mai­ling list?