We’re coming up on the final episode of Dick Tracy here at Inventing Situations. This very Wednesday (depending on how quickly you read this, that’s tomorrow, today or the past) at 6 PM eastern. I’d give you a recap, but frankly, I have no clue what’s going on in the series any more.

To celebrate, we’ve even got a special set of pictures from the serial over at Wasting Precious Time – go write a story with them now!

Of course, one serial ending means another one’s starting. And the winner of the vote I held with myself is….The Phantom Creeps, starring Bela Lugosi. All twelve episodes. Not just the three you’ve seen on mst and IS. The others will be coming to the catalog eventually. There’s also going to be a change of time – Thursdays at 4 PM, hopefully to catch more people capping from work. Not that we encourage that. Starting 4/26.

To mark the occassion and the 502nd item available for request, I’ve finally moved the catalog/request system out of beta and set the price at nothing! That’s right, zip, zero, zilch, nada. What the market would bear. Go ahead and make a request for the item of your choice to be capped at the time of your choice.

It’s official. I’m not good enough for you any more. At least, not the old timey nite shift cappers. Tired of being under my public domain thumb for their once a week gatherings, and not getting to cap the infomercials they used to sit through endlessly, Jazppie and Hizsoda have built the new captioning site Hipsoda’s Caption Crack. Starting 1 AM eastern, March 18th, they’ll apparently be running it every Saturday overnight, offering grabs more to the discerning tastes of the people who used to sit through night after night of Thriller and Lapre.

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The polling on our next serial is closed, and the results were as follows:

Dick Tracy 4
Zorro 3
Radar Men 2
Undersea Kingdom 2

Admittedly, that’s pretty close for a polling system that would make Diebold blush. That said, we’re still sticking with Dick. And just to change things up, I’m going to show them on Wednesdays at 6 PM eastern instead of Mondays. The first episode premieres on January 10th.

While I’ve only gotten grabs for one episode so far, it looks like it may supply some good capping moments, and the guys in suits running around syndrome manifests itself more mildly than I’d feared. It’s worst symptom is the fact that on wide shots it can be hard to tell if our hero is present. I will say that I’m pretty frustrated by the image quality to file size ratio on the archive files, publicdomaintorrents looks like a viable option though, but that’s my problem.

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The new year will start with the capping of the last episode of Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe, which means it’s almost time for me to start getting screengrabs from the next serial. It also means that since the last two episodes will be running on holidays, I’ll play them each on their regular spot on Monday at 6 PM AND Tuesday at 8 PM for those of you who’ll be celebrating/hungover on the 25th/1st. At any rate, I’m going to let you good folks vote on the next serial to get capped. Also, if anybody has any suggestions for a new time slot, I’m open to that too. Here then, the choices:
1. Radar Men From The Moon:

Pros:

• Some cappers may already be kind of familiar with it thanks to its presence on mst3k.
• Goofy looking moon men and cool looking jet packs.
• I’ve already got all 12 episodes grabbed, so I can sit back (though I’ll probably go ahead and redo some episodes and trim the chaff from the rest).
• Grabs coming from relatively decent prints.

Cons:

• The first nine episodes have been part of the last four Turkey Week marathons.
• Suffers from GISRAS (Guys In Suits Running Around Syndrome).

2. Dick Tracy (1937):

Pros:

• I haven’t watched this one, but I imagine it’s fewer goofy suits, if you don’t care for that sort of thing.
• It’s entirely new to Inventing Situations.
• Dick Tracy. It’s a funny name.
• Familiarity born of being on the funny pages for decades.

Cons:

• Looks like chapter two might be missing from the archive.
• Probably also suffers from GISRAS.
• Questionably print quality.

3. Undersea Kingdom

Pros:

• Unspeakably goofy.
• MST-borne familiarity.
• Only two episodes have appeared on IS so far.

Cons:

• Unspeakably goofy.
• Questionably print quality.

4. Zorro’s Fighting Legion

Ok, this one’s a total unknown for me. I just figured it probably doesn’t suffer from GISRAS as badly as some of the others, but apart from that, all I know is I can get the whole thing from the archive.
p.s. Wasn’t it sporting of me not to mention the drama over at that other capping site? Darn. Guess I just did. Ooops.

The serials will now start at 6 PM Mondays. When it started that half hour later by accident today, it seemed to generate a bigger crowd. Could be a coincidence, but maybe it’ll coincide again next week when we show episode four of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe – The Destroying Ray!

And since you folks seem to enjoy the blog more when I’m talking about the Brains instead of capping minutiae, here are two fake campaign ads from Michael J. Nelson:

p.s. “Michael” is in fact the answer to the question that was so hotly debated during today’s Flash Gordon episode.