Right, so I’ve been here 5 and a half years and never posted any sort of article or anything and I guess the new year is the right time to change that. This is a game/challenge we played at an old MST3K board, and I’ll try and explain how it works. Basically you take a standard season of a show you like (it works best if it has a good number of seasons, and isn’t intensely serialized, but anything you can make work for you is fine) and fill in your favorite episodes from any season of the show based on episode number.
So if I’m doing MST3K, I decide I’m filling in 24 episodes since it has multiple seasons of that many episodes. I look at all the episodes that ever aired as the first in a season and decide the season 7 premiere, “Night of the Blood Beast” is my favorite, so I fill that in the first slot, decide what my favorite is for episode 2, then 3, etc, until you eventually get something that looks like:
701 Night of the Blood Beast
902 The Phantom Planet
303 Pod People
904 Werewolf
805 The Thing That Couldn’t Die
1006 Boggy Creek II And the Legend Continues…
907 Hobgoblins
508 Operation Double 007
609 Skydivers
810 The Giant Spider Invasion
311 It Conquered the World
212 Godzilla vs. Megalon
613 The Sinister Urge
814 Riding with Death
415 The Beatniks
316 Gamera vs. Zigra
817 Horror of Party Beach
618 High School Big Shot
819 Invasion of the Neptune Men
820 Space Mutiny
621 The Beast of Yucca Flats
422 The Day the Earth Froze
523 Village of the Giants
624 Samson vs. the Vampire Women
Some random points:
- Say your show usually runs 24 episodes a season but one season has 25. You can either include that episode by default if you like it, if you do not then end your list at 24.
- If you want to do a show that has, say, 6 seasons but you happen to hate every episode in the 9th slot, either choose your least disliked one or just skip that number, the point really isn’t to force you to include episodes you hate.
- I am probably forgetting other guidelines we had, if some other situation comes up just improvise.
- Have fun! Maybe? Yay.