Capping (Mystery Science Theater 3000)

:"for the capping process in biology see 5' cap."

Capping is best to describe the Internet activity of looking at a screen capture (or "screengrab") and typing a caption to coincide with the picture. Usually the caption can be of any use, like observation, but generally it is used to make a humorous quip about the screengrab.

History

The beginnings

It began with the popular cult TV show "Mystery Science Theater 3000", whose characters make jokes while watching bad movies. It was a phenomenon of minimal proportions in the eyes of its viewers and fans. When the series moved to the Sci Fi Channel in the late 1990s, Sci Fi's webmasters at "The Dominion" website created a program on its server called "Caption This!". The process was simple: they took still pictures from whatever was airing on the Sci Fi channel at the time, to which visitors could add their own humorous captions. The program was created to coincede with the show's debut, and came alongside the Channel's other "game", "".

The program had greater longevity than the "Home Game" did, as it debuted from October 30, 1996 and stayed on for several years, allowing users to come in at any time to caption whatever was airing on the channel at the time.

"Caption This!"

While the program remained, fans could sign-in with their Dominion sign-ups and look at the picture to be captioned. New pictures loaded up every minute or so and users could either click on links to see what the gallery had up so far (only a couple recent pictures showed at a time), to refresh the picture if needed, or to make a caption. The program worked well for its time, though had a few snags. One of the common occurrences was a frozen screengrab which stayed on for hours, or when there was no screengrab loaded at all. The latter became a bit of a joke as usually the "broken" screengrab would have a message reading "Sorry. This isn't very interesting without graphics."

The end of "Caption This!"

While "MST3K" was finished with producing new shows, "Caption This!" remained online for fans to continue the capping tradition. Activity at the site remained steady until January 31, 2004 when reruns of "MST3K" stopped airing on the Sci Fi Channel. At first, the only change at "Caption This!" was the removal of the "MST3K" theme, but the site soon experienced a downturn. Screengrabs were provided in worse quality than before, often looking too dark to see, and the program started to freeze up more frequently. Activity dwindled, until finally in July, 2004, "Caption This!" was quietly removed from SciFi.com, with just an [http://www.scifi.com/screengrab/note.html old hidden note] as a reminder.

The capping adventure continues...

Capping in itself did not fade away completely, as some communities still exist, and a couple of related websites provide opportunity for people to continue capping. Most well-known of these are Glitter's Cap Page Board and Inventing Situations.

External links

* [http://lustforlunch.com/is/ Inventing Situations]
* [http://capperwiki.com The Capper Wiki]