Introduction To Caption This!

AN INTRODUCTION TO “CAPTION THIS!”

By Erik Wilson

An electrical engineer in Cleveland, Ohio, is sitting on the floor of his living room, his legs spread straight out under the low coffee table. A computer is in front of him, and he taps away at the keyboard. He clicks the mouse, watches as the screen changes, then begins laughing out loud. In Denver, a university librarian sitting at a computer tries to muffle her giggles with her hand. A graphic artist in Paducah, Kentucky, a video store manager in Sedalia, Missouri, a high school student in New Orleans, Louisiana and a retired policeman in Pennsauken, New Jersey are all similarly amused at the screen they have just called up on their computers. It is the same screen, in the same moment, for all of them, one consisting of twelve small pictures, known as “screengrabs,” accompanied by captions provided by themselves and others like them. The website they are accessing is known as Caption This!

The image that has them laughing is a single frame from the movie “One Million Years B.C.,” which is being broadcast at that moment on cable’s SciFi Channel. In the frame, a blonde Raquel Welch is shown in close-up snuggling with her bearded cave-guy, gazing deep into his eyes, while he stares off into the distance. A sign painter from Augusta, Georgia, with the computer handle MrBungle, has just written the following line to accompany the picture: “Come on baby, invent my fire!”

Caption This!,1 referred to by Wall Street Communications Vice President Bob Decker as “one of the Seven Wonders of the World Wide Web, ” was created in the Fall of 1996. It is a website that was at its inception and remains today unique among sites on the Internet. It regularly receives thousands of hits a day, and has both a transitory and a fiercely loyal following. To access the site, all that is required is to fill out a simple on-line registration form, choose a handle and a password, and go. Visitors to the site range in age from pre-teens to adults in their forties and fifties. Students, homemakers, professional people and retirees are welcome, and there is no discernible class structure or authority figure present. Egalitarianism is the rule. The 14-year-old junior high school student sitting in her parents’ den typing away at their home computer is on equal footing with the 37-year-old accountant sitting in his office with his post-graduate degrees on the wall. What brings them together and defines them as a community is the fact that they enjoy having fun with popular culture, that they have a shared sense of irony, iconoclasm, and inspired wit. Caption This! is all about humor.

The site began with a simple, chance idea and a series of happy accidents. In late October, 1996, a website set up by the SciFi Channel, and known as The Dominion,2 was about to hold its first online convention, SCIFI.CON. The convention was meant to showcase the features and services available through The Dominion, to give a boost to the programming of the cable channel that started it in the first place, and to exemplify the best of science fiction and fantasy on the Internet as a whole, with over 50 “exhibit booths” created by fans, writers, artists, publishers and others exclusively for SCIFI.CON. Just prior to the convention, the SciFi Channel had announced that a popular television series with a cult following, Mystery Science Theater 3000, would move from the cable channel Comedy Central to the SciFi Channel in early 1997, and would begin airing new episodes at that time. SCIFI.CON seemed a perfect place to promote this acquisition.

Mystery Science Theater 3000, or, as it is known to its fans, MST3K, or simply MST, is a show based on the premise that a man is trapped on a satellite in space by a couple of mad scientists. Along with a few “robot” companions -- which are actually puppets -- he is subjected to an unending series of bad movies. He and the robots proceed to trash the movie in each episode by making wisecracks at the screen throughout the showing of the film. The jokes and cultural references range from highbrow esoterica to lowbrow humor; from television and movies to art and literature, music and dance, history, religion, politics, current events, quantum physics and beyond. The audience it attracts is just as diverse.

Back at The Dominion, one of the features from the early days of its inception had been the ScheduleBot, which featured the Screengrabber, a program that seized visual images of the current broadcast on the SciFi Channel and relayed them to the website, where anyone interested could take a look and see what was on TV at that particular moment. The three people directly responsible for building the website initially -- known to the outside world only as Gmark, WebBuilder J and shred -- would occasionally make comments about an odd or unusual screengrab. It was during an episode of The Incredible Hulk that shred, noticing a still of the Hulk standing next to a youth in a baseball uniform and holding a canned soda, said to the other two, “I’d like to buy the Hulk a Coke, and keep him company.”

The three of them laughed at the joke, and an idea began forming. An idea that was simple -- and simply brilliant, as it turned out. What if, they speculated, they could create an application that would allow visitors to their site to share the same sort of joke that they had just made? An application that would allow them to make jokes -- captions -- of their own?

While not initially associating it with the show, which at that time was still in limbo between the two cable channels, they began to create what was, in essence, a home game version of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It was a chance for the viewer to talk back to the screen, to create dialogue or situations that could be absurd or funny or anything but what the creators of the show being captioned had originally intended. It was also a chance for the people making those wisecracks to share them with other like-minded individuals.

Although the actual concept of Caption This! was envisioned prior to the acquisition of MST, by the time it was developed, the announcement of the show’s move to the SciFi Channel had been made. It seemed natural, then, to include their application during SCIFI.CON as a tie-in to the upcoming debut of the show. The intention was to make it a featured part of the online convention, and to then have it become a permanent part of the site once the convention ended. Because of this association, Caption This! and Mystery Science Theater 3000 have been seen as being joined at the hip ever since, even though none of the show’s writers or staff, a group known as Best Brains, had anything to do with the creation of the site. Graphics taken from the show are used to dress the site up, and many, if not most, of the visitors to the site initially found it by searching for information on the Internet regarding MST, but at its heart, it is an invention created solely by the three people responsible for building The Dominion.

In reference to the type of humor found on MST and inherent in making cynical and irreverent comments about television programming in general, it was decided that a somewhat “in your face” type of name was needed for the site. Thus Caption This!, with an exclamation point, became the title of the site that today attracts hundreds of users daily.

As a side note to this connection between Caption This! and Mystery Science Theater, there was a huge outcry among Caption This! users when the SciFi Channel announced in 1999 that it was cancelling the show after a three-year run on its channel (it ran for seven years on Comedy Central, but none of those episodes were ever shown on the SciFi Channel). Many hateful and bitter captions were directed at SciFi Channel executives, programmers, and the station in general; letters and email were sent to the corporate offices, to no avail, and there was worry that with MST going, Caption This! would be dismantled as well. The Dominion has assured its users that this will not happen. Still, there is an undercurrent of animosity among many users because of this turn of events.

What sets Caption This! apart from other captioning sites and makes it unique is the use of the screengrab, the live feed of the SciFi Channel’s broadcast. There are any number of other sites on the Internet that allow visitors to create their own humorous captions for images provided, but none of them have the immediacy and spontaneity of Caption This! There is, for instance, a site3 set up in conjunction with the notorious JenniCam website, the voyeuristic, 24-hour-a-day webcam look at the apartment of one Jennifer Ringley that has been an ongoing Web project for a number of years now, where a still picture is taken from the previous week and visitors are invited to submit captions for that picture. A moderator then chooses the one that he thinks is funniest, and a winner is announced at the end of the week. Similarly, cable channel TNT, on its website, sponsors what it calls the “MonsterVision Caption Contest,”4 in which a still is posted from the upcoming Saturday night movie offering and visitors are asked to submit captions, with each weekly winner being sent a free T-shirt. Sites such as Spinnwebe’s “It’s A Dysfunctional Life,”5 and, before it was shut down over copyright issues, “The Dysfunctional Family Circus,” operate in much the same way, with users sending captions in to a moderator who chooses the ones that will be accepted and displayed.

In addition, some Caption This! alumni have created their own captioning sites on their respective web pages, utilizing screengrabs saved and archived from Caption This! or pictures taken from other sources, including movies, television shows and commercials. Some of these sites include Jazzsoda’s “My Caption Lounge,”6 Artanas’ “DTV,”7 and BuckFifty’s “Cap It Yo’self.”8 While most of these site are not moderated, and nearly all captions posted are accepted and displayed, they also lack the one thing that sets Caption This! apart from all other captioning sites -- they are not “live.” All theses sites are static, virtually unchanging or changing very slowly, with time limits of days rather than minutes for submission. On Caption This!, a maximum of five to six minutes is allowed to create a caption and submit it. Often, when the gallery is full of people and captions are coming in as fast as they can type, a delay of more than two or three minutes assures that a particular caption will be entered near the bottom of the ever-changing rows of screengrabs, or will possibly even not get posted at all, simply because it was sent in too late. It is this chat-room like immediacy, the pressure of coming up with a funny, relevant caption for a small, sometimes nearly indecipherable picture that gives Caption This! its cachet, and brings people back day after day, sometimes for hours on end. Users have spoken of the addictive nature of Caption This!, and how they access it at school or work, even when that means taking a risk, just to make wisecracks and interact with other people doing the same thing.

It is testament to the addictive nature of Caption This! that when glitches occur, as they do with some regularity, users still access the site and make captions. The screengrabber may be stuck on a single image, in some cases for days at a time, or may show just a black screen, and still “cappers,” (or “captioneers”), as the members of the community refer to themselves, will fill the gallery with comments. While many cappers find these technical breakdowns frustrating, and refuse to participate in captioning activity until they are fixed, there are some who consider a frozen screengrab to be more of a challenge than the regularly-changing version, and will stay and make different captions for the same image for as long as their creativity lasts.

As designed, Caption This! does not archive any captions made on its site. The creators of The Dominion felt that it would be too cumbersome to try to save every caption made, so once a caption reaches the end of the page, it’s gone forever. In an effort to preserve some of the better captions, though, many users have taken to saving them themselves, and reposting them in what are known as Caption Galleries on their own webpages. This practice started in early 1997, with a student in northern Minnesota, a capper known as GuloGulo, and now dozens of such galleries have proliferated around the Internet.

One of the ongoing phenomena of Caption This! that many of these Galleries illustrate is the common use of themes or threads in captioning. Like many comedy writing teams, cappers will play off each other, taking a particular subject and giving it a different spin in each caption as suggested by the picture being shown. This riffing on a theme can last for a few hours, or can be carried on for months at a time. For instance, face shots that appear in a screengrab, vaguely resembling some person or persons that are generally well known, are described as the offspring of two wildly disparate individuals, or even the “product of an unspeakable menage a trois between...” three highly unlikely people. A completely black screen has been described as the “close-up picture” of a certain capper’s ex-wife’s heart so often that it has developed a life of its own, and variations on this theme are rampant. Some of the better-known themes, ones that have lasted for a good length of time and are known throughout the captioning community, include the “Failed Superhero” thread, the “Lost Spice Girl” nicknames, and the various television show parodies such as “Poorly Researched Theater,” “Extreme Close-up Theater,” and the widely-used “You’re Shittin’ Me Theater,” sometimes abbreviated simply to YSMT.

While the primary purpose of Caption This! is to be humorous, the chat-room aspect of it cannot be ignored. Users greet each other, converse occasionally or comment on a particularly funny caption while in the gallery. These asides are generally done in parentheses, to distinguish them from actual captions, and after three-plus years, a number of regular visitors have gotten to know one another quite well in some cases. Unlike regular chat-rooms, it is a bit more difficult for users to “disguise” themselves, or pretend they are something they’re not. Caption This! can be compared to an ongoing Rorschach test, revealing a user’s personality through the type of humor in which he or she engages. Through this website, there have been any number of people who have met and developed relationships of one type or another, both within and outside the confines of the Internet. Friendships and romantic relationships have developed, with at least one wedding already having taken place; momentous occasions, such as births, new jobs, graduations or birthdays are noted and congratulations or condolences are given when appropriate. In the last year, one well-known and well-liked capper, a cartoonist from Muncie, Indiana, who used the on-screen handle Widget, tragically passed away as the result of an epileptic seizure that resulted in his going into a coma. The community rallied around each other in mourning, posting a memorial webpage to him, and sent cards and emails to his fiancee in an effort to comfort her. References to him are still made on occasion, as the group attempts to keep his memory alive in the capping community.

The diversity of the group of people that comprise this community cannot be overstated. The range in age, background and social status is enormous. High school and college students interact easily with office managers, artists and lawyers. Retirees and musicians share jokes with security guards and software analysts. Medical professionals crack wise along with journalists and disc jockeys. All are united by a common interest -- that of making each other laugh. Because the pool of participants is so diverse, the range of cultural references is also spread all over the map. Allusions at any given time may be made to such widely disparate influences as Shakespeare, Sidney Sheldon, H. P. Lovecraft or Joseph Campbell; Akira Kurosawa to John Waters; Monty Python to Fibber McGee and Molly; Andres Serrano to Andrew Wyeth to Salvador Dali; Michael Jackson to Mozart to Men Without Hats.

This is not to say, though, that all the humor is highbrow, or that all the jokes are bursting with intelligence and Algonquin-like wit. Because the site is not moderated, there are always a certain number of captions made using genital references, sexuality, flatulence and scatology and other earthy subjects. Just as in any free speech venue, unpopular speech is tolerated with the idea that censorship is more abhorrent than the occasional obscenity or unpleasantness. Even given the sometimes juvenile nature of the humor displayed, though, most users find it worth it to wade through the less than stellar offerings when they come across a caption such as this one, from an administrative assistant in Austin, Texas, who uses the handle psymorph: From the opening of the show “Twilight Zone, ” the screengrab shows the equation “E = MC2” against a background of space and stars. The caption is: “Let’s help this George Bailey.” “Okay, we’ll give him The Bomb.”

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1. http://www.scifi.com/screengrab/startcaption.cgi
2. http://www.scifi.com
3. http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Campus/7682/jenniconp.html#thisweek
4. http://tnt.turner.com/monstervision/caption.html
5. http://www.spinnwebe,com/iadl
6. http://members.xoom.com._XMCM/ratel/lounge.html
7. http://dementia3000.com/dtv/index.html
8. http://www.redrival.com/buckfifty/yoself.html