When I was a kid, there was a TV show on the discovery channel called Movie Magic. It was about special effects, I believe. I never watched it that I can recall. But its title has stuck with me all these years later. It strikes me that its title captures something fundamental about movies: movies are magic. Even bad movies. I’ve been reminded of this as I’ve been watching Hobgoblins.

It was Rick Sloane’s third movie and had a budget of $15,000. According to an inflation calculator I tried, that’s the equivalent of $31,337 today. And they didn’t have digital photography or editing back then. It’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but the acting, camera work, editing, and so on were… competent. Not compared to big budget movies, but compared to other tiny-budget movies. There were characters who were written and played consistently from start to finish. And the result was that this movie—bad as it was—had that movie magic.

Movie Magic is, specifically, the creation of a world. Not merely a temporary world, but a world which lasts in the imagination of those who watched it. As cheesey as the scenes between Macready and his boss were, in some sense they happened. In some sense this was a movie studio boss’s office:

It doesn’t make much intuitive sense, and yet it’s true.

And I think that it’s the people who have that sense of movie magic who are the primary fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000. We’re fans of it because it’s an opportunity to laugh at ourselves. Because every one of us would jump at the chance to be part of movie magic. Every one of us would make the compromises which are unavoidable when you have a budget of $31,338. But for all those tradeoffs, the movie would still be a movie. It would still be a bit of reality with places and people we made out of thin air. Maybe we’d write better dialog, but even if we didn’t it sure would be something to be part of making a movie. And I think that we all know that on some level that’s ridiculous, which is why we enjoy laughing at ourselves so much.