Chris Thilk

Today is National Sunglasses Day and everyone on Twitter and Instagram is celebrating by sharing pictures of themselves – or their children – sporting shades. It may be happening on Facebook as well, but we’ll only know in two or three days when the News Feed surfaces those posts.

To mark the day let’s take a look at some iconic movie posters featuring not only the main characters from those films but shows them wearing sunglasses for whatever reason.

The Blues Brothers

“It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark… and we’re wearing sunglasses.”

The fact that Jake and Elwood Blues are perpetually wearing their sunglasses is part of the appeal of those characters, something that makes them look cooler than cool, to the extent that it becomes a joke in the final act of the story in that iconic line above. With that exception it’s never mentioned or pointed out by anyone, even when they’re still sporting them while wearing only a towel in a steam room. The only time you see either of them remove their sunglasses is when Jake is trying to stop Carrie Fisher’s character from mowing him down with a machine gun, and that removal is meant to signal just how sincere he’s being with his apology.

Almost Famous

The movie that first brought Kate Hudson to most people’s attention did so initially by making her face more or less the sole element on the one sheet.

An important part of that photo is the hippie sunglasses she’s wearing, the purple tint of which means you can’t see her eyes. But what you can see are the reflected images of the rock concert she’s apparently watching, with at least a couple performers visible in the reflection along with the adoring throng.

That worked to not just sell the time period – the sunglasses themselves should have told you the story takes place in the post-Summer Of Love 70s – but also the setting in the world of the rock music industry.

Reservoir Dogs

This poster immediately conveyed the anonymous but lethal attitude of the five gangsters who are brought together by Joe to commit a bank robbery in Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature.

Chief among those attitude-conveying elements are the sunglasses worn by all five crooks, which pair nicely with the white shirts and black tie and suits they all wear. Those sunglasses mean they’re keeping part of themselves hidden while also trying to look as cool as possible, not just that they want to keep the sun out of their eyes.

The Terminator

Again, the sunglasses are a key part of what we’ll learn about the character in James Cameron’s sci-fi action film.

On the poster Arnold Schwarzenegger wears them along with a leather jacket that’s unbuttoned down to, it seems, his knees. He’s meant to look as lethal as possible and the sunglasses convey a cool, detached, lethal professionalism that’s augmented by the fancy looking gun he’s carrying.

Importantly, those sunglasses also convey a bit of character information beyond his attitude, with what looks like a digital serial code seen on one of the lenses. That hints to the audience that this cold-blooded killer may not be entirely human.

Lolita

It’s not the 1997 remake, which was more concerned with selling star Jeremy Irons, but the 1967 original adaptation of Alexander Nabokov’s story of teen seduction that sports the notable shades.

The title character is seen on the poster suggestively eating a cherry-red lollipop, looking over the heart-shaped sunglasses she’s wearing at someone in the distance. There’s nothing in the reflection to see, so this is all about establishing the character, with those heart-shapes conveying that she’s all about love in some manner or another.

Today Shout! Factory is doing something that, were I still 18 years old with nothing to do for hours on end on a summer day, I’d be totally down for: Streaming 38 episodes of the original incarnation of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” it has the rights to on its Twitch channel. The stunt has a couple goals seemingly in mind: First, i wants to show off its Twitch channel and reach the powerful, incredibly sticky audience that site has, especially around gamers and others who like to watch live broadcasts from others. Second, Shout! wants to draft off the renewed buzz for MST3K, which recently relaunched on Netflix with new episodes starring Jonah Ray and others.

So because I can, today I’m going to take this flimsy excuse and look back at the marketing of 1996’s Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie.

The movie was the product of what turned out to be a tumultuous time for the show. Shot between the sixth and seventh seasons, its production wound up shortening that seventh season. That meant it was just a season-and-a-half after the departure of original host Joel Hodgson, when fans were still kind of getting used to the slightly different style of Mike Nelson. In fact Hodgson’s departure was at least in part due to producer Jim Mallon’s desire to produce a theatrical feature. That abridged seventh season – it was just six episodes long – would be its last on Comedy Central, which no longer felt this sci-fi themed show fit into its more hip, political brand identity. So at the same time MST3K was never more popular, the result of a rabid tape-trading fanbase, and never on shakier ground.

In the midst of all that the talent and creators of the show signed up with Universal to bring MST3K to theaters. To do so they picked This Island Earth, a Universal-owned science fiction classic that unlike many films riffed by the team actually had a pretty good reputation. There’s no big conceit that’s added to the basic show formula: Mike, Tom Servo and Crow are sent a movie by Dr. Clayton Forester that is meant to drive them mad as part of his plan to rule the world. Instead, they wind up wisecracking their way through it to retain their sanity. In between movie segments the residents of the Satellite of Love engage in various hijinks, including trying to dig a tunnel through space back to Earth, attempting to repair the Hubble space telescope and more.

That’s a stark contrast to many TV-to-movie adaptations, where there’s some bigger plot that’s shoehorned onto the basic idea. This is the show writ-large, though its 75-minute runtime means it actually comes in at least 20 minutes under what a normal TV broadcast would be. Perhaps this retention of the low-concept outline was part of the reason the movie got a *very* limited release by Universal (my friends and I had to go to the one theater in Chicago it was playing at and it wouldn’t stick around long enough to expand) and has languished with barebones and infrequent releases on home video.

While Universal was anxious to release the movie at first, the marketing push perhaps showed that the “the show, but on the big screen” approach was a difficult one to sell. That starts on the poster, which is a direct appeal to the show’s existing fanbase with almost nothing to attract anyone not already familiar with this not-too-distant future. Mike and the Bots are shown in their familiar silhouette at the bottom of the image, looking up at the screen. On that screen are images from This Island Earth, though that movie isn’t mentioned at all. In addition to those images, which are pulled straight from the one-sheet for the original movie, we see the giant MST3K logo hanging in space, with “The Movie” added to it. A word balloon coming from Mike’s mouth declares “Every year Hollywood makes hundreds of movies. This is one of them.”

That’s an OK tagline in that it evokes the often dry sense of humor of the show. But it’s less than compelling and seems a bit half-hearted in the end, like no one could think of anything better so they just went with something that was mildly self-deprecating and called it a day.

The trailer opens with that same copy, which is shown and narrated as Mike and the Bots are shown entering the theater and taking their seats. The narration continues as it sells the idea of the show but this time without a censor. From there on out we get a mishmash of clips from the host segments as well as a few riffs from inside the theater itself.

It’s…weak. Again, there’s no surprise the movie didn’t find a mass audience as there’s nothing here that’s going to appeal to anyone who wasn’t already likely to have been watching the show. If you don’t know who Mike and the Bots are and what that guy in the green lab coat is doing spanking himself with the clipboard, there’s nothing for you here. There’s no decryption code offered for non-fans. Sure, you get a sense of what’s going on, but it fails to sell the audience on anything but watching a movie about watching a movie.

Perhaps that’s why the concept behind MST3K worked so well on the small screen but failed to translate to the larger one, where it takes a lot more intentional effort on the part of the audience to accept the meta nature of the idea.

MST3K: The Movie is a pretty good episode of the show, which is not an insult in any way. But the campaign, which seems to have been tossed off by Universal/Gramercy after it realized it had no idea how to sell such a low-concept movie.