I Never Went to Castleton

It's pretty amazing... just a few days ago I mentioned that David Letterman's autograph was the only autograph I own. I said it confidently because there hadn't been much activity in that area for about a decade. Little did I know that, at that very moment, another one was headed straight to me via the United States Postal Service...

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode "Time Chasers" is a classic and one of the best episodes in my opinion. It begins with a title card that Mike Nelson reads out loud as "A David Giancola Film.... is not something you'd want to see."

The hero of the film is Nick Miller, a 10-speed riding academic who has figured out the secret to time travel .... and yet his ventures into the future don't allow him to see the datedness of hockey hair (AKA the mullet). The movie was independently made and entirely filmed in the Vermont area. And so it's not surprising that Nick wears a Castleton t-shirt throughout MOST of the film (there's a brief shirtless scene). It looks like this (the shirt, not the shirtless scene)...

The ever-present shirt is often referenced by Mike and the Bots - Crow: "Remember when everybody got the 'Nick Miller' haircut and went around wearing Castleton t-shirts?" - and has therefore become an iconic image of the show.

When I saw that Edgewood Studios (the makers of the film "Time Chasers") were selling an official Castleton t-shirt, I bought one. And it came today. It also came wrapped around a piece of cardboard. "Probably to keep it from crumpling up", I thought. No, the cardboard was this...

That, my friends, is a flattened VHS cover of the film "Time Chasers" with a personalized autograph from the Director of the film, David Giancola.

So now I own two celebrity autographs (not counting Disney characters, which probably should count)... David Letterman and David Giancola. And if you were only going to get autographs from two celebrities named "David" it probably would be those two.