misty's tour of terror: an introduction for the curious
unreal to see a resurgence of fan activity around the devil-worshipping surprise buttseks game show. unreal to make my little personal in-jokes about it and see people clock them, offline, in public, outside of the usual geezers at munches and play parties gushing over it like it was lisa frank or frutiger aero, and people like me, who saw this shit waaay earlier than i was supposed to after guessing the parental control PIN (it was the year i'd turn 18) (thanks mom and dad! your child wears a collar now) (also i remember one guy saw it at a babysitter's house which good lord lmao). the year of the MToT is revival is nigh! i know it's been nigh for the last 17 years, but this time it's well and truly nigh, mid-nigh, dead of nigh. MILF misty now!
however. the scattershot archival status of the show* means that fan accounts of it are a half-remembered half-waking dream, a mess of whole truths, half-truths, puffery, embellishment, entirely made-up events and rules, and fanfic presented as fact. i think reaching some limited consensus on what actually happened during the show's 10-year mission is critical for shepherding the nascent next generation of its fandom (the original fandom still exists and has always existed) through the crucible of its birth, and keeping its momentum from fizzling out in a telestatic buzz of canon disputes.
so i've sent a bootload of asks, written a bootload of emails, and read a bootload of posts both here and on other sites. i've pulled up the Wayback Machine and dug into Usenet message archives and IRC chatlogs, ICQ chatlogs, AIM chatlogs, to see what people were saying while this stuff was airing. i've even gotten off my ass and gone outside to pick up old tapes from old fans up and down the state, and spent money getting them delivered to me from out-of-state and even out of the country. imagine! to put everything i've learned in one post would be impossible, and i plan to keep yapping about this at least through the end of summer. but i think a broad outline of the show is still good for folks just arriving at the scene of the crime, beset as they are on all sides by conflicting evidence, confused by eyewitness testimony, and unsure where to start. this is where you start.
shut the fuck up. tell us what it was.
misty's tour of terror is a game show that aired late nights on s------ network, a premium cable channel that mostly ran softcore porn and yesteryear's sex comedies (but i repeat myself!), from february 7th, 1999 to october 31, 2009. it started out on monday nights, but switched to thursday nights a few seasons in, and episodes ran from 42 to 64 minutes, though the former includes only a few early episodes and a pilot. its ratings were all over the place, for reasons i'll get into below, but were typically V, SC, and AL, as per the united states pay television content advisory system.
the premise: thousands of years ago, misty devil, an interdimensional trickster, was exiled to earth for a prank gone too far (which is brought up throughout the series in a succession of increasingly outrageous noodle incidents). so, being a chronically understimulated little bitch, she builds a magic fortress called the INFINITE PAIN VORTEX, and lures humans there with promises of money and happiness. but lo! this is a trap laid for her perverse entertainment; players degrade themselves and each other in a futile struggle for the prize, and misty draws on her otherworldly powers to bully them all the way.
cute story. but how did it actually work?
each episode, 7 contestants (officially "contestant challengers," or "CCs" in fanspeak) arrive at the infinite pain vortex for a tour of 5 rounds. each round comprises some kind of physical game, like one where players have to run up a hill under a time limit with misty rolling foam boulders at them, or one where they have to keep their footing on an erratically spinning, tilting platform with misty at the controls. you've seen a show like this, or a parody of a show like this. think takeshi's castle (MXC), or sasuke and kunoichi (ninja warrior), or wipeout. maybe even mario party? does super galdelic hour count here? i digress.
each player gets scored on their performance after the event, and these points are added to the player's total score for the tour. take for example the uphill race i mentioned earlier, named "rock bottom". in this game you have to travel 100 meters in 400 seconds; you get a point for every centimeter traveled before timing out or getting hit by a boulder, and if you make it all the way to the top, you get additional points for every hundredth of a second left on the clock, for a theoretical maximum score of 50,000 pts. (NOTE: not actually possible unless you teleport to the end on frame one). virtually all the games are set up so that the maximum score is 50,000 pts., and the last round isn't scored, so a theoretical maximum score for the whole tour is 200,000 pts. in practice, however, players would hardly come anywhere near those numbers, and the lowest ranking players would score less than 10,000 pts. in a single event.
after each event, the player with the lowest total score is marked for elimination, pulled aside, and given a choice. they can either walk off with a "chicken prize," their score converted to cents, or play a nefarious, stupidly risky gambit---one that just might get someone else eliminated in your place.
fuck it, i'm not going down without a fight. bring on the gambit.
congrats! you've just entered The Weird Part Of The Show.
the gambit, you see, is to challenge the next-lowest-ranking player to a contest to see who goes home empty-handed. to decide what that contest is, misty brings out the Wheel of Torture.
…oh god, i forgot to mention. this is a BDSM show. you know that, right? you were able to pick up on it, weren't you? i don't know how you found this post without already knowing that, and if you really just stumbled across this i'm sorry you only found this out after reading about, uhh (checks) ~1000 words? but yeah this is where most of the sadomasochizing happens. some of misty's fantastic challenges include, but are not limited to:
getting whipped by misty until you safeword
getting your bare ass spanked until you safeword
getting facesat-choked until you safeword (hand gesture this time!)
letting misty make out with each of you and having her keep on the better kisser
making out with the other player and being judged by a panel of audience members (the yaoi fangirls went crazy over that one)
mud wrestling!
oil wrestling!
just straight up begging
fucking DEPTH TESTING. look that one up on your own.
if that isn't degrading enough for you (slut,) the player who survives elimination has to play the rest of the tour in their underwear. a player who survives twice has to play the rest of the tour butt-ass-naked.
after two rounds, viewers at home and in the audience could vote on which CC would get a "blessing" in the form of a 10,000-point bonus, delivered by a nun. did i mention the entrance to the infinite pain vortex was in the basement of a convent? yeah they've been trying to seal her up for centuries now. yes, that means a perfect score sans grand prize would actually be 210,000pts. no, no one ever got it.
so how about that grand prize? it started out as $25,000 (2,500,000pts.), which is the kind of money a kinky late-night b-movie of a game show does not put out unless they know it's gonna be a while till someone gets it. to get it, the final round brings the remaining 3 players to a hedge maze. first to pluck the black rose in the center of the maze goes home with the grand prize and their past earnings. so a truly perfect score would be 2,710,000pts.
there's just one catch: misty is chasing you through the maze with a nerf gun. you all have trackers, and she has a handheld minimap. if you get shot, you're out, and only the last player shot gets paid out their score. every week the prize wasn't won, 10% of the cumulative final score of all three players would be added to it. it wouldn't reset until it was finally bagged.
the grand prize would only be won three times. two of those were fair and square, and the third was on the halloween series finale, in which misty was visited by an interdimensional parole officer who, after seeing all the joy she'd brought to humans around the world, agreed to grant her parole on the condition that the remaining prize money had to be paid out. thus the last three players would race unharried to the center of the maze. the exact terms of the parole agreement were that misty had to show kindness to a former enemy, but it didn't say which one, so all the CCs were taken from past seasons, and the finale doubled as a retrospective and tripled as a tell-all.
the creators of the show, maria and derrick (nee lithum (said "LYE-thum" (not "lithium"))) colt, had watched japanese game shows like the ones mentioned above, picked up a strong kinky undercurrent, and decided that someone had to go and turn the subtext into the text. in addition to the masochism inherent to those shows' grueling physical challenges and humiliating wipeouts, the colts had also zeroed in on their hosts as Doms par excellence, calling count takeshi "a Master by every measure" (capitalization theirs). one of the writers was even purported to have written takeshi/tani fanfic! the colts then extended that line from hosts, to doms, to heels in wrestling, leading to the brilliant idea to cast indie wrestler maggie lovebrine (aka "pearl viper") as misty devil.
though most of the kink by weight was in the elimination games, a kind of ambient freakiness permeated the whole show to saturation. the main halls of the infinite pain vortex combined wartenberg pinwheels, st. andrew's crosses, hanging manacles, and other Cool Devices (so to speak) with rococo artwork and architecture to produce the kind of dungeon that could've housed justine herself.** but it also had a medieval room! and a roaring '20s room! and an ancient sumerian room! the conceit behind this eclecticism was that the vortex, having moved itself to and fro across the world over the millennia, looking for saps, was gradually built outwards in layers, according to whatever architectural style was in at any given time and place. the finale took this in a clever direction by framing the tour as a "journey to the center of the IPV," wherein each round took place on a deeper floor, from a present-day "new millennium floor" all the way down to a stone-age floor, with the final double-door opening to a bright, futuristic machine room, aseptic and uncannily quiet but for the humming coming from all directions, stairs and railings winding and spiraling around at alien, escherian angles to remind you that, oh, that's right, she's not from here.
in fact, misty tied the whole package together, a whirlwind of horns, leather jackets, slick red boots and maniacal laughter who sprouted wings when she got riled up and threw a double-voice at the rare sucker who managed to get her genuinely mad. not that this was easy; on the contrary, she had a knack for coming out on top of every interaction. her normal repertoire was a disorienting mix of flirty banter, outright catcalls, threats of bodily harm served with a smile, and bone-cutting put-downs, fired aloof with the precision of a russian sniper. she was scary good at getting under your skin, at intuiting your deepest insecurities and guessing how to apply maximum pressure in minimum time, omitting all needless words. the truth is that this intuition amounted to going over CC auditions and interviews, taking note of their reported strengths and sore spots, and having enough time to tune her natural powers of humiliation to each of them in advance. but it was an impressive show of sadistic creativity nonetheless. if you did poorly on an event, she'd even give you a nickname commemorating it, and refer to you exclusively by it for the rest of the game. and if you came back a few seasons later, she wouldn't forget.
oh by the way, there was a bondage event. it wasn't even an elimination game, you just got tied up weakly and had to wriggle like an escape artist until you got out.
sounds hot. how do i watch it?
yyyeeeeeaaaaahhh that's kinda the problem.
you need to understand that this show aired at a time when kink was a more contentious topic than it is today. not that it isn't today! but this was the jack mcgeorge debacle era. it was the "arrested for battery over a wooden spoon" era. it was hard out there in a way that's hard to appreciate today. no really, think about it: this was late-night viewing…on a porno channel. it was so pervy it made the perverts uncomfortable. the network allowed it run, because it consistently did well. but they could never not be a little sucky-fucky about it.
take its ratings for example. remember when i said they were all over the place? that was because the network kept trying to stick it with a "GV" rating, for "graphic violence," while the show's crew (correctly) argued that a rating that extreme was only appropriate for stuff like gore and dismemberment, and that the violence in MToT, while more sexualized, wasn't any more extreme than in your typical contact ballgame or martial art.*** the surface manifestation of this internal debate was that the show's rating flipped between "V" and "GV" several times over the course of its run.
on that note, its ratings were made even more inconsistent by the fact that the level of nudity per episode varied depending on whether anyone had gotten WoT-ed twice, or whether any of the elimination events required at least some nudity (e.g. spanking), so that the show flip-flopped between "N" and "BN", and by the end of it a blanket V-N-SC-AL had been thrown over the whole thing. incredibly, no episode ever received a "GL" rating for "graphic language" (i.e. swearing like a sailor,) though a few of them came close. misty had a rolodex of innuendos and metaphors that would dazzle even the most imaginative smutsmith, many of which felt dirtier than the terms they were covering up (this may have been the point).
anyway, the most important consequence of this lack of network support was that the show never got an official video release of any kind. like, at all. there were a few tapes handed out at fan events. there were even a few laserdiscs at the earliest events, 'cause weren't fully dead yet in 1999. but nothing in retail, or online, or even mail order. moreover only a handful of episode ever were handed out. most of the clips you see on the internet are from viewer recordings, either VHS or DVR. we don't know if every episode has been recorded. we do have reason to believe some crew members were given backups of the original video files, and it's likely those files are still lying around someone's garage somewhere. but the full series has yet to surface. we end up in the strange position of maintaining a fandom for a work of mostly lost media surviving as mostly oral history.
…which is exactly why people like me have a responsibility to use the internet to link up as many fans as possible. the more of them learn about efforts to archive the series, the more likely someone is to call in with a shoebox video they'd never considered uploading until now. if you know someone IRL who's mentioned having watched MToT in its heyday, show them this post! see if they have an old busted VCR, or an old hard drive, or a wacky con story none of have ever heard before, or even a memory of an event or episode or witty exchange the rest of us have either forgotten about or never seen. we want your contributions! someday, every piece of this puzzle will have fallen into place.
until then, get comfy, fire up your torrenter of choice, and see if you can answer any of these prompts for yourself as you watch:
who's your favorite CC, and why?
what would your CC name be?
conversely, what nickname would misty give you?
which main event would you do best/worst in?
which elimination game would you be a shoo-in for?
if you were brought onto the revival crew, what would you change?
conversely, is there anything you'd keep that you think others would change?
you're on the audience panel for CC Smooch. who gets your vote, and why, for each episode it appears in?
who gets your blessing for each episode?
best misty insult?
see you next post!
*that you can't upload full episodes of a show like this to YouTube is imo a big part of the problem. gone too are the pornhub uploads, as of about a decade ago. there even used to be episodes split up into parts here on tumblr, but that ship has long sailed.
**the working title of the show was, in fact, black justine.
***those of you into martial arts in a freaky way are welcome to turn this comparison in your heads a bit.
Day 3 of 18 "Krrrriiiiiinnnggg", I said to the alarm. I woke up before you buzzed. Closing to the last, departing to the first. Though learning more each day, missing you most when I stay. Pick me up love, it is the 18th day. Credits roll, end now. #enjambments #creativewriting #3of18 #academictrack #MTOT #english
