Success Often Depends on the Butterfly Effect

A couple of months ago I got the 20th anniversary collection of Mystery Science Theater 3000 from Amazon since it was pretty cheap used.  On 3 of the four discs was a documentary talking with the cast about the history of the show.

It highlighted to me how often success in something depends on a number of seemingly random events happening.  Series creator Joel Hodgson basically came up with the idea by combining a few disparate ideas:  a movie "wraparound" show (where a host introduces a movie and talks about it before/after commercial breaks like Elvira and so on), the movie Silent Running where a guy is on a ship with only robots he built for company, and silhouettes from an Elton John album cover.  Those ideas created the gist of the show's formula:  a movie show where a guy and his robot pals are shown in silhouette during the movie making jokes.

Pretty much the way most of the core writing/performing group was hired was a guy who knew a guy.  Like Hodgson was working in comedy clubs and the like around Minneapolis around that time where he met original Servo and evil henchman Josh Weinstein.  Later that's also how they found head writer and future host Michael Nelson.

The show was on local Minneapolis TV the first year but then got picked up at Comedy Central.  It was on a bubble for a second season but then a freelance reporter for a paper in Philly saw the show and pitched a feature on it.  That attracted attention from TV Guide, which attracted attention from Time, which attracted attention from Newsweek.  The resulting buzz is what largely got the show picked up for a second season.  And the rest was history.

If you start thinking about it, there's a sort of butterfly effect that goes into something like that being a success.  If Hodgson doesn't combine those three ideas the format of the show is different and maybe it's not as successful.  Or if he hadn't met Weinstein, Nelson, and other people around clubs and such then the show would be completely different.  And of course if that reporter doesn't see the show there's no newspaper article, which means no buzz, which means no second season on Comedy Central.  Which means I never see it and buy the DVDs almost 30 years later!  And it would also have meant there never would have been more than two seasons, which meant there'd also never be a Rifftrax, which means there'd be almost nothing for Pluto TV to show 25-30 years later for me to watch obsessively.

Most everything successful pretty much depends on this sort of butterfly effect.  When coming up with a story it's a lot like what Hodgson did; it's often combining different bits here and there to create a final product.  For me sometimes it's a title or a character or some vague "what if?" thought.  Or maybe I saw a movie or TV show or read a book and something in that makes me think of an idea.  Like when I made gender swap stories on Transformers and GI Joe episodes.

And of course the whole business of writing depends on this butterfly effect.  You have to send it to the right agent at the right time who then has to pitch it to the right editor at the right time.  And knowing a guy who knows a guy also would help a lot--which is why so many of us aren't successful.  If one variable doesn't turn out right then it spoils the whole equation.

On a similar tack sometimes sites will run stories about some famous actor who turned down an iconic role.  Like Burt Reynolds turning down Han Solo, Tom Selleck turning down Indiana Jones, or Will Smith turning down Neo in The Matrix.  The latter was on the Geek Twins site and I was thinking aloud (or through my keyboard) that if Smith had taken that role it might have hurt the movie because he was coming off Men in Black and so people would probably have whined that the movie wasn't an action-comedy like MIB.  But then Wild Wild West might not have sucked as much--or probably not.

All of existence is so fragile when you get to thinking about it.  You're probably better off not thinking about it unless you're writing an alternate history book or TV show.