Anybody want a peanut?

THE INTERNET HAS MUCH KNOWLEDGE CLUTTER: Hey, Princess Bride fans, you never had it so good!

LINKS: Official The Princess Bride Web site; Inigo Montoya on Facebook

Official movie Web sites are dorky. (Almost as dorky as people who, tragically warped by years of brutally enforced adherence to style guides, still use the archaic construction "Web site.") Almost every movie has one — still, in 2011 — but it's hard to imagine what anyone uses them for, other than as a semi-convenient means of watching a movie's trailer (which is almost always easier to find by visiting an aggregation site like those hosted by Apple and Yahoo!). Seriously, ask yourself, when is the last time you went to a movie Web site to look at early photos, or read a plot synopsis, or join a community, or even just see what was there? And yet there's a line item in every movie budget — still, in 2011 — that says something like, "Create Web site. Include trailer, synopsis, photos. Game?"

I mention all of this because I'm a tad confused as to why I find it so charming that The Princess Bride has an honest-to-Pete official Web site. It's right there, on the Internet, just like the movie was going to come out at Thanksgiving, or Christmas. This is a movie that was released in 1987. The Internet was six guys in a room at Los Alamos in 1987. Infoseek hadn't even been invented in 1987. AltaVista returned the same three hits for every search in 1987, and two of them were Al Gore's e-mail address. At what point in the last 24 years did someone with legal jurisdiction over The Princess Bride find himself, while staring at a Web browser, suddenly sitting beneath a blinking light bulb? Hey, it's only negative 13 years until the movie opens, we could really use an official Web site. Or maybe it was: Guys, guys, I finally figured out that line item in the budget! No wonder we still have $251,003.26 on the books.

The site itself is pretty basic. I mean, you're not gonna believe this, but you can look at photos from the movie. Or play a game. Or join a community. And there's official movie merchandise for sale. Some of you just said, "Aha!" but I'm not buying it. Either the official movie merchanidise, or its presence as an explanation for the site's existence. Sure, it's cool to think about owning the official, limited edition, 1:1 scale prop replica of the Dread Pirate Roberts's sword, but how many people have actually seen that and reached for their credit card? Inconceivable! Frankly, I'm not even going to bookmark the site, or probably ever go there again, let alone buy a ringtone, or take a trivia quiz. And despite all of that, it makes me just a tiny bit giddy that there's an official Princess Bride Web site. Not some half-(glassed) fan site. Not a random page on Facebook. It's the official movie Web site.

It occurs to me that I've written this far into a post about a 24-year-old movie and I'm just expecting that everyone knows what it is. People born the year that The Princess Bride was released could have graduated from college by now. If they're Mark Zuckerberg (who's not actually young enough, though it's close), then they could have dropped out of Harvard, alienated friends, rivals and non-existent ex-girlfriends who go to BU, and accrued billions of dollars by now. I just assume that all of those people know about Westley and Buttercup, about Inigo, Fezzik and Vizzini, about the Pit of Despair and the Cliffs of Insanity, about the shrieking eels and the Rodents of Unusual Size, because how do you not have encyclopedic knowledge of something as awesome as The Princess Bride? It's not just a movie. It's one of my vital organs. And now it has an official Web site. And that makes me a little jazzed. Because if there's a Web site, then someone, somwhere, realized at some point that there's a critical mass of people out there who recognize the sound of ultimate suffering, or who would sooner destroy a stained glass window than an artist like yourself. Still. In 2011.