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RiffTrax’s 200th Riff

Surpassing MST3K, RiffTrax announces its 200th riff:
StoneCold

Stream or download it here.

82 Replies to “RiffTrax’s 200th Riff”

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  1. EricJ says:

    Even though it’s just an episode-count claim (Iike the Simpsons claiming “We have more episodes than the Flintstones!”), given RT’s opinion of themselves, I have a little problem with their claim of “surpassing” MST3K…A more diplomatic term, perhaps?

       7 likes

  2. maclen says:

    Surely the apt attitude at least for me, regarding this is of course simply a question of “quality over quantity.”

       5 likes

  3. JCC says:

    There’s a pretty good 30 For 30 doc on “The Boz”, I believe it’s viewable on Netflix. I never watched football but I knew all the big names because they became a part of the pop culture and was shocked that he played for such a short time in the NFL.

       4 likes

  4. littleaimishboy says:

    It was released on Thursday, in fact.

    Surprising that no one mentioned it before now …

       3 likes

  5. Remmie Barrow says:

    Definitely a BIG hunk of 80’s cheese here.

       3 likes

  6. mst3ktemple says:

    I still look forward to each of their riffs. Great stuff. I hope they keep going for 200 plus.

       15 likes

  7. Johnny's nonchalance says:

    EricJ:
    Even though it’s just an episode-count claim (Iike the Simpsons claiming “We have more episodes than the Flintstones!”), given RT’s opinion of themselves, I have a little problem with their claim of “surpassing” MST3K…A more diplomatic term, perhaps?

    What is RT’s opinion of themselves?

       4 likes

  8. Droppo says:

    EricJ strikes again…a bit of unsolicited advice: don’t watch Mike-era MST3K or Rifftrax. It appears to make you very unhappy.

    Congrats Rifftrax! It’s safe to say this project has been a resounding success for Mike, Kevin and Bill.

    In celebration, here are my top 10 Rifftrax eps (in no order):

    Cool as Ice
    Birdemic (studio version)
    The Boy in the Plastic Bubble
    Psycho II
    Abraxas
    The Star Wars Holiday Special
    Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny
    Twilight
    Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
    Karate Kid III

       31 likes

  9. David J says:

    This has to have some of the cheesiest dialog I’ve seen in a Rifftrax movie! I doubt they were saving this one for the 200 spot, but it’s perfect for this milestone!

       2 likes

  10. eric m says:

    Don’t get me wrong, I love the RT guys (at least Kevin, Mike, and Bill) but they could do a thousand riffs and not surpass MST3K.

    Watching RT makes me understand Joel’s comic con comment of what it meant to be head writer on MST. “It means they were in charge of the remote control”. It certainly didn’t mean they were the most talented writer.

       3 likes

  11. Mike "ex-genius" Kelley says:

    I was one of Rifftrax’s biggest fans when they first started, but there is little doubt in my mind the last few years have been very very poor in terms of what they do anymore. At first I thought it was because their hearts weren’t in it anymore, and while I think there is some of that I think it’s mostly that a large part of the writing is being done by younger people who never did have the talent of the folks who worked on MST3K.

    I still buy the shorts but even those have declined greatly. Perhaps we are all now too jaded to ever approach that golden era of MST3K, and the world has changed too much in too many bad ways for the humor ever to be quite as innocent and charming.

    But for those fans, it’s great that at least someone is still at it — and for nothing more than all the joy they gave me during the MST3K years, I wish Mike, Bill and Kevin the best.

       7 likes

  12. Cornjob says:

    Lance Henrickson is good in anything.

       11 likes

  13. TarlCabot says:

    200 Rifftrax’s and I think I’ve watched all of maybe 5 or 6.

    I watched the first few when it started, got bored of them. Every few years I feel charitable and go see a live riff just to know if it’s any better than I remember, and they just come off as low-effort and pandering.

    So, congrats on reaching 200 Rifftrax, you’ve surpassed MST3K in terms of output. And that’s about it.

       1 likes

  14. EricJ says:

    TarlCabot:
    200 Rifftrax’s and I think I’ve watched all of maybe 5 or 6.
    I watched the first few when it started, got bored of them. Every few years I feel charitable and go see a live riff just to know if it’s any better than I remember, and they just come off as low-effort and pandering.

    So, congrats on reaching 200 Rifftrax, you’ve surpassed MST3K in terms of output. And that’s about it.

    I’ve watched a few of the early RT’s on Hulu (so I have the luxury of not having to pay for them), and like CT, I find the live-concert ones funnier, as there’s more direct input about whether the audience actually finds the riffs funny. When RT’s are just doing the movies in their own hermetically-sealed environment where they can reassure each of other of their comic brilliance, there’s an air of desperation about trying to turn EACH and EVERY SINGLE strange momentary input into a ten-minute running gag, like the glory days of BigMcLargeHuge and Rowsdower. If a character stubs his toe, it gets a riff, and then the character will show up five minutes later, “I would have gotten here sooner, except I stubbed my toe”, if he’s shot later, “Ow, my toe!”, and then if a character knocks on a door later, “Hi, I’m selling iron-tipped boots!” It gets to the point that the audience wants to shout back “Will…you…freakin’ forget about the toe thing already??”, at which point they now make it a running ritual to do the “Yes, thank you, Bill, we’ve stopped running that joke into the ground now…” routine at least once every movie as a self-aware performer shtick. (At least, I hope it is.)
    There’s a difference between the “found humor” that Joel Hodgson tried to create out of a few movies lying around KTMA, and frantically rooting around for humor like searching your couch cushions for change and hoping to find a nickel instead of lint–Namely that with one, you don’t always have to try so HARD.

    Also, in the live CT “East Meets Watts”, there’s a riff where a character climbs up a cliff, and Trace riffs “Hey, Joel–‘Rock climbing'”, and Joel jokes back “Hey, Trace–‘Audience pandering’.” :)
    When the Joel-era Brains took their act on the road, think Joel wanted to create some integrity to the group that this was NOT “MST3K with a legal name change”, it was just four comics reuniting to do what they had experience in doing. With RT, there’s a fairground-rockband sense that fans have to know every fanboy-loyalty cultural reference to the glory days of the show–Look, we’re doing Manos again!
    One of the early RT’s I Hulu’ed was Supersonic Man–because I’d remembered seeing the original on a local station as a kid and had no idea what I was looking at–so when I watched the RT version, was the appeal in choosing that one to riff because it was jawdroppingly strange, or because it was from the director of Pod People?…No, from the riffs, it was apparently selected because it was supposed to remind us of Puma Man! And it had Cameron Mitchell from Space Mutiny! Hey, Mike–“SciFi-era audience pandering.”

    (And not to quibble numbers, but is the 200 count including the shorts and Batman serials? And if so, does that mean we have to count Phantom Creeps and Commando Cody MST3K shorts as separate “episodes”, just to keep the numbering equal, or do we need an asterisk on the record?)

       3 likes

  15. NickH says:

    @EricJ
    The 200 count is just full length feature films. The shorts and Batman serials would add almost 250 more to that number if they were included.

       4 likes

  16. Torgospizza-NJ says:

    @ ERIC J (#1)…I thought “Joel v. Mike” and it’s offspring, “RT v. CT” were buried. I stand corrected. I didn’t interpret the RT guys claim to have “surpassed MST3K” in the number of episodes to be anything more than that, a numerical milestone. Other than the cringing lyric of the RT theme song about “professional jokes by comedy professionals”, I’ve never witnessed an attack of hubris from any of the gang. Not one pwn or put-down from any cast member at the expense of any other cast member, in any interview, live show or twitter that i’ve ever witnessed in fifteen years plus. No current or future project will ever eclipse the original shows or recapture the feeling we had when we first saw them, when we all young and beautiful.

       18 likes

  17. jaybird3rd says:

    Just a few random observations, prompted in part by Eric’s comments. One of the things that Rifftrax has to struggle with is that today’s audiences aren’t steeped in the same sort of media monoculture that still existed through the late 1990s. This leaves them with much less potential material in the form of shared experiences that they can mine for jokes, especially the more referential kind of jokes that MST3K was famous for.

    MST3K’s writers could build riffs and sketches out of those ubiquitous Sally Struthers correspondence school commercials, or Yul Brynner’s anti-smoking PSA, or tired reruns of “I Love Lucy”, or those omnipresent ads for “Lord of the Dance”, because they could more or less take it for granted that everyone in their audience was watching the same broadcast networks that they were and had also seen these things a million times already. Now, the Internet gives everyone the ability to pick and choose what they watch and insulates them from ever having to see anything else, which leaves the audience–especially younger folks who grew up in that context, and are now the same age as the younger Rifftrax writers–without the kind of collective cultural memory that the MST3K audience had. Basically, most of these people are blissfully ignorant of anything that existed before they were born, and may even be unaware of most of what came later if it doesn’t happen to slip through their self-imposed media filters.

    Rifftrax’s efforts to find the same sources for jokes in the new media have been mixed. They’re either stuck reaching for low-hanging fruit, like kicking around Paris Hilton or the Kardashians for the upteenth time, or else trying to take someone who is “famous” in a narrow social media circle and making them out to be some huge cultural figure, even though most of the audience doesn’t know who they are. In “Frankenstein Island”, for example, they make reference after reference to someone on Twitter called “DadBoner” whenever a bearded character is on screen, mostly in the form of comments about alcohol which aren’t inherently funny and don’t have anything to do with what’s happening in the movie. I’ve never heard of “DadBoner” and I don’t know anyone else who has either, but I gather that he’s a bearded guy on Twitter who talks a lot about alcohol. Okaaaaay, so why is that supposed to be funny to anybody other than drunken frat boys on Twitter?

    I think this is one of the reasons why Rifftrax, both in the material they write and in the current box office hits that they choose for riffing, tends to be a lot more topical than MST3K ever was. On MST3K, they could get away with referencing a print ad from a 1940s Clark Gable movie (“Gamera’s back … and Garson’s got him!”), but that would never be possible with today’s audiences because their experience and their attention spans are far too short. So, you end up with lots of riffs that are drawn from the “lowest common denominator” end of the cultural spectrum, and I think they’ll ultimately prove to be short-lived as a result. Can you imagine a Shout Factory equivalent publishing collections of Rifftrax’s treatments of the Twilight movies thirty years from now? By then, the Twilight movies will have long since been totally erased in the public consciousness by some other shallow flash-in-the-pan fad, and everyone will have forgotten about such cultural icons of today as “Twitter’s DadBoner”, leaving no reason for anyone to look back at any of that stuff.

    Rifftrax’s output may now be larger in volume than MST3K’s output, but with a few notable exceptions, I doubt that most of it will be as interesting or as enjoyable in the long term as MST3K continues to be. It’s a shame, too, because I think they’re very talented people, and although I haven’t seen anything recently that interests me, I genuinely think that several of the releases they’ve done in the past measure up to the best of MST3K.

       15 likes

  18. Gummo says:

    I can’t believe the sourness & negativity expressed here over what is a simple & joyous milestone.

    Happy 200th, Rifftrax!

    And why shouldn’t the guys be proud? They basically created a new business model from scratch, took a big chance that there would be an audience willing to sit & twiddle the play buttons until their movies & commentaries were synched up (before they returned to doing B movies) and that enough MSTies would follow them into this uncharted territory to keep it viable until they could broaden their audience to newer, younger fans.

    They let others worry about “art” and “the legacy” and just tried to keep being funny commenting on dumb movies.

    And for the most part, they’ve succeeded. I’m very glad to have had my life “enriched” by Abraxas, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, Terror at Tenkiller, Galaxy Invader (“I’m going to call you pookynoodle”), the Twilight abominations, Starship Troopers, the shorts, and so much more.

    And if they’re not doing EXACTLY what they were doing 20 years ago, well, are you? And how would all these so-called fans be complaining if they HADN’T changed at all since the 1990s?

    Whatever. I’ll let others feel angry and unfulfilled. I’m happy that Mike, Kevin & Bill are still working together, still making each other laugh, and still making me laugh. That’s really all I’m looking for from them.

       30 likes

  19. Mike "ex-genius" Kelley says:

    Jaybird,

    That’s an interesting and thoughtful summary about the differences between riffing in a modern era and the MST3K one except…

    One thing I’d argue is that MST3K never even worried about whether their audience would “get it”, and that’s all the modern writers (and I will leave Mike, Kevin and Bill out for a moment) think about. So they COULD make a riff referencing even such obscure things like a girlfriend who stole Mike’s keyboard and if it made them laugh, so be it.

    And I don’t buy the “shared culture” argument you are making — if anything, the internet should have strengthened the amount of stuff most of us are familiar with. The very obscure calls to old films and TV ads done in the MST3K days were mysteries to my wife, who is (mostly) the same generation as I am, but she did laugh at the stuff she understood. But here is where I think you have a good point though — if the present young writers for Mike and company (who I really do believe, at this point do almost no writing themselves) try for these internet references it’s not so much to amuse themselves as it is to pander to what they believe will be their audience. And that, in point of fact, is what much of the humor of RT has come down to, writing what they think the audience WILL laugh at, instead of what is genuinely funny (and let’s not try to get into a philosophical discussion of what the heck THAT is, or we’ll be here until the crows in that movie RT riffed come home).

    Also, while I wasn’t a huge Cinema Titanic fan to begin with, on repeated viewings I find their humor and approach to be much closer to MST3K than RT’s ever was. And I think the simple answer is they did NOT pander to the crowd, but tried to stay true to their comic vision. As a result, their stuff has held up much better.

    This isn’t just an off-the-cuff observation — I’ve bought nearly half of the RT catalog (ALL the shorts, and all the video on demand stuff, but few of the “modern” movies) and in recent years rewatched it all. I rewatched “The Film Crew” four several times (they, IMHO, are the closest thing to a “lost” MST3K we’ll ever have). And my wife and I are on our fifth go-around, in order, of all 200 or so MST3K. And the clear takeaway is that RT’s stuff has seemed less and less funny throughout the years (with notable exceptions — the live “Plan 9” show is still a knockout, and some of the shorts, like the one on cleaning with gasoline, are as good or better than anything done in the MST3K era).

    But as the last poster says, I am as happy as anyone can be that Mike, Bill and Kevin are still working together, still seeming to have fun, and still making money. But I am not “angry and unfufilled” — heck, I have SO many hours of tremendous riffing from them and the others that I feel priviledged to have lived through this period of time.

    So I raise a glass to them over at RT and wish them all the best (even if, at this point, we are parting company).

       2 likes

  20. EricJ says:

    @17 – OTOH, you could say exactly the same thing about how Mel Brooks’ movie parodies specifically referencing Son of Frankenstein, Vertigo or Destry Rides Again turned into the Scary Movie series and Seltzer & Friedberg comedies–Does the fact that more young people would probably get Twilight and rapster jokes, or the filmmakers’ attempt to express their angry-Internet annoyance at them more than film-fan homage them, make them funnier than a joke you would need a decent modicum of pop-cultural IQ to get? The old saying, “Comedy is research”, but is it the filmmakers’ fault or the audience’s for not knowing enough? If the audience doesn’t find it funny, it could be because they know more than the comic does, and oh, that’s lethal for the comic.

    RT still has the 90’s MST3K chops to make a few really-old-guy refs to Star Trek episodes, or 70’s songs, but without background, the emphasis seems to be more on filling in the void with the time-saving bulk filler of just repeatedly bullying a funny line that sticks in their heads into the ground, like the dorky kid in class who said something dumb on the first day and then gets it rubbed in his face as a “trademark” every day for the rest of the school year. That way you don’t have to think up additional new jokes, or strain yourself looking for source material, and still keep your teen fans cult-loyal and parroting them.
    The appeal of MST3K was that no matter how obscure the joke was, The Right People Would Get It, but we barely have the Right People even writing it anymore.

       1 likes

  21. MissT3K says:

    Droppo:
    EricJ strikes again…a bit of unsolicited advice: don’t watch Mike-era MST3K or Rifftrax.It appears to make you very unhappy.

    That’s what I was thinking, Droppo!!! Avoid it altogether and you’ll be a much happier person. And that’s what we want for all MST3K fans – happiness and laughter.

    :-))

       17 likes

  22. EricJ says:

    jaybird3rd:
    Rifftrax’s efforts to find the same sources for jokes in the new media have been mixed.They’re either stuck reaching for low-hanging fruit, like kicking around Paris Hilton or the Kardashians for the upteenth time, or else trying to take someone who is “famous” in a narrow social media circle and making them out to be some huge cultural figure, even though most of the audience doesn’t know who they are.In “Frankenstein Island”, for example, they make reference after reference to someone on Twitter called “DadBoner” whenever a bearded character is on screen, mostly in the form of comments about alcohol which aren’t inherently funny and don’t have anything to do with what’s happening in the movie.I’ve never heard of “DadBoner” and I don’t know anyone else who has either, but I gather that he’s a bearded guy on Twitter who talks a lot about alcohol.Okaaaaay, so why is that supposed to be funny to anybody other than drunken frat boys on Twitter?

    In one episode, a character’s away on business, and they riff “He’s at a Furry convention.”
    Okay, so the culty Internet kids get it…But they start turning it into a ten-riff running-gag (“I LIKE dressing up as a cartoon fox!”) based on…what, exactly?–Their own joke? The sense that they didn’t beat up on an Internet fan-fringe enough yet?

    Or, if that fails, making at least three Nick Nolte jokes per movie, every time we have a drunken/grungy character, or even the presence that a drunken character might have been there–“(wreckage) Well, looks like Nolte’s been on another bender…”
    Okay, I’m missing something here too: Is there some family pet of Mike or Kevin’s that Nolte ran over, did he say MST3K-unfriendly things, is there some headline from four or five years ago I’m supposed to know that requires Joe Don Baker-like manual citation?

       1 likes

  23. jaybird3rd says:

    And I don’t buy the “shared culture” argument you are making — if anything, the internet should have strengthened the amount of stuff most of us are familiar with.

    One would think so. The Internet is, after all, a shared network which allows content to be published worldwide. How could it not expand the audience’s awareness? But the Internet isn’t just a neutral medium: through algorithmic searches and targeted marketing, it is also able to recalibrate the content it delivers to conform to the user’s tastes and preferences. So, even though everyone is accessing the same network, the range of their experiences is very different.

    Going back to my earlier Sally Struthers analogy: at a time when there were only a few national broadcast and cable networks, all of which ran pretty much the same stable of commercials, it was fairly safe to make a joke about the Sally Struthers ads because it was all but guaranteed that everyone would have seen them. What would be the equivalent today? The little 30-second ads we see on YouTube and other ad-driven media sites? Even for people who watch the same videos, the ads they see are different. Depending on who you are, even the way you watch “traditional” TV is very different now. With so many different frames of reference, with so little overlap between them, there isn’t much common ground left to bounce riffs from. This deprives Rifftrax and other movie riffers of a rich source of material that MST3K was able to mine with great success.

    The very obscure calls to old films and TV ads done in the MST3K days were mysteries to my wife, who is (mostly) the same generation as I am, but she did laugh at the stuff she understood.

    So did I, and even at the stuff I didn’t immediately understand! The charming thing about the obscure MST3K references is that, even though most of the audience may not have recognized them, we could at least appreciate them as a bit of local flavor. When they casually dropped the name of an obscure Minneapolis open mic’er that nobody but the Brains would have known about, for example, it was just one throwaway comment out of 500 or more, but it made the Brains come across as real people from a real place with real lives, and you could at least feel happy for the guy because his friends mentioned his name on national TV. That’s the kind of intimacy that I never see in Rifftrax, which seems much more deliberately calculated and targeted. The “DadBoner” jokes were especially tiresome because the Rifftrax guys got so stuck on milking them again and again, and then they proceeded to made jokes about that! It came across as some old guys insistently trying to sound cool by pandering to the drunken frat boy crowd, who are about the only people who would find so many “DadBoner” references funny.

    But here is where I think you have a good point though — if the present young writers for Mike and company (who I really do believe, at this point do almost no writing themselves) try for these internet references it’s not so much to amuse themselves as it is to pander to what they believe will be their audience.And that, in point of fact, is what much of the humor of RT has come down to, writing what they think the audience WILL laugh at, instead of what is genuinely funny.

    Yes. I would attribute that to the influence of social media, too. Social media is how most of Rifftrax’s marketing is done, and it is explicitly designed to encourage an obsession over “friends” and “followers” and how much people “like” you. It provides a kind of feedback which is much more specific than the old cable ratings numbers, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it influences the kinds of jokes that Rifftrax looks for opportunities to make. At MST3K, on the other hand, they really didn’t know who their audiences were, so they wrote primarily to amuse themselves.

       3 likes

  24. Johnny's nonchalance says:

    Things change.

    Get busy living, or get busy dying.

       7 likes

  25. EricJ says:

    Johnny’s nonchalance:
    Things change.

    Get busy living, or get busy dying.

    (Er, I think you might maybe want to choose a quote that sounds less like it could be in favor of them just packing up and retiring while the retiring is good…)

       0 likes

  26. littleaimishboy says:

    the RT guys claim to have “surpassed MST3K”

    I believe the word “surpassed” is actually a bit of pot stirring by our genial host.

    I couldn’t find the word – or its equivalent, or any sort of implication that “RT is better than MST3K” – anywhere on the Rifftrax site.

       2 likes

  27. Atorgo says:

    EricJ – I hope you consider therapy for your bullying issues. It might do you a world of good living without that particular burr up your behind.

       18 likes

  28. EricJ says:

    littleaimishboy: I believe the word “surpassed” is actually a bit of pot stirring by our genial host.
    I couldn’t find the word – or its equivalent, or any sort of implication that “RT is better than MST3K”– anywhere on the Rifftrax site.

    He was probably quoting RT’s own press/e-mail:
    “Stone Cold also marks the 200th movie that we’ve riffed as RiffTrax, which is a huge deal for us as it surpasses even what Mike, Kevin and Bill did collectively at Mystery Science Theater 3000 – and we did it purely as an independent, web-based company.”

    (In addition to providing the 20th consecutive daily–DAILY–e-reminder of when the encore rerun of Sharknado 2 Live was going to play in theaters.)

       0 likes

  29. Jesse "Awfully Good Movies" Shade says:

    EricJ: He was probably quoting RT’s own press/e-mail:
    “Stone Cold also marks the 200th movie that we’ve riffed as RiffTrax, which is a huge deal for us as it surpasses even what Mike, Kevin and Bill did collectively at Mystery Science Theater 3000 – and we did it purely as an independent, web-based company.”

    (In addition to providing the 20th consecutive daily–DAILY–e-reminder of when the encore rerun of Sharknado 2 Live was going to play in theaters.)

    Dude, they’re a business, and it’s smart business sense to plug your products as much as you can. And whether or not they’ve actually surpassed MST3K, they’ve made it 9 years and counting, and for guys as awesome as Mike, Kevin and Bill are, they deserve any and all success.

       20 likes

  30. Atorgo says:

    eric m:
    Don’t get me wrong, I love the RT guys (at least Kevin, Mike, and Bill) but they could do a thousand riffs and not surpass MST3K.

    Watching RT makes me understand Joel’s comic con comment of what it meant to be head writer on MST. “It means they were in charge of the remote control”. It certainly didn’t mean they were the most talented writer.

    Source?

       0 likes

  31. ready4sumfootball says:

    There are still people out there pushing the Joel vs. Mike thing? I may generally prefer apples over oranges, but that doesn’t mean I never run into a rotten apple.

       6 likes

  32. jaybird3rd says:

    Atorgo: Source?

    Search for the Museum of Broadcast Communications interview that Joel, Frank, and Trace gave in December 2013.

       0 likes

  33. Kali says:

    I understand that it was Joel and Frank who would slip in the obscure gags that “the right people will get,” to quote Joel. Once they were gone, Mike and the writers concentrated on the jokes (particularly in The Movie, which cut out many of the more obscure jokes they did in the live show and left many that were more “audience-friendly”). Then, Mike, Bill, and Kevin carried that “audience-friendly” approach to Rifftrax. That doesn’t make the Joel era better than the Mike era (or vice versa), just a different focus of gags.

    In the end, there has never been a truly bad episode of MST and there probably were never any bad releases of Rifftrax (I certainly don’t have every one Rifftrax ever did – not even Rifftrax can convince me to buy a Twilight movie). It’s just that the Rifftrax approach to the riffs is different than Joel’s approach. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld always said.

       8 likes

  34. pondoscp says:

    I never understood all the praise “Space Mutiny” gets, but we’re all different.

       0 likes

  35. Bad Wolf says:

    All i can say is, we’re pretty spoiled with an embarrassment of riches compared to some–most fandoms out there. Even though a few series are apparently coming back for a second-go-round, we’ve had multiple years of similar entertainment by the same people we originally enjoyed. MST and Simpsons started around the same time and who would have thought that one is tamong he longest-running show on TV, and the last cast of the other is still producing movie riffs?

    Okay, i can also say that i don’t know how EricJ always ends up dominating a conversation about something he says he has no interest in.

       16 likes

  36. Atorgo says:

    jaybird3rd: Search for the Museum of Broadcast Communications interview that Joel, Frank, and Trace gave in December 2013.

    Thanks. Joel’s “meltdown” over the Philo Guy during the Q&A is hilarious!

    eric m:
    Don’t get me wrong, I love the RT guys (at least Kevin, Mike, and Bill) but they could do a thousand riffs and not surpass MST3K.

    Watching RT makes me understand Joel’s comic con comment of what it meant to be head writer on MST. “It means they were in charge of the remote control”. It certainly didn’t mean they were the most talented writer.

    And it doesn’t mean they were the least talented writer. Clearly Joel was having a bit of fun, making a joke – he is always effusive with praise for Mike’s talent.

       6 likes

  37. eric m says:

    Atorgo: Source?

    It’s either on one of the discs in the special features section or on youtube. It was a con panel. I’m not sure if it’s the one with Joel and Jim Mallon on the same panel. It may be the one where they show a few minutes of the pilot episode with a long haired Joel claiming everything was “of my own design”. Maybe it was the one where they sent the go-fers for Dairy Queen across the street. Maybe those are all the same panel …They’ve done a lot of panels.

    The remote control line stuck out though because that’s the closest thing to a dis (“as in disrespect?“ :-) ) I’ve heard them say about another.

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  38. Mike "ex-genius" Kelley says:

    Kali,

    Well, perhaps the problem is you haven’t seen enough of the RT stuff. Compare and contrast, as my English teacher always used to remind us, and the Twilight riffs are an excellent example of truly good RT stuff versus the crap they put out nowadays. Not a bad RT movie? Um, about the last 50 I’d say (they vary from really poor to just mediocre).

    And it’s interesting someone here mentions The Simpsons, another show that has gone from great to “meh” — you can argue about *when* it jumped the shark, but not IF. I guess there is something to be said for longevity, and in that I praise any creative endeavor in this day and age that keeps making enough money to go on, but as you quoted Seinfeld let me remind you that one of the main reasons we remember the show so fondly, and that it has held up so well, is that it quit when it was on top, despite the network wanting to throw vast sums of money at its star (Seinfeld turned down over 100 million for a tenth year).

    Unfortunately, there are others who just don’t have that discipline.

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  39. littleaimishboy says:

    My apologies to alert host Sampo.

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  40. littleaimishboy says:

    But … I thought MST3K did 197 episodes, not 199?

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  41. EricJ says:

    Mike "ex-genius" Kelley:
    And it’s interesting someone here mentions The Simpsons, another show that has gone from great to “meh” — you can argue about *when* it jumped the shark, but not IF.I guess there is something to be said for longevity,

    But….I thought everyone agreed the Monorail episode was The Last Funny Episode, before Conan O’Brien left! ;)

    And the Simpsons are used as a comparison that just hanging around and not getting off the stage does not in and of itself make “longevity” something to be put in the Hall of Fame–If it were, we’d be praising the last ten years of Saturday Night Live.
    Fox kept the Simpsons on twenty years of life support just to be their network-pimping anchor icon, and in the hopes of finally getting that movie ground out, just as MK&B want to continue gainful employment, since the book, Cracked.com or website things didn’t quite work out.

    And while RT says they’ve “built their own little successful business”–although ISTR they were first hired on Legend Films dog-leash as an excuse to squeeze one more dollar out of their PD-colorized House on Haunted Hill and Reefer Madness for the Nth time–they first formed their business trying to get away from someone who wanted to hire the last hirable “MST3K guys” because they were cheap, and needed the money because they didn’t get any royalties from the show. (Hence the jokes about Mike being “the Eric Idle, George Takei and Ringo Starr of MST3K”.)
    We can admire nine years of “Will make Twilight jokes for food”, but some apply more stringent judgment of their work.

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  42. Torgospizza-NJ says:

    The comparison between CT and RT is unfair, because the business model and approach were different. CT was primarily a “live show” experience, which was intentionally nostalgic and referential to MST3K. With the exception of the Princeton, NJ show, the audiences at the four shows we attended was about the same age as the performers. The movies were mostly all public domain. There was no special effort to draw an audience beyond the fans. RT’s focus on nationwide broadcasts of better known Hollywood product aims at a larger audience,and the more topical approach is to reach that audience and (they hope) younger viewers. In my experience, the crowds at RT shows are generally younger and rowdier. Whichever one you prefer, be glad they’re all still around (where’s Paul Chaplin?)

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  43. Bifflog says:

    Just so you know, lots of you folks in this thread sound like you got JADED and you got OLD (at heart). An unfortunate fate for any MSTie…

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  44. Laura says:

    EricJ: He was probably quoting RT’s own press/e-mail:
    “Stone Cold also marks the 200th movie that we’ve riffed as RiffTrax, which is a huge deal for us as it surpasses even what Mike, Kevin and Bill did collectively at Mystery Science Theater 3000 – and we did it purely as an independent, web-based company.”

    (In addition to providing the 20th consecutive daily–DAILY–e-reminder of when the encore rerun of Sharknado 2 Live was going to play in theaters.)

    Wow. Why do you even bother coming here if you hate Mike Nelson with such a passion? So what if they’re promoting the Sharknado 2 encore? I couldn’t see the first live broadcast because of technical issues at my theater so I’m going on Thursday. I love that there is an encore to begin with! So why can’t you just moan and cry about how horrible Rifftrax is to you somewhere else and leave the rest of us who actually ENJOY the product alone?

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  45. EricJ says:

    Laura: Wow.Why do you even bother coming here if you hate Mike Nelson with such a passion?

    (Sorry, I forgot the entire purpose of Satellite News was to offer praise and burnt offerings to RiffTrax, and recite holy litanies of Season 9 and 10 quotes to our Lord and Series Creator…)

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  46. pondoscp says:

    EricJ: (Sorry, I forgot the entire purpose of Satellite News was to offer praise and burnt offerings to RiffTrax, and recite holy litanies of Season 9 and 10 quotes to our Lord and Series Creator…)

    Wow, are you actually defending Season 8? For me, I don’t judge by era, I judge by episode. And Season 8, for me (I know I’m in the extreme minority, but I usually am in most fandoms), contains 7 of the worst episodes of the entire series. Yet, there are a few gems sprinkled, and an actual attempt amongst all the Sci-Fi “plotline” meddling to tie the series back to the CC years. But for the most part, it’s like saying you enjoy Wings or John or George or Ringo’s solo work to any of the work they did collectively with The Beatles. Because, you know, they found their groove after they left The Beatles.
    There’s a few good songs here and there in their solo work, but better? Hmm, must be a nostalgia thing I don’t get.
    But I don’t blame the Brains. I blame CC for not letting Season 7 go a full 24 episodes, and I blame Sci-Fi for forcing the plotline down their throats. If it wasn’t for that, there most likely would not be a divide amongst the fanbase. Too much change, too soon, and we’re left with an entirely different cast that some think are better. Personally, I don’t even consider 8-10 the same show. It’s 2.0 to me.
    Just wait, we’ll all be unified one day. When the reboot happens, and a new fanbase pops up claiming the new ones are the best, all us old-schoolers will unite with a giant “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” 8-)

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  47. pondoscp says:

    That being said, I’m having a hard time sitting through Laser Mission, but The Devil’s Hand is going down nicely. Just goes to show, take it on an episode by episode basis.

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  48. JCC says:

    EricJ: (Sorry, I forgot the entire purpose of Satellite News was to offer praise and burnt offerings to RiffTrax, and recite holy litanies of Season 9 and 10 quotes to our Lord and Series Creator…)

    Does every post have to be anti-Mike, anti-Bill Corbett, anti-Kevin Murphy though? I am legit shocked when you post and it doesn’t take a shot at someone or something. I don’t even like Rifftrax but just TRY to be a little more positive? WE ALL KNOW you hate the post Joel Era, we don’t need a reminder every time you post. I know you’re angry it’s not 1991 anymore and obscure stuff isn’t on TV but just try and find a little joy in your life, maybe share it with us instead of all the relentless bellyaching.

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  49. pondoscp says:

    I once watched Stone Cold in an altered state and I could have sworn Lance Henriksen was also an undercover cop and he went rogue. lmao
    Like Lance and Bosworth were both cops and neither one knew it.

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  50. EricJ says:

    pondoscp: Wow, are you actually defending Season 8?

    No, just noticing that the Universal Season somehow doesn’t get quoted with as much holy ritualistic fervor by Ye Culte of Mike as the seasons that contained Final Sacrifice and Space Mutiny. Must’ve been something they put in the food. ;)

    (Not to say that S6 and 7 don’t have their zealous parrots either, although at one CT, Joel was taking Q&A and when one fan, forgetting to phrase it in the form of a question, shouted out “Girls Town!” Joel literally had no idea what the fan was talking about, and thought he was high. Silly boy, doesn’t he know that when you quote a Mike episode, the whole WORLD is supposed to be gloriously unified and in on the joke?)

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