Last Friday we had the premiere of season 13, on Tuesday we get a new Mads Livestream, the Friday after this one, it’s back to the Gizmoplex for an event and a new short, and in the final Tuesday of the month we get another episode of the Mary Jo Pehl Show (and along with that, there are Movie Jo Nights).
All that and you have various Rifftrax and Rifftrax Presents releases.
It’s an embarrassment of riches if you love riffing and the personalities behind that.
Friday and Tuesday are now the best days of the week.
Top 3: MST3K, B&MJ, BritTrax
Also Ran: The Mads
Every Now and Then: RiffTrax Core 3
In Rotation: Cinematic Titanic (so many good episodes)
Skip: Pretty much anything else, especially fan riffs.
Cinematic Titanic was great. Even Frank mentioned on the Mads that he wished they’d released more of the those. Unreleased… Astral Factor, Doll Squad and Samson and the 7 Miracles of the World - I’ve seen the boot for Astral and that was a blast, even in that condition. And I checked out unriffed versions of the other 2, and they were great picks.
I don’t do fans riffs or the others that have popped up… I gave them a go, and I’ll give them a E for effort, but they’re not for me.
I’ve only seen one episode of CT in the time of its original run and missed them on tour. Because of that, I’ve been considering the DVD boxset Shout released around the time of Season 11.
Seems to be priced pretty well for the amount of riffs it contains, even if I don’t personally know the films. I guess it’s their complete collection of released material, but I’m not entirely sure. Seems to be a good place to start, though.
If anyone hasn’t yet tried out RiffTrax, one of the best opportunities to do that is to back their latest Kickstarter. Backers can chip in just $1 and get up to 10 riffed shorts (including two riffed by Bridget and Mary Jo). Shorts are “unlocked” based on the number of total backers for the campaign, and the first three have now been unlocked. That means if you chip in $1, you’re already guaranteed $3 worth of riffs.
Link to the Kickstarter is in this thread: RiffTrax Live 2022 Kickstarter
Cinematic Titanic is riffing gold. They put a lot of time into writing each movie, which is why there are comparatively few versus something like Rifftrax. The live episodes are especially brilliant.
My only critique of the boxed set is that they don’t include the behind-the-scenes extras that the DVDs sold directly through CT did. Those are some the best documentary bits and often very funny on their own. But don’t let their omission keep you from the set, the riffed movies themselves are fantastically funny.
And yes, the set contains all their officially released films. There were three others they did on tour which never got a proper release. One of them is circulating the web as a bootleg, the other two were only ever seen by the audiences of the shows themselves.
I’ve only ever dabbled in MST3K and Rifftrax so I definitely need to check out The Mads stuff, Mary Jo Pehl’s stuff and of course Cinematic Titanic. I think I’ve caught random bits of some Cinematic Titanic on the MST3K Twitch stream, but that’s about it.
Yeah, the YouTube fan-made copy of Astral has atrocious sound. But I made it through a couple of times anyway. [sigh] Poor, poor Frank Ashmore. I felt terrible for him on so many levels. (And what a bummer that they neglected doing a Clonus callback.)