I’d never heard of “Tyler Durden” until Youngary… and Google.
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Being a bit older, I get most of the Riffs, the ones I miss tend to be regarding something a bit newer or “trendy.”
Interesting thing is, my younger son (now 36) is a huge fan of old time radio and movies (his friends wouldn’t play Scene It with him because he always won) and is very up to date on the riffs, he misses very few.
Sometimes, Google is my friend.
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I have hit obscure riffs I didn’t understand or had forgotten. Luckily, we have the MST3K fan wiki for some explanations and additional trivia about the episode and/or movie and Annotated MST to take you through just about every riff in the episodes they’ve published. (I’m told they have pages written for the other episodes but aren’t quite ready to publish.) Of course, even they have a short list of riffs they’re unable to explain. But that’s part of the fun of the show. Somewhere out there is someone who does get it, and that person gets to feel special when they do. And sometimes, that’s going to be you.
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I never understood the Daktari Stool riff.
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Try here:
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Well there we have it! Thanks for the learning!
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The references to “Then Came Bronson.” Like that was something we were meant to be familiar with instead of Frank being intentionally obscure.
When we were preparing for the birth of our first child, we were told that the first “checher” would be a “dark, tarry stool”. It was like a deep hidden secret in my life had finally been discovered and made life all the more sweeter.
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I still have No Earthly Idea who Gary Biggner is, but he’s the alternate choice for who the character in “The Day The Earth Froze” looks like - one of the bots says, “Look - it’s Penny Marshall” and then Joel mutters something about “Gary Biggner”…whoever that is!
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After hearing I don’t even know how many references to der weisse engel in MST3K and RiffTrax, I finally had to ask around. Not sure how or why I hadn’t heard the phrase elsewhere (other than never seeing The Marathon Man), but trying to look it up phonetically was no help at all from an English-speaking perspective.
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I’m not sure if this counts as a riff, but a scene from Sinister Urge.
The phone rings and the guy runs up to the phone, then Tom Servo loses it. Did I miss something?
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Now. are you asking, or just saying you now know what it is? Since you mention Marathon Man
If not, it refers to Dr. Szell, the antagonist, who was known as The White Angel of Auschwitz.
If you already knew that, here’s a bonus - I made this ages ago… I thought it would be a good movie/Christmas special mash-up
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I learned of it only recently—I had been curious about those references for a while, but not until asking around a bit did someone point me toward Marathon Man.
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There’s one I just got yesterday, in fact, watching Pluto TV.
At the beginning of The Undersea Kingdom short, Joel quotes the opening of the old Namor, The Sub-Mariner cartoon, but it’s hard to understand what he says because he’s rushing the words a bit to fit the odd cadence of the theme song.
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I learned something new there, I didn’t know Namor had a cartoon. I Just watched a bit of an episode at Youtube. And next time I catch Undersea Kingdom I’ll keep ear open for that one.
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Not technically a riff but I can’t find a better topic to put it in and I don’t want to make a new one just for it but:
Do people actually eat peanut butter and dijonaise sandwiches?! Is that a real thing or was Kevin Murphy messing with us in Gunslinger?
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In my mind, nobody did until just before the show was shot. K.M. made one and sampled it just to make sure he could fully get into character. 
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i learned about firesign theatre and frank zappa through MST3K
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I don’t think there’s anything here to understand, but since it happens more than once (Crash of Moons and Teenagers From Outer Space, maybe others) I thought I’d consult the hive mind:
Is there anything behind the phrase “a shoestring and a picture of Eve Arden” or is just a funny line?
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If it’s a reference to anything, I’m not familiar with it.
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