Though I remain an avid admirer of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I've pretty much stayed away from the RiffTrax website starring three of the show's alumni. The concept is clever enough: veteran movie riffers Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett (a.k.a. Mike, Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot from MST3K) serve up MP3 commentaries of past and present movies that you can download and play alongside your DVDs of the same flicks. A pretty sharp idea, provided you don't have a computer with the memory capacity of Dory the regal tang.
Though the website has been off and running for three years, those of us with antique computers have had to wait until now to embrace the riffy goodness. This June, ten RiffTrax DVDs are being released by Legend Films. Unlike the website — where the boys spend as much time vivisecting recent blockbusters as they do low-budget oldies — most of the films offered here are the kinds of public domain standards you can usually buy for a buck at your local Dollar Tree. Six of the ten selections will be familiar to s-f/horror fans (Plan 9 from Outer Space's the most notorious); apart from two collections of educational shorts, perhaps the least well-known entry is the 1946 Monogram musical Swing Parade.
I recently watched RiffTrax's take on this Poverty Row musical showcase. To get in the proper MSTie frame of mind, I sat down and viewed it on a Saturday morning, much as I used to when the series aired on Comedy Central and Sci-Fi Channel. Unlike the original show, the RiffTrax commentaries are presented sans story context — just three smart-ass disembodied voices (plus the occasional guest) cracking wise at the expense of a riff-worthy flick — so there are no silhouettes, puppetry, or interstitial sequences on the DVD. Fans of the original MST3K are divided on the merits of these aspects of the original show: for some, the sequences featuring Mike and robots on the Satellite of Love were often the weakest parts of the show. Me, I rather enjoyed 'em, though once Nelson, Murphy and Corbett started verbally bouncing off Swing Parade's opening credits on the DVD, I quickly stopped obsessing about the lack of a back-story. These are still very funny guys.
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