You know Dasher, of course. And Dancer, no need to refresh your memory there. Prancer, you go way back. Vixen is as familiar to you as Comet, not to mention dear old Cupid. Donner and Blitzen, why you had them over to your house for chili just the other night. But do you recall the most famous donkey of all? Neither do I. That's why Nestor the Long Eared Christmas Donkey performs such a great service. It offers THE authoritative biography of this under-appreciated representative of the species Equus asinus. And it makes a great RiffTrax!
From the guys who brought you Mystery Science Theater 3000 comes the classic short film A Visit to Santa, with their unique blend of comedic commentary. Just in time for the holidays, RiffTrax presents our take on A Visit to Santa, a Christmas short of unknown origin that most probably was the result of Santa's short-lived collaboration with the producing team of Screwtape and Wormwood. Rather than being a right jolly old elf, Santa here is depicted as the Dark Prince of a vast slave empire made up entirely of children under 10 - it's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with less dignified clothing. Or put another way it's Manos: The Hands of Fate without the elephantiasis. Mike, Kevin and Bill fall on it like a Christmas goose in a brand new downloadable video!
Young Jim is caught in a shocking act of pencil-based vandalism, leading him to look deeply into the core of his soul and come to the inexorable conclusion that he is kind of a weenie. A classic of the late '40's, "authority figure shames a student" genre, Act Your Age is a window into the soul - of Jim. And it makes a great RiffTrax.
Meet Phil. Like all children from the fifties, he enjoys playing ball, building soapbox racers, and taunting his non blond-haired, blue-eyed classmates. Things are going great for Phil until a puppet shows up in his class. The Puppet, Ichabod Dorian Bungle III, or "Mister" to his friends, delivers a powerful lesson about lunch room safety, that no matter how much Phil tries, he is unable to forget. Soon our hero is haunted by the omnipresent demons of Mister Bungle, and begins a descent into madness that has him endlessly washing his hands, and nerdily saving his dessert for last. Mike, Kevin and Bill team up to riff "Beginning Responsibility: Lunchroom Manners" and hopefully stop the classroom menace that is Mister Bungle, once and for all.
Heroin, it turns out, is bad. The Terrible Truth lays waste to the all-too-common myth that regular heroin use is a healthy part of a balanced diet. Professional scowler Judge William B. McKesson guides us through a case study of Phyllis Howard (no relation to Curly) who tries marijuana and quickly begins vacuuming up Charlie Parker-levels of Mexican black tar heroin. Kevin, Mike and Bill ride this pony for all it's worth.
At long last, the question of the ages is met head on. No facet of the issue is left unexplored. The philosophical, eschatological, teleological, epistemological, and cosmological aspects are all given a thorough exegetical going over. Just one viewing of this ground breaking short will see you fully prepared to engage the weighty issues and answer confidently and with authority when someone asks, Why Doesn't Cathy Eat Breakfast? To further expand your mind, RiffTrax is proud to offer you the weirdest thing ever - weirder than a million Crispin Glovers starring in a million remakes of The Wicker Man - a short subject called Petaluma Chicken. If you have any interest in omelet making history, you owe it to yourself to see this. Mike, Kevin, and Bill will be your guides through this hugely important double feature.
The youth of today, no longer content to roll a hoop with a stick, play endless hours of mumbly peg, or work a lathe at a factory 14 hours a day for just pennies, need something to occupy them. Crime sprees are not the whole answer. No, they need a place where they can rap, just let it all hang out, encounter one another, preferably over terrible boiled coffee. The short Coffee House Rendezvous makes a strong case that what these kids need is a coffee house rendezvous. Mike, Kevin and Bill remain unconvinced.
Your home is crawling with hazards. You are not safe. EVERYTHING WILL KILL YOU. In fact, never mind, because you're already dead; killed by your stupid house. That, at least, is the heartwarming message of the short Safety: Harm Hides at Home. "But RiffTrax," you say, "many shorts have already exposed the obvious truth that my home is a deadly, sinister trap, ready to spring at any moment. What's so great about this one?" Aha. Do other shorts feature the groovy safety dominatrix Guardiana? Well, one other one does, but then so does this one! So buy it and laugh* along with Mike, Kevin and Bill. *A thin, strangled laugh designed to cover up your growing panic as you realize your house is trying to murder you.
It's time to face the question head on, to stop pretending that the crowds of people following you, jeering, throwing rocks and half-eaten burritos are there because of your charm and animal charisma. You've suspected it for some time, from the moment you were rejected by CompuServe because you just weren't cool enough. The short Are You Popular? will help you solve the question once and finally: the question, "Are you popular?" There are no easy answers, friends (that is, the answer is "no", of course, which is not always easy to hear) but Mike, Kevin and Bill are more than happy to be your guides.
Cruel self-assessment is given a new twist as vulnerable grade-schoolers are forced to look into the deep blackness of their own souls only to reach the inevitable conclusion that they are unloved and they will spin out their meaningless years on this drifting rock before dying alone and afraid.
Do you find that you're sleeping a little too well as of late? That your dreams are of the innocuous stripe, i.e., old friends turning into llamas and eating your baseball hat, rather than full out, scream-yourself-awake nightmares followed by 15 minutes of sweating and shallow breathing interrupted by occasional anxiety-induced "whale flips" that rip the covers off your significant other? Well, then we've got a short for you. One Got Fat is the real deal - a concentrated dose of lab-purified nightmare fuel. To give away too much would be to blunt the surprise of your upcoming trauma - but here's a hint: A teeming sea of pre-adolescent ur-monkeys are murdered one by one, all to the whimsical narration of the lubricious Edward Everett Horton. Yay.
There are so many things to which drugs can be compared that to even attempt to catalog them would be an act of incomprehensible madness. Yet in this pastel colored, 1970's nightmare, two hard-of-hearing, loggorrheic pre-teens are up to the task. Have you always wondered, Are drugs like pumpkins? Like small willow saplings? Like those bags of cotton candy you can buy in gift shops? Find out as Mike, Kevin and Bill go once more unto the breach.
When you hear the word "patriotism" what's the first name that pops into your head? Wrong. The answer is Bob Crane. And not "Hogan's Heroes" Bob Crane, but rather creepy, post-"Hogan's Heroes" Bob Crane, home video, um, "pioneer". There is no one - NO ONE - better equipped to imbue America's youth with a sense of pride in their magnificent country - you know, once you get past the overwhelming, suffocating creepiness. Fear not, feelings of discomfort soon turn to laughter thanks to true patriots Mike, Kevin and Bill.
From the guys who brought you Mystery Science Theater 3000 comes the classic short film Skipper Learns a Lesson, with their unique blend of comedic commentary. Snoopy, Lassie, Cerberus, Rin-Tin-Tin: lovable canine companions are a dime a dozen. Which makes Skipper: The Racist Dog such a breath of fresh air! Tired of "PC" dogs who "like" children and "accept" other mutts without passing judgment? Well then, Skipper is the dog for you! He humps the leg of intolerance and takes a good long sniff at bigotry's...er, tail! Will Skipper's titular lesson be learned in time to redeem him in the eyes of his fellow dogs? Or will he be condemned to sit alone on his porch, muttering about the way things used to be? Find out, in Mike, Kevin and Bill's hilarious riff of Skipper Learns a Lesson.
Buying food - how hard can it be? You go to a store pick out a few items, and start mashing them into the side of your head, right? WRONG. That's a common misconception, but as Buying Food clearly demonstrates, buying food is a very, very dangerous and complicated affair, fraught with hazard, the path to success Byzantine and arduous. To even attempt it without instruction is to court heartbreak and, most likely, violent death. Lucky for all of us there is Buying Food. Kevin, Mike, and Bill take it very seriously.
Right or Wrong tells the gritty story of Harry, a boy who doesn't vandalize a warehouse and suffers the consequences for it. Harry, who resembles a younger, less handsome French Stewart, undertakes a philosophical journey, where every character he meets routinely pauses mid-conversation in order to deliver a 30 second internal monologue about Right and Wrong. (This was normal in his community, they eventually traced the problem back to the nearby Play-Doh factory offloading into their water supply.) Parents be warned: This being an educational film about vandalism, some minor breaking of windows may occur. Mike, Kevin and Bill riffing this short: Right or Wrong? (Answer: Wrong, but fun, therefore Right)
Women - what the hell, man? I mean, what's your problem? Thankfully, for all of us non-women, some very smart people have put their best be-crew-cutted minds into coming up with a solution to the trouble with women (to avoid a conflict of interests, no women contributed, thank goodness). The Trouble with Women doesn't give us the definitive answer, but it does give us some very useful tools for dealing with - them. Mike, Kevin, and Bill (themselves NOT women) are your guides through this indispensable short.
Bill Duncan had it all until the day when he discovered that his garbage cans had been deemed unfit for use by the city sanitation committee. The deep shame of this incident drove him into a spiral of despair and nearly claimed his life until he realized the great truth of suburban America: His problems were the fault of his neighbor. The rats in the lumber pile, the pestilence breeding in standing water pools in the backyard, his sure thing horse breaking its leg coming out of the gate, resulting in the pawning of his son's bicycle: They weren't his fault! It must be the neighbors!
"Each Child Is Different" goes the saying, and no truer words have ever been spoken. Take Miss Smith's fifth grade class for instance. While Elizabeth is withdrawn and silent because of parental neglect, Ruth is withdrawn and silent because her mother died soon after the birth of her brother. Yes, just like Wes Anderson's latest, each character has a delightful quirk. Go in depth with five unique misfits, in a wonderful comedic stew of bullying, dyslexia, fire starting and bean-feeding. Our own three unique misfits are on hand for riffing.
Years in the spotlight had left Kitty with fame, riches, and a drug habit to rival all but the Busey-ist of addicts. Hooked on catnip, Kitty quickly found herself alone on the street, fishing quarters out of the gutter in hopes of landing her daily fix of The 'Nip. It seemed as if she had hit rock bottom when she shot a delivery man in cold blood, only to find out that he was unloading crates of oregano, not catnip. Kitty knew she needed to get Cleaned Up, and she enrolled into the finest 12 step program in the country, hoping to patch her life back together. Kitty Cleans Up...is not that story. It's about some creepy kid with the voice of a forty year old who decides that good hygiene practices are best learned by imitating a cat. Mike, Kevin and Bill have of course known this for years, and help get the message out in one of the oddest RiffTrax shorts to date.
Why Vandalism? It's the one question that kept parents in the fifties up at night. Why would my boy turn to vandalism for thrills when they could be listening to Burl Ives 45s or campaigning for Adlai Stevenson? While they were pondering this, their boys were out vandalizing things. This short follows three boys-Jeff, Ron and Burger-who spend all their time hanging out together, complaining that none of them have any friends. Their positive attitude, combined with Burger's poverty, Ron's overbearing parents, and Jeff's bone-crushing stupidity, ensure that their descent into a vortex of vandalism will be a rapid one. If you've ever asked yourself "Why Vandalism?" or even just "Why?", you owe it to yourself to watch this short and get the answers you deserve. Mike, Kevin and Bill are on hand to riff this classic short from the wrong side of the tracks.
If you were told you were about to see a film that contained turtles bigger than men, cliff-diving Mexicans and a family that eats Thanksgiving dinner underwater, you'd probably complain "But I don't like David Lynch!" Wrong you would be. You'd actually be all set to watch the 100 percent Lynch-free Aqua Frolics, a short from the 1950's whose message is clear: here is a partial list of things you can do that involve a proximity to and/or immersion in water. No doubt a response to the Land Council's propaganda film "Dryness: Stay On Land to Achieve It", Aqua Frolics will have you itching to strap on a life preserver and tuck into a drumstick in your neighbors swimming pool. Known frolickers Mike, Kevin and Bill are on hand for their dampest riffing session yet.
Washing your hands after using the restroom - most of us only do so because a fellow co-worker is in the bathroom with us, and we wonder if he'll tell other people if we don't. But evidently, we should be doing this even when a co-worker isn't there. It's a "Good Health Practice." Another example is eating fruits and vegetables instead of gorging on sweets. This too, is usually the type of thing one starts doing only after noticing that your pile of empty Milk Dud boxes is drawing stares from your co-workers. But it's also a "Good Health Practice." Yes, for some reason, "Good Health Practices" was recently made mandatory viewing for all employees here at RiffTrax. The delightful tale of Jim and Judy learning how to lead healthy lives has really caused us to turn a corner. We have more energy, sleep better, and the Milk Dud boxes have been arranged into a whimsical structure resembling a tortoise. Mike, Kevin and Bill are here to riff what may be the finest childrens Health Film since "
For many of us, Good Eating Habits boil down to a simple rule: avoid any food whose name ends in "-ator" or "-o-rama". But fifty years ago, in an era food historians refer to as "Pre GoGurt", what constituted a Good Eating Habit wasn't as widely known. Was cleaning your plate always necessary? When was the proper time for snacks? And did Johnny Miller really see the lunch lady's glass eye fall into the casserole when he went to the bathroom during Social Studies? These questions and more are answered in classic "Do the Opposite of This Guy" mode by Bill, a young child whose eating habits were the inspiration for the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character. Mike, Kevin and Bill are on-hand to riff the appetizing, food-like loaf of a short that is Good Eating Habits.
You think you don't have syphilis, but how do really know? Has anyone you trust told you you don't have it? Have you been in contact with anyone from a big city in, say, the last year? Then you almost certainly have it. Talk to your doctor immediately, or at the very least, a silver-haired white guy with an authoritative voice. He will put your shame under a microscope and make you look at it and if that doesn't change your ways, than I don't know what! Or you can just watch RiffTrax latest hilarious short subject Know For Sure.
Can't anyone tell me what Christmas is all about!? an exasperated Charlie Brown once asked. Well, pace Linus van Pelt, the true meaning of Christmas-according to Christmas Toyshop-is a criminally incompetent father, a drug-dispensing demon of the night, and a bored and detached Santa who spins magic mushroom induced fables to two captive children. Other beloved Christmas themes include war, a killing spree, and an attempted murder suicide by an arachnid-in easy-to-view cartoon form! Join Mike, Kevin and Bill for a warm cup of holiday cheer.
Shyness-for years it has prevented boys from becoming men and girls from landing men. How can shyness be conquered? By imitating those who are better than you: the popular children. This is the advice that the New Kid in School receives from his father: alter who you are to make people who don't know you like you more. It must be good advice; after all, the man is wearing a suit. Watch TV's Dick York-the first Darrin from Bewitched-try to overcome his shyness by putting on a sweater in Shy Guy, riffed by Mike, Kevin and Bill. (Dick Sargents need not apply.)
From the guys who brought you Mystery Science Theater 3000 comes the classic short film Self-Conscious Guy, with their unique blend of comedic commentary. Do you find yourself in a constant state of niggling self criticism, e.g., "I bet everyone is laughing at me just because I have a waffle stuck to my back", or "I know it's the right thing to do, but will people look down on me because I jar, meticulously label and store my urine in the root cellar?" If so, may I call you "Self-Conscious Guy" or would that make you feel self-conscious, you ugly, over-sensitive little self-conscious guy?! (Don't cry, it's part of your therapy.) Learn to deal with your freakishly abhorrent personality disorder by watching, along with your life coaches Mike, Kevin and Bill, Self-Conscious Guy.
Fear: Most of us rejected it in the mid-90s by wearing trendy t-shirts emblazoned with slogans such as "Second Place is the First Loser." This national "No Fear" campaign almost single-handedly eradicated Fear from our streets. Unfortunately, one day America woke up and realized just how gut-wrenchingly lame those t-shirts were. The shame quickly gave way to a much more powerful emotion: Fear. Yes, Fear has returned to our society, which makes the message of the 1950 educational short Overcoming Fear all the more important. It teaches us that your Fears are irrational, and are best confronted head-on. It features the greatest locker room confrontation scene since a be-toweled Iceman called out Maverick, nerds standing up for what they believe in, and a dog so terrifying, it makes Cujo look like the Beverly Hills Chihuahua. What better way for Mike, Kevin and Bill to Overcome their Fear of Overcoming Fear than by riffing the short Overcoming Fear.
"You would like to play with Donny and Duncan." So the narrator for Playing Together confidently tells us, and we have no reason to doubt him. But as the minutes pass it becomes clear that he may have been overselling Donny and Duncan just a bit. Donny, as it turns out, has trouble navigating life, from the smallest things (he's confused and frightened by the rules posted at a public pool) to larger problems, including the question of evil (his favorable reaction to aquatic clowns makes it clear that his moral compass is broken and he may even be a dangerous psychopath.) Duncan tries, he really does, to curb Donny's dangerous habit of clinging to every stick he finds like a lab monkey clings to his wire mother, but Donny is too far gone, and Duncan's helplessness and rage is beginning to show. But what makes it all work is the constant, tuneless piano noodling. Because of it, the narrator wins in the end: Kevin, Mike and Bill would like to play with Donny and Duncan.
It's a question we ponder every time we tip the pizza guy: How much affection? Is it necessary to set the box down before embracing him? How long do you hold him, knowing that he has other deliveries to make? Can lower tips be compensated for with more affection? How Much Affection? sadly touches on none of these issues; its Pizza Guy advice comes from the "30 Minutes or Free" era and is therefore quite out of date. What you will find in this short are dates that end in tears, sandwich making and a stern reminder of the potential Gerber-eating consequences of Too Much Affection. Riffers Mike, Kevin and Bill differ wildly in their estimates of How Much Affection, but mostly because Bill insists on measuring affection using the metric system.
What happens when a public television studio realizes that it has to spend $2,000 of government grant money before Wednesday in order to qualify for full funding for the next fiscal year? You get Your Chance to Live: Technological Failures. Obviously thrown together in a matter of hours, Your Chance to Live rails against modern man's dependence on technology with the vibrant coherency of a raving street corner derelict. This may have something to do with the fact that the producers hired an actual street corner derelict to do the raving, or as they refer to it, the "narration." Among the pearls of wisdom he imparts along the way? "Without electricity, there could be no electrical fires." The point is emphasized by showing stock footage of "Pioneers" baling hay. Surely, the producers of this film were on a higher plane of consciousness, or maybe just really wanted to get off work in time to catch the tail end of happy hour. The whole thing makes for an experience that is as surreal as i
Pop quiz hotshot: Your father tells you that your grandmother has fallen and badly hurt herself. What do you do? Like most of us here at RiffTrax, you probably answered "Call an attorney to jump start the inheritance process." Well, this self-centered attitude is what separates regular guys like us from Understanding Your Ideals star Jeffrey Moore. When Jeffrey hears this tragic news, his first thoughts are not of himself, but instead of others. Specifically, of the girl that he was supposed to take to the dance that night. He had hoped to pick her up in the family car, which is instead speeding towards Grandma's prone, frail person. How disappointed this young girl will be when she learns she has to take the bus! OK, it actually turns out that Jeffrey is just as bad, if not worse, than most of us. Why? He is lacking "ideals", which if we understood the short correctly, are like headlights on your car, in that if you accidentally leave them on while you're at work, you have to get a ju
Ah, beer. Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast. (We think that's what the Swan of Avon was referring to...) Beer provides everything the human body needs-if anything, what little it lacks can be made up with regular doses of loaded potato skins, an occasional pickled egg, or several handfuls of pub mix (if you can get it before the loud guy with Pat Riley hair picks out all the peanuts.) Yes, beer is perfect and holy, but lately it has been maligned by dark forces. Envious, beady-eyed, sober little creatures who resent that the rest of us have a way to actually have fun playing softball, or going bowling. That we have a beverage that makes encounters with our family almost bearable, enhances our powers of seduction and gives us the courage to jump over a too-high park bench when goaded on by our fun-loving friend. (The fact that we didn't make it and shattered four of our teeth in the process is immaterial to the argument.) Thank goodness As
It's the most important decision you'll ever make: should I eat the rest of this BK Stacker, or just trust my vague feeling of nausea and quit while I'm ahead? But put that aside now and let's talk about the third most important decision you'll ever make*: should I go steady? The answer, of course, is no. But the short Going Steady doesn't settle for such easy answers. Instead it probes the question through the tortured angst of Marie, an insecure girl with "offbeat" good looks who can't shake her Jeff habit. Jeff, for his part, is a flannel-clad Lothario, prowling the high school hallways and leaving nothing but the shattered husks of broken-hearted bobby-soxers as his terrible toll. Otherwise, very polite young man. In the powerful third act, Marie confronts Jeff, and the reaction is as explosive as anything Judson T. Landis has ever done! Mike, Kevin and Bill learned everything they know about life, about love...and about laughter....from Going Steady. *The 2nd is "should I take adv
Like Wii Boxing, they're one of those things that instantly becomes 1000x less cool the moment you bring it home and try it out. Rather than quickly earning their keep and chomping down on your neighbor's annoying labradoodle, your carnivorous plant instead sits on your window sill, vowing that he'll get to work tomorrow. You show off their opening and closing ability to disinterested friends who suddenly realize that Wii Boxing wasn't that bad after all, while your housefly population triples in size and begins to plot a coup. Soon after, the plant dies when you go to visit your grandmother in Sarasota.
You and Your Family. Much like gunpowder and an open flame, combining the two is not recommended (especially if mom's been drinking.) But every now and then a scenario arises where you must remove your iPod's ear buds, emit a contemptuous, full-bodied sigh and actually interact with your family.* You and Your Family is the must-have guide to how to handle these situations with a minimum involvement of municipal services. Each scenario in You and Your Family plays out in several different ways, and you the viewer are left to decide which would be the most effective course of action. It's like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, except that instead of reading about The Lost Jewels of Nabooti**, you decide whether to help mom with the dishes. Imagine Rashomon with slightly more Room-Storming-Off-To, and you've got You and Your Family. Riffers Mike, Kevin and Bill each assume the "You" in You and Your Family is referring to one of the other two guys. *These situations include holidays, bir
The follow-up to the smash hit "Primary Safety: In the Three Mile Island Cooling Tower", Primary Safety: In The School Building starts with a catchy name and builds from there. Personal injury lurks everywhere in our nation's schools, and while any hipster with an ironic "Runs With Scissors" t-shirt can identify the most famous way to hurt yourself, fewer can pinpoint the dozens and dozens of more obscure ways that you can lose an eye in music class alone. Primary Safety: In The School Building has an answer. A cumbersome, ineffective answer. It involves giant "stop" and "go" signs, a dimwitted child, and lots of trial and error. It is the same system that now powers our nations DMVs. Head dimwit Bill mans the signs, a responsibility he earned by amassing the most experience, having repeated kindergarten for a third time. After a morning with Bill, you may be no closer to surviving a school day in one piece, but you'll probably have eaten enough paste that you just won't care. Mike, Ke
Surprisingly, not a biography of Björk, Damaged Goods is a cautionary tale about a couple of young men who go on a harmless adventure in search of beer and girls and end up finding exactly that. Unfortunately they are lured off that wholesome path by the seductive siren song of something called a "Coolie Cup". Inspired, apparently, by the jockstrap of an Asian worker, this evil rum drink causes our hero, Hercules-like (Kevin Sorbo Hercules, just to be clear), to be led astray. The result, a stern lecture by a silver-haired doctor-oh, and some horrible communicable disease affecting the genitals. We weren't really paying attention, as someone had just whipped up a pitcher of Coolie Cups. Mike, Bill, and Kevin: damaged goods and your guides through Damaged Goods.
Mario Batali. Emeril Lagasse. Thomas Keller. What do they all have in common? Besides having seen Julia Child naked? That's right, they are all masters of Cooking Terms. Cooking Terms are the first step toward becoming a master chef. Because how can one properly prepare Duck Foie Gras with a Confiture of Meiwa Kumquats and a Balsamic Glaze if you don't know what "boiling" means. Cooking Terms And What They Mean follows a newlywed named Margie through her first day of housewifery. Margie evidently spent her childhood in a vegetative coma, because she somehow made it to her wedding day without knowing what "bake" means. We observe Margie as she learns the terms she will need to prepare the Culinary Institute of America's four basic dishes: Meat, Cake, Jelly and Scalloped Cauliflower. Will she successfully cook her husband a delicious meal? Or will her spiral of failure expand so rapidly that it consumes our entire known universe? Mike, Kevin and Bill now understand the difference between
It can happen to any of us: we fall in with some free-spirited youths, get a few lime phosphates in our system, and before you know it we're rolling up our blue dungarees to impertinent heights, styling our hair into an ill-mannered pompadour and beating up our own fathers and rolling 'em for spare change. Such rash acts can lead almost directly to juvenile delinquency. What About Juvenile Delinquency is not afraid to ask the tough questions, none of which, surprisingly, is, "What about juvenile delinquency?" Rather it takes on the abstruse but no less important questions such as, "How close can we can get to an acne-scarred teen's face before it's too close?" Mike, Kevin and Bill answer the question What About Juvenile Delinquency with a hearty, "Sounds good!"
The 50's are back with a simple message for you-Snap Out of It. "But," you protest, "I only-" Hey, the 50's are gonna stop you right there. Don't say another word. Doesn't matter what mealy-mouthed, limp- wristed, it's-somebody-else's-fault bull crap excuse you were about to offer, the 50's are gonna say the same thing: Snap the hell out of it! And in Snap Out Of It, when laconic high schooler Howard starts in with some garbage about how he should have got a better grade on blah-blah whatever whatever, the answer was the same. Hey, H-man. Snap out of it. And Howard knew to slick back that hair, hitch up the dungarees and get down to the business of snapping out of it. Mike, Bill and Kevin snap out of their own funk, and into a Slim Jim, to take on Snap Out Of It.
Ground-breaking in its use of "toward" as the first word in its title (can you think of another?), Toward Emotional Maturity also pioneered the techniques of throwing reptiles at people and locking puppies in boxes as a way to demonstrate the deep deficiencies in the human character. Featuring the beautiful but volatile Sally, a girl who loves Hank with all her heart one moment, and the next wants to cut him into thin slabs with her fencing épée and feed him to her dog. Along the path to maturation, Sally must learn to control her emotions, and, in one terrifying scene, put down a violent riot of her fellow students, the likes of which makes a Pistons/Pacers game seem like a Friends' Meeting. Mike, Bill and Kevin move toward-toward, mind you, not near, or close to, or anywhere within several hundred miles of-but Toward Emotional Maturity.
When a short entitled Alcohol Trigger Films turned up at RiffTrax HQ, we jumped at the chance to riff it. After all, everyone who works here is a big fan of the subject matter: trigger films. Alcohol we can give or take. But a chance to watch even one Trigger Film, let alone a collection of three Trigger Films, back to back to back...We were so excited we pulled the bottle of Wild Turkey out of our desk drawer for a little early-afternoon celebration (we lied, we're actually pretty fond of alcohol, too.) Alcohol Trigger Films explore three different booze-related scenarios. The general theme seems to be that alcohol is the only way to explain the horrible 70s fashion choices that each character is sporting. Amazingly, for a film about the consequences of drinking, the issue of vulgar, slurred wedding toasts never arises. Instead, we witness a series of mundane alcohol-related events, where nothing really all that bad happens. In fact, the one party that the seventh graders throw looked
Yes, it's that's time again-time to go back to school. And when it's time to choose with whom you'd like to go, the options are nearly limitless: your uncle Barney, Richard Simmons, that guy who sits in front of you at church and occasionally cleans his ears with his keys, Pruane2, Jewel, or possibly one of the Baldwins. Well, the idea that you should return to school accompanied by Joan Miller is given a fair and compelling hearing in the colorful short Back to School with Joan Miller. Yes, Joan Miller, designer extraordinaire, creator of dresses and suits that span an extraordinary range from conservative, plaid two-piece suits, to conservative plaid two-piece suits complemented by a hat. And BtSwJM offers not just two or three examples of her work, but rather a seemingly endless march of them, by the hundreds they come, one after another, modeled by strange-eyed shapeless women, driven relentlessly on by the sting of Joan Miller's whip. Take notes, because there will be a test as Mi
Sometime between the invention of pyromania and the discovery of Beatlemania, the country suffered a frightening outbreak of Highway Mania. Accounts of the disorder are sketchy, but if the film Highway Mania is to be believed, it involved shaving your head, scarring your face with a good, strong liter or two of muriatic acid, and then climbing in your car and driving like Lizzy Grubman while-and this is very important, critical, even- cackling like a community theater actress in a bad production of Hansel and Gretel. While you did this a team of three different narrators described in purple prose the horrors you were visiting upon the land. You, however, remain singularly focused on your cackling. (Don't be too hard on yourself; highway mania is a disease, just like alcoholism or embezzling.) Somehow hurricanes and cruise ship sinkings are also involved and probably your fault. Join Mike, Bill and Kevin as the catch the fever that is Highway Mania.
It seems that forty years ago, one out of every three instructional films was about The Bill of Rights (the rest were about either syphilis and/or Mr. Bungle.) So it was only natural that we'd finally get around to riffing a short focused on the Bill of Rights, and we had just the one in mind. Unfortunately, that episode of Schoolhouse Rock where the bill becomes a law proved far too expensive to acquire, and we had to go with Plan B. Plan B turned out to be The Bill of Rights in Action. It proved far more exciting than The Bill of Rights Takes it Easy and is a veritable thrill ride compared to The Bill of Rights is Feeling Kind of Hungover, So Could You Put On the 'Saved By The Bell' Marathon and Pick Him Up a Gatorade and a Breakfast Burrito. And even though we wish it would focus more on our favorite amendment (#9, Protection of rights not specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights, booyah), it makes the admittedly more populist choice and focuses on the granddaddy of all rights,
The world of Safety Instructional Films breaks down into two distinct categories: Shake Hands with Danger, and everything else. If you like your hair feathered, your glasses huge and your moustaches grown at an eighth grade level, this is the short for you. Narrated by a guy who was rejected from the Dukes of Hazard narrator job for sounding too much like a cotton-pickin' bumpkin, Shake Hands with Danger explores the terrifying world of construction work. Sponsored by the Caterpillar heavy machinery company, it chronicles the myriad of ways you can hurt, dismember, maim or kill yourself using Caterpillar brand heavy machinery. No action is free from potentially life-ending consequences. Even if you stay home and lock yourself indoors, the bulldozer will just barrel your house over before seeking out the rest of your family!. Nobody is safe!!. Nobody!!!! Yes, riff fans of all ages will enjoy this lighthearted timecapsule of the 1970s, set to one of the catchiest Industrial Safety-based
When we think back on the list of the great entertainers of the past century, a few names universally come to mind: Sinatra. Carson. Lohan. And Jimmy. No, not Jimmy Walker. And not Jimmy Stewart, (Really? You guessed Jimmy Walker before Jimmy Stewart?) We're of course talking about Jimmy the Raven, sparkplug of the glorious ensemble cast of Wing, Claw and Fang.
Ladies and gentlemen: Moose Baby. Think of Howard Carter as first he gazed upon the freshly unsealed chamber of the tomb of Tutankhamen; that should give you some sense of the awe and wonder we felt as we sat in a nondescript screening room poring over a series of colorless and uninteresting shorts only to discover the rare and precious gift that is Moose Baby. To try to describe it would be to rob it of some of its magic. He is Moose Baby. "But what is it about?" you quite reasonably ask. It is not about anything. It is Moose Baby. "Who made it? Where did it come from?" No one knows. There are no credits, no markings of any kind. It is untraceable. It is a beautiful mystery. It is Moose Baby. He is Moose Baby. Drink it in, and you will be one with Moose Baby.
Flying Stewardess takes us for an airborne jaunt through the wild blue yonder. Hop on board a spacious plane, where you'll be treated like a king. Enjoy a delicious steak dinner, served to you by a smiling stewardess. After that, treat yourself to a complimentary cocktail before retiring to your own bed in the sleeping cabin. You'll arrive at your destination refreshed and relaxed. Yes, Flying Stewardess is one of the most chilling science fiction shorts we've ever seen. Set in the bizarro realm known as "The 1940s", it is not-as you may have guessed-a tale of a Stewardess who gains the power of flight after a freak tray-table accident. It is actually a biting satire of the airline industry as a whole. (WARNING: Satirizing the airline industry may not be a wise idea. A sharp uptick in sitting next to shrieking babies, Bluetooth headset guys and people requiring multiple seat belt extenders may occur as a result.) Mike, Kevin and Bill were all chastised repeatedly by their stewardess fo
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff a short about beauty tips from Constance Bennett, an actress you've never heard of from the 1930s.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on the film that puts teenagers on trial.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short with the many ways people race.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short film and see if it tells us what it means to be an American.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where a 9-year-old safety hero gets hit by a car, sending him to the afterlife called Safety Island.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin finds out if this short film answers the question: What does it mean to be an American?
Mike, Bill, and Kevin find out how Tommy Tucker could escape Safety Island.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about the female NAVY during World War II.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where a circus prepares the show.
Veronica Belmont joins Mike, Bill, and Kevin for riffing on a short about the American woman.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short film where a woman spends too much at the gas station.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on the short that introduces us to the small tree of no account.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on an adaptation of the classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In this version, he has a hot mom.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a Christmas film where Santa gives a girl a dream where her doll comes to life.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short of the classic Christmas poem.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where a musical trio follows a woman home, just to show her how to cook better.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short of swimmers performing. Also, Esther Williams appears.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin continue on American Thrift, but without Veronica Belmont.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where a girl named Molly experiences growing up. Also, the school nurse stalks her.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin continue on Call it Free, where a love triangle between a wife, her husband, and the gas station owner gets put straight. Also, there's a red fat cartoon guy involved.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short focusing on the dangers of drug addiction.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where a kid learns following instructions from a rhyming shopkeeper.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short that introduces us to Gregory the skunk.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about a school fish tank.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where a woman goes to the zoo with her pet monkey.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about seat belt safety in the 80's.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where they show you how to draw things that are rectangles.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short that follows the first weeks of a group of kittens since their birth.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about teenagers struggling with problems because they didn't learn how to read.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short which shows families from Japan, Mexico, and the USA getting food and eating dinner.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about a typical family enjoying the hot days of summer.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where some stuff in Reggie's room come to life and talk him into cleaning up.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a film about the basic skills of reading growth. Also, a boy named Ron has a pet frog tied to a string.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where we assume a kid is named "Farmland".
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a film about types of words while we go to the beach.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about a boy who adores a plant.
Mike, Bill and Kevin riff on a short where a few kids bug a junk collector.
Mike, Bill, and Kev in riff on a short about working in a family team.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about a post-WWII Philippean village, complete with cockfighting.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a film where they think the teacher's name is Mr. Bachelder and Roy, the shy boy, is treated like crap.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about hats in different seasons.
Fans of crappy paragraphs, run and hide because Building Better Paragraphs is here to pummel your putrid paragraphs into submission! Building Better Paragraphs tells the tale of Susan, whose dog Major wins a prize at a dog show. Actually, it tells the tale of three children telling the tale of Susan & Major. While the rest of the class presumably learns important life skills such as the capital of Delaware, these three toil away at the back table, shaping their initial failure of a paragraph into something vaguely coherent.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short which asks if anyone is the same person.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where a boy named Phil learns mealtime manners from some television program. They also think that Phil is Italian.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where a kid named Joey is stuck in an ever changing world.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about a boy named William who gets a baby doll.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where a boy named Tommy who befriends Joey, who is hated by the other kids. He then sort of befriends them, but winds up having to decide.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where two kids waste time at the library instead of going to that baseball game they're supposed to go to.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about the successful and unsuccessful diets.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where a woman washes clothes in gasoline and catches fire.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about how to stay safe when you're alone in your house.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short that addresses calling for emergencies.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where a boy visits a fire station and learns about escaping house fires.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about seven ducklings that are owned by a pig-faced girl.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a film where a kid named Steve spends a day with the cops. Also, he hangs out with the "What Frank?" guy.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about removing and preventing acne.
The film is about the signs that show us whether anything in school is safe or not.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about pigs in the wild, from farrowing to teets.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where we see footage of monkeys and verbs combined.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a film where an Australian bushman tells them safety tips of camping down under.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where a witch tells the grocery store customers to save money.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where three boys find a hubcap.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where two people show a girl how to use a calendar. But due to calendars being too clever, their heads almost blow up.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short on saving one of the then-most endangered species.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where Santa shows some children a Punch and Judy show.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short that takes place in a world ruled by eggs, which means "EGG PUN ALERT".
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where we see the return of Mr. Mac.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a film about - you guessed it - handling daily problems.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a film where a kid looks through a film thingy and sees absurd examples of courtesy.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff a film about a mistreated customer. And if you think that guy had it rough, wait until you meet Norman.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about walking to school, which follows children Jim and Margie taking a (awfully long) walk to school.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about how we're pronouncing words wrong.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about dealing with customers at your job.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about crossing the street like the alphabet.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short film where Vaughn Monroe's family goes camping and one of the daughters witnessed seeing Smokey Bear.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about a badger who has a bad day thanks to other animals.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin return to the American, Mexican, and Japanese families they met last year to see how each of them earn and spend.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about one of Australia's known animals: Kangaroos.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short film about a red hen which involves duck urine.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short with two small hippies who seek over kids and a glitter-wearing tooth fairy.
Ah, the rural county fair -- the kind of place that everyone takes their children, then immediately remembers that county fairs are no place for children, or decent folk of any age. Carnies, deep-fried treats that make the KFC Double Down seem like a heart-healthy option, and rides that are either 100% rust or coated in the blood of previous riders, there’s no end to the number of ways a county fair wants to kill you. County Fair takes this bacteria farm of an environment and adds new levels of terror, with songs straight out of a bottomless David Lynch fever dream. Dip your funnel cake in liquid mescaline and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill on the ferris wheel to eternity with County Fair!
Quick! Say the first word that comes to mind when I mention porcupines. Ok... Sure, why not...That one’s not really what we're looking for, but keep 'em coming...Ok, that's a little weird that you thought of that...Oh god! How would that even work!?!? You know what, let's stop that exercise. NOT the results we were expecting. How would you even get the banana out of the rubber chicken once you were hooked on to the trapeze? You know what, it's not important. The word we were looking for was "salt". That's right, porcupines like the star of our latest short, Prickly, love salt and will stop at nothing to get one sweet, sweet lick of the decidedly non-sweet substance. Dont believe us? Possibly because you've never heard this so-called "fact" before and it sounds like it needs to be accompanied by a big fat, 72 point Wikipedia-style "citation needed" label? We agree that it does. So here's our citation: Prickly the Porcupine, a great new short in which one brave porcupine goes off
The internet era is filled with mysterious, indecipherable messages. The comment “firsties” on an article - what could it possibly mean, and what purpose could it serve? An all-caps email forwarded by your grandmother warning of the potential dangers of the ethanol gasoline conspiracy...but only after scrolling past thousands of strange, hieroglyphic “>” symbols. Or a text message like “lolwut gmafb rusrsly X-D”, which, according to the work of our finest crypto-linguists, translates roughly to “Pass the frog-banana, Harold.” But our new short The Mysterious Message shows that failures in communication happened even back in the ancient period known as Pre-Geocitian! In those days, something called “handwriting” was the culprit. Now used primarily for that one actual check you still have to begrudgingly write each month (ugh, rent) handwriting was once so common that a faux-scary short film with a faux-good Vincent Price impersonating narrator had to be made!
Sometimes it’s really hard to be a good sport. Like when your fifth grade basketball team gets embarrassed 41-17 on the court, so you convince all the boys on your team to hock a loogie into their palms before shaking hands with the winning team. Then the goody-two-shoes on your team, James, rats you out to coach and you get in big trouble. So, as kids do, you dedicate your life to developing an elaborate revenge plan against James, culminating in cut brake lines and you doing 10 years hard time for no good reason. Hey, we’ve all been there, am I right? Kids will be kids! Our new short, Being a Good Sport, tries to help you avoid such scenarios, but mainly just proves that snotty kids who don’t play well with others should be shunned for the safety of everyone involved. Embracing these adorable little psychopaths will earn you nothing but a knife in the back! Consider yourself warned!
Animals make their homes in lots of fun, interesting places! Some burrow into tree bark, while others burrow into the dense, matted armpit hair of a bench-napping Nick Nolte! Some gather twigs and leaves to construct nests, while others nest in the exhaust pipe of the inoperative Dodge Pacer in which Nick Nolte resides! Some dig elaborate underground tunnel systems, while others dig tunnels in the massive stack of restraining orders, ignored subpoenas, and unpaid adult pay-per-view bills that Nick Nolte keeps around so that he has something to wipe up his sick! Mike, Kevin, and Bill invite you to join them for Animal Homes, which provides a window into the everyday lives of gophers, opossums, and other hideous rodent beasts that you usually only get to see on the side of the freeway, being very, very still!
Sure, great, here we go...”beginning” responsibility, and “getting” ready for school. Hey kids, how about for once you just GET responsible and BE ready for school? We’re tired of coddling you! Oh, you can’t eat your breakfast, because we put the plate up on top of the fridge and you can’t reach it because you’re only five years old? Yeah well everyone’s got some kind of sob story, just figure it out buddy! Oh, sure, cry, guess you don’t need any help learning how to “begin” doing THAT. Inexplicable rage aside, Beginning Responsibility: Getting Ready for School centers on two wholesome 1950s lads, Pete and Ricky, and their morning routines. One boy’s home runs as smoothly as a Swiss watch, while the other is as disorganized and maddeningly chaotic as one of those Canadian watches you never hear about (and now you know why). Hurry up and join Mike, Kevin and Bill for Beginning Responsibility: Getting Ready for School because the late bell already rang twice and if you don’t get insi
Who among us doesn’t love a good adventure? A chance to escape our routines and stimulate our minds and reinvigorate our sense of fun. Yes, there’s nothing like the thrill you get from emerging from your burrow, nervously looking around, and perhaps grabbing a nut before darting back underground to huddle amongst your brothers. What’s that? Not exactly how you define adventure? Something more along the lines of travelling, camping, whitewater rafting? Well, I apologize. I didn’t clarify that I was using the definition of adventure as found in the latest RiffTrax short Adventures of a Chipmunk Family. It’s packed to the brim with adventures, if you consider expanding the series of underground tunnels that the chipmunks live in in preparation for winter to be an adventure. Also, a weasel shows up. You know what, we probably should have mentioned that first...Forget everything you just read and remember this: weasel.
GET TO DA CHOPPA!!! Many of us have heard these iconic instructions hundreds of times. They’ve been shouted at us during important life events: graduations, weddings, or most likely, watching Predator hungover at two in the afternoon at Dan’s. Few of us ever take the shouter up on the Choppa-getting-to however. Except Billy! Billy is a boy who acts where the rest of us cower in fear, or perhaps ask Dan to pass us the gatorade. Make no bones about it, in Billy’s Helicopter Ride, Billy gets to da Choppa. The fact that Da Choppa is driven by Uncle Joe, who looks like he was rejected from the Grapes of Wrath cast on the grounds of being “too drifter-like”, does not deter Billy’s father from letting Billy take an unaccompanied tour of their town in the helicopter. While touring their town they see many exciting things such as: their town from a slightly elevated position than normal. Will Billy seize the controls in a manic episode and plunge the helicopter downward, spiralling towards
Who needs friends when you have a talking paper bag named Mr. Paper Bag?
Aesop’s Fables. These stories, with their universal morals, have inspired us all. Tales such as “The Fox and the Grapes”, “The Lion and the Mouse” and “The Two Cat/Bear things that go to the North Pole and one dies but comes back to life and they see a polar bear.” Not familiar with the last one you say? Perhaps you remember it by its more common name Frozen Frolics. No? We’re pretty sure it’s one of Aesop’s Fables, it says so right on the title screen... Anyhow, Frozen Frolics answers that eternal question, “What was it like when people took acid before color had been invented?” The answer? Lots of black and white cartoon animals that sort of bob up and down repeatedly while a crazed mixture of consequence free violence happens all around them. Many credit it as the inspiration for The Jerry Springer Show. Mike, Kevin and Bill learned a very important moral during their riffing of Frozen Frolics: cured meats are delicious.
Ever since this short debuted at RiffTrax Live: Reefer Madness, we’ve heard one question more than any other: “Why are you standing so close to me?” But a VERY CLOSE second to that is, “When are you guys gonna release that insane Grasses short??” Friends, you need ask no longer! Unless you were one of the people asking the first question, in which case the answer is “It’s a free country, I’ll stand where I want. Hey, you gonna finish that Hostess fruit pie?” Here, in a new studio version, is At Your Fingertips: Grasses. It’s got everything! Arts & crafts so awful they would even disappoint Depression-era children, fancy headdresses galore, and child worship of a terrifying clay-faced god! Not to mention a certain inquiry about corn that ranks up there with “Who is Keyser Soze?” as one of cinema’s great questions. While recording At Your Fingertips: Grasses, Mike, Kevin, and Bill kept something else at their fingertips: lots and lots of bourbon.
Let’s just be upfront: this is a sequel to the infamous Grasses short and you should buy it right away. Yes, the mad geniuses at ACI films have recruited a new group of children to glance nervously at the authority figures standing off-camera as they’re forced to make crafts out of common household garbage. This time, the waste product of choice is cardboard boxes. Yes, before Calvin and Hobbes turned a cardboard box into a transmogrifier, the children in this short were showing similar sparks of imagination by pretending to assemble crafts that were clearly made by adults when the camera wasn’t rolling. There are no fancy headresses in this short, but you will witness an entire city made of blocks, complete with corpses floating in a motel pool. Also, two youngsters live out every child’s fantasy and use boxes to set up their own furniture moving business. And it wouldn’t be an At Your Fingertips short without twisted creatures brought into existence
A cutting, thoughtful, and sober analysis of the coming world energy crisis, Borrowed Power affirms -- WAIT WAIT DON’T GO just kidding!! It’s really about an extaordinarily ugly teenager killing someone with his car! Or did he? That question is the raw mystery of this driving scare film, which brings to life the character of young, reckless, hideous Jerry, and his equally unpleasant friends. In his hurry to get to a sock hop, or a malt shop, or some other dull and awful thing old-timey teenagers did to pass the time until video games and psychedelic drugs became available, Jerry drives his giant car like a gosh-darned fool. After his (potentially) lethal ride, he’s scolded by a vaguely governmental official who calls in Jerry’s parents, who somehow take the ugly levels EVEN HIGHER! You won’t believe your eyes! Mike, Kevin, and Bill have taken the key lesson of Borrowed Power to heart, namely, whatever you do, try not to be outrageously ugly while doing it.
There are lots of places you could take eggs. You could take eggs to a party! You could take eggs to the museum! You could take eggs to prom! You could take eggs to the workplace of your romantic rival, lock his office door from the inside and then plug in a hot plate, put a skillet onto that hot plate and slowly, one-by-one, crack the eggs on the edge of the skillet, letting them sizzle as you maintain steady eye contact with this man, your nemesis, as his terror grows exponentially in the face of your unflinching refusal to answer his questions about why you’re there and what you’re going to do to him. Or you could take Eggs to Market! From filthy chicken cages to depressed factory workers to big goopy buckets of yolk matter, Eggs to Market is full of delightful behind-the-scenes egg-packaging fun! Mike, Kevin, and Bill enjoyed Eggs to Market, but it did nothing to change their view that eggs should primarily be used as bacon grease delivery systems.
Juan and His Donkey! Rockin’ your commute on KBLZ 105.3! Stay tuned because we’ve got our producer Timmy The Gimp in nothing but a kilt out in front of a funeral home, and a guy in a turkey costume is gonna blast him with paint balls! It’s gonna be off the- Wait, what? Juan and His Donkey is not a wacky morning show DJ Team? It’s an educational short from Coronet, part of the popular “A Boy Of ____” series? Are you sure? I mean, that sounds feasible, but what is it meant to teach exactly? Hm...Cultural differences...I dunno. Seems like it’s just going to prove dated and offensive...You’re sure we can’t just run with the Morning Zoo thing? Well fine. A Boy of Mexico: Juan and His Donkey is NOT wacky, and there are no interns harassing old ladies. The donkey isn’t even painted like a zebra. But this tale of a poor Mexican boy who chops firewood for a living and longs for nothing more than to buy his donkey Pepito a new serape is quite dated and proves quite ripe for riffing.
When you ask a company like ACI, makers of the now-infamous “Grasses” and “Boxes” shorts, to create a film teaching kids to count to ten, there are three things of which you can be certain. One, you can count on the fact that if you’re talking to someone at ACI, they are attempting to speak to you on a telephone made out of old, damp egg cartons. Two, you know the end product they give you will not teach children how to count, but WILL teach them how to succumb to the chaos of life and turn their backs on reason with whimsy and a shaky, nervous smile. Three, well, we’d list a third thing here, but we learned to count from ACI and frankly, after two we always get confused and take a nap under the kitchen sink. One Turkey, Two Turkey plunges the viewer gobble-deep into the hideous, squawking world of a commercial turkey farm. Juxtaposing images of these terrified birds awaiting execution with a cheerful, legitimately catchy song about counting is just the sort of special touch
We Discover the Dictionary weaves the enchanting tale of three grade school children who discover the dictionary for the first time. And that’s all well and good: they use it to write a thank you note to a police officer who must have lost a bet or something, because he had to come talk to their class about bike safety. But if we may nitpick for just a second... As far as discoveries go, “Discovering the Dictionary” probably ranks down there with Columbus “discovering” America in terms of least impressive feats. First of all, the dictionary, much like America, was already there the whole time. It was just sitting on teacher’s desk, gathering dust. Second, much like America, people were already using the dictionary before these three idiots found it. In fact, it’s hard to argue that anybody could “discover” the dictionary when it’s in fact a book created by other people. Thirdly, these children immediately begin to abuse the dictionary, looking up words like “poop” and “weiner.” Sure
It’s summer vacation! School’s out and you have all the time in the world to hang with your best bud and...ponder the meaning of nothingness? In What is Nothing? we join two youngsters who, as all rascals do, sit around and contemplate the void. Whether they’re journeying to the library to look up “Nothing” in the dictionary, or coming up with profound truths such as “caterpillars matter to caterpillars”, one thing is certainly true: we want some of whatever these kids are on. What is Nothing? will have you longing for the bygone days of your youth, when entire days could be spent eating cookies, riding bikes, silently screaming about your own insignificance and watching Gilligan’s Island reruns. Mike, Kevin and Bill yell riffs into the abyss on What is Nothing? Oh wait, that’s not an abyss...That is a microwave oven somebody left on the side of the road.
When you see the title of our new short, Feelings: I’m Feeling Alone, you might think to yourself “Alone? That’s gotta be the saddest thing you could put after the words ‘I’m Feeling’ in an educational short meant for small children.” Not so! Consider these other titles in the series. “Feelings: I’m Feeling My Ex-Girlfriend’s Wet Doormat When She’s Not Home.” Or “Feelings: I’m Feeling Like the Last Bit of Hamster Food in the Bowl that Even my Disgusting Hamster Won’t Eat.” Then there’s “Feelings: I’m Feeling the Grooves in Mickey Rourke’s face,” and, last but not least, “Feelings: I’m Feeling Like Seeing Transformers 3 with my Wife on our Anniversary.” A whimsical, musical foray into the infinite sadness of childhood, Feelings: I’m Feeling Alone went the extra mile to bum out schoolkids, who were already pretty bummed out because they were watching awful educational shorts in school. And if you think the short builds to a resolution or offers kids any kind of hope for the future.
Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about two teachers setting up a kindergarten classroom. And that's the short.
Many of the educational shorts we riff seem to have been designed not to teach children, but instead to confuse them into a state of dizzy, nauseous acceptance. Most try to hide this deception with an authoritative narrator, some pretense of structure, or official-sounding “key terms.” Our new offering, Join Hands, Let Go! makes no such attempt, and in fact is so bold as to put contradictory instructions right in the title! Do we join hands, or do we let go? Who are the children in this film? Where are they going, and why? Is the mustachioed man with the wacky outfits connected in any way? Is he a good man or a bad man? He seems like a bad man. Will I ever go to college, or even learn basic math, if we keep watching films like this in school? The answer Join Hands, Let Go! provides to all these questions is a firm, definitive, “whatever.”
Do you ever get scared? Do you ever get the creeps? More importantly, are both of these questions wildly inappropriate for an educational short to pose to a bunch of nine year olds? Of course they are, yet The Creeps Machine soldiers on with whatever its mission might be. In theory, it’s supposed to reassure kids that they can conquer their fears. It does this by springing a hideous clown named Old Bobo upon them, thereby guaranteeing that they never sleep for the rest of their childhood, which fortunately will end much sooner once they’ve witnessed The Creeps Machine. The Creeps Machine features lurking old men, Rube Goldberg devices, a menacing gorilla’s hand, zero coherence and of course, Old Bobo. In other words, perfect educational fodder for Mike, Kevin and Bill to riff.
A discussion of great, important series would be incomplete without mention of Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Twin Peaks, and, of course, the “Boy of” shorts. We’ve previously presented A Boy of Mexico: Juan and His Donkey, and our new installment doesn’t disappoint in fulfilling the naming scheme of “Boy of [country]: [name of boy from that country] and His [stereotypical animal from that country].” Told through the eyes of a narrator who insists on inserting himself into the story of Rama’s family life even though he never appears on screen, and there’s no reason to think the people in the short know he exists, it is a sweet tale of physical labor, visibly moist living conditions, and heaps and heaps of elephant feces. Despite this, the film contains less excrement than NBC’s “Outsourced”, which was 100% excrement. Grab whatever animal best represents your background (for most of us, a stuffed Ewok doll) and join Mike, Kevin and Bill for Boy of India: Rama and His Elephant!
It's true that the educational shorts we dig up have been described as “less educational than an episode of The Jersey Shore” in a review from Bizarrely Contrived Comparison magazine. Shown in classrooms, they formed young minds, in the sense that stomping a jar of wet clay flat is still a way of “forming” it. But our new short What Are Letters For? takes the miseducation of America’s youth to a bold new level, by teaching the alphabet yet LEAVING OUT certain letters. Which letters? That arrogant but rare Z, or perhaps the co-dependent Q that refuses to work without its U? No, they’ve instead plucked out all the vowels, those pesky soft letters that you almost never see in any words ever. Teamed up with random animals and objects, this short is easily your best bet for helping kids unlearn what scraps of language they might have learned! They’ll be committed to an illiterate future with no job prospects beyond fry cook, or popular tween vampire novelist. Having happily adopted the s
Meet The Sentencesmith! Some say this wacky old gent has a way with words! Good thing, since he lives on the Island of Grammaria, where he runs a workshop teaching all the little boys and girls the rules of...Say, is that a monkey over there in the corner of the workshop? It is! Boy, this is going to be one heck of a short! What’s that you say, Sentencesmith? Ignore the monkey, and focus on basic sentence construction? OK, OK...So, the predicate is always followed by the - I’m sorry, it’s kind of hard with the monkey right there. It’s just that it’s bound to do something hilarious any minute and - Right, grammar. Focus on grammar. You were saying how a sentence is like a treasure map because it doesn’t make any sense if you don’t follow it in the proper LOOK, WHY WOULD YOU HAVE A MONKEY IN THIS SHORT IF YOU’RE NOT GOING TO EVEN ACKNOWLEDGE THE MONKEY!? WHY TEASE US THAT WAY?! WHY!!! WHY!!! WH-!!!
For decades, the phrase “I’m looking for a job in cosmetology” has been a great, positive way to let your girlfriend know it’s probably in her best interests to seek a more compatible mate. Cosmetology is a profession traditionally filled with glamour, cutting-edge chic, and hip, attractive stylists--and our new short Jobs in Cosmetology manages to include none of those things! Even better, it presents a 1960s paradise of dead-eyed matrons squirting what appear to be bottles of diner BBQ sauce onto enormous beehive haircuts. It’s garish, hideous, and baffling--in short, the kind of thing we here at RiffTrax live for. Grab a magazine and plop down in a salon chair next to Mike, Bill, and Kevin for Jobs in Cosmetology! (And please, help us convince Kevin the full-body perm is a bad idea...)
“What Makes Things Float?” It’s no longer just something for your stoned roommate to mumble before he spreads Nutella on a Chipwich. It’s also an educational short which features two boys who just want to get some damn fishing done but are instead incessantly lectured by an off-camera stranger. Floating, as it turns out, is pretty complicated to figure out. After breaking new ground in determining that fishing sinkers do not float (this required a 3.2 million dollar grant), we’re taken to a science lab, that clearly did not receive any of this grant money. Here, a motley collection of misfit equipment that looks like its sole purpose is to inflict injury upon young scientist’s eye region, is used to determine “What Makes Things Float?” How exactly is this determined? Sand. Lots of sand. If you’re a petulant Jedi, you may want to stay clear of this lab. Instead, stay in your fishing boat with Mike, Kevin and Bill. They’ll only end up drinking all your beer and daring each other to e
There’s no two ways about it, Let’s Pretend: Magic Sneakers is a gleeful, brightly-colored, downright whimsical piece of insane evil. A young boy, grime-encrusted as a train hobo, has seemingly been left to fend for himself in a glum warehouse district. He plays with the garbage he can find, all the while smiling and laughing, probably because his brain is collapsing into a vegetative state from going days without food. Among the filth, he discovers the Magic Sneakers, which can dance and move all on their own! Overjoyed at finding intact footwear, the boy follows the sneakers on what’s sure to be an uplifting adventure (or at least, a trip to a place where he can get some soup)...but no, the sneakers cruelly lead him through a drainage ditch to the kind of remote wilderness location where people tend to “disappear.” Things get even more sinister when a cloaked figure (who looks more like a violent meth addict from Breaking Bad than a playful spirit) appears, his sneaker trap success
Every community needs a Broken Bookshop. You’ll find it in town square, over by the Moth-Ridden Mattress Hut, just around the corner from Shaky Sam’s Shattered Stemware Emporium. Because it’s not enough to buy a used book, what you really want is a book that’s been abused, stained, made damp, shredded, and then painstakingly reconstructed into something you would still rather not touch, let alone buy. That’s the sound business model featured in our new short, Beginning Responsibility: Broken Bookshop. It focuses on the sweet old man who owns the shop and happens to secretly BELIEVE THAT BOOKS TALK TO HIM. His delusional senility may seem folksy and charming, until he brings an innocent boy into his world of pointless book repair. When he aggressively insists to young Andy “My books talk to me, and maybe they’ll talk to you too!” you know that this shop deals not only in broken books, but also broken hopes and dreams for the future. At first glance we thought this short was a documen
What child wouldn’t want a wild crow as a pet?...is a question you might sincerely ask if you had never encountered children or crows before. Crows, the repulsive, squawking harpies of the suburban skyline! Crows, the chosen pet of that drunken buffoon Uncle Billy in It’s A Wonderful Life!! Crows: where do they go at night? Nobody knows, and that’s the most terrifying thing of all!!! But when one family’s attempts at warding off the sinister black hearted beasts fails (because their scarecrow is less intimidating a Cabbage Patch Doll*), they decide to do the only logical thing and flee the harbingers of doom. No, of course they don’t; they devise a crude trap to capture it. It works almost instantly, presumably because this is exactly what the crows want to happen. After a couple weeks of feeding the crow beans** in its cage, they name it Corky and it becomes a lovable member of the family. But then...! Everything turns out alright actually...
Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for the classic revenge story, Reading From Now On!
Grab a juicebox (grape ‘n dust flavor) and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill in the chummy abyss of companionship called Friends!
The Lemonade Stand: What’s Fair? is an intriguing corporate thriller, that also features a little boy who performs an entire scene with a lemonade cup in his mouth. Mike, Kevin and Bill would have preferred a beer.
Mike, Kevin and Bill have been denied membership to The Clean Club ever since the launch of their failed business venture, Foxy Septic Tank Wrestling. (It looked good on paper!!!)
Nearly 30 minutes long, packed with tension and vintage office scenes - if the popular AMC show were called Sad Men instead, this would be that show. Instead of Don Draper we have David: not quite as sexy, perhaps, but just as distant and seemingly confused by the presence of a wife and children in his home. When there’s trouble at work and his devoted, quivering Hazel decides to ask about it, the action* really heats up (*infinite icy silence). All that, plus a freakish son who’s at least 75% alien and a roast beef dinner scene that stands as a master class in Dysfunctional Family Planning. Let Mike, Kevin and Bill bring David and Hazel into your home, but don’t you dare ask how or why it was made because that’s simply not your concern, dear.
Complete with a male dog named Penny and a father who ignores his children while narrating the film with his mind (no, really) be sure to join Mike, Bill and Kevin for Sailing a Toy Boat, the full-throttle prequel to Battleship!
Mike, Kevin and Bill team up to riff one of their top three intoxicating liquid substances, Alcohol!
Ever since seeing the atrocities committed against food in Cooks and Chefs, Mike, Kevin and Bill have been fasting* in protest. *Drinking beer until not awake anymore, waking, repeating.
Like Shake Hands With Danger but instead of a folksy narrator, you have one that is sometimes made of clay, Danger Keep Out! is one warning sign not worth heeding! Previous quote designed to pander for prominent placement on the box cover of Danger Keep Out! VHS edition.
The Fish That Nearly Drowned is about a fish who [SPOILER ALERT] nearly drowns. Whoops, guess that spoiler alert should have come a bit earlier. Forget you saw it! The titular fish in question might actually drown! Because that is something that a fish can evidently do! But even though the question of whether or not the fish might drown, (he doesn’t [SPOILER ALERT] Dammit! Late again, spoiler alerts!) the true star of The Fish That Nearly Drowned is the narrator. Eschewing conventional educational short techniques, mainly because then it gets to use the word “eschew”, the short opts not to have a nebbishy man or lecturing woman narrate. Instead it has a fish do it. A fish named Silverus. A fish named Silverus whom the short informs us can communicate with the boy who maintains the aquarium while he plays ice hockey on a nearby pond.
Ah, how little these poor Carter-voting rubes knew. You will probably watch Nutrition while consuming the Pizza Hut Ten Dollar Meal box (contents: bread & cheese), or perhaps the monstrosity known as the Baconator. If you are lucky enough you may even scarf down a taco with a shell made out of a giant dorito, washed down by a varietal of Mountain Dew whose color did not exist in the 1970s. You will see these be-muttonchopped, floral print wearing ninnies lecture about the negative health properties of a burger that shockingly contained no onion rings or pulled pork. And you will laugh.
Join Mike, Kevin and Bill in the sinister clutches of our fickle puppet god, The Toymaker!
Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as they travel back in time to the age of the terrible lizard and try not to affect the future in terrible unforeseen ways, such as all taking the last name “Slapczynski”.
Farm Babies and their Mothers has a bunch of footage of cute baby animals running around. It has no educational content whatsoever. We think you’ll agree that this is a perfectly acceptable trade off.
Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as repressed memories of their own tyrannical safety patrols come back to haunt them and they instinctively cower in fear of Jimmy of the Safety Patrol!
Get “duded up” for some “hotshots” (actual slang used multiple times in this short) then join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for a seatbelt-free, Kool-Aid soaked Joy Ride!
Join us for Love That Car!, a swingin’ trip back to the ‘60s: a time so free that everybody was gettin’ some, even cars.
You’ll learn important lessons as you watch a narrator impose sentient thought on a bunch of drugged-up animals, but the true lesson of The Hare & The Tortoise is that you should study hard in school so you don’t end up being the guy who has to clean up after the animals on the set of The Hare & The Tortoise.
Our main protagonist is a Ginger Walrus. After receiving his GED from Night School (Motto: Show Your Probation Card for half off science classes), he wants a job. The problem is, where to start? So he goes to a library to look for books about resumes, which is really what you should be doing instead of watching a worthless short film like Get That Job. Eventually, he lands the big interview with a boss who is in no way overcompensating for his baldness by growing a ridiculous beard. Will our hero smooth talk his way into a dream job? Or will he mistakenly inform the delusional man interviewing him that he looks like the worst Wooly Willy variation imaginable in a suit. Join Mike, Kevin and Bill to find out!
This one takes the standard educational short goal, “waste the kids’ time while teacher sips from a flask,” to a whole new level, by actually showing OTHER kids having THEIR time wasted. A group of children, possibly detainees in a secret government prison, are put through a series of “exercises” meant to replicate the motions of common devices familiar to kids...like, y’know, an antique coffee grinder. But at least the motions...are also confusing and really dumb. Maybe the short’s real goal was to make kids shut up and appreciate ordinary jumping jacks and push-ups? Enough questions, just join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for the hallucinatory gym class fever of Perc! Pop! Sprinkle!
We’ve all been there: enjoying a nice TV dinner of Swanson’s “Slightly Bigger Than Bite Size” salisbury steak (seems irresponsible on their part frankly), when all of a sudden BOOM! The person across from the table starts choking. “This could never happen to me” you say. Oh really? “Yes really,” you say. “Obviously if I am eating a Swanson TV dinner, I am doing so alone, possibly having not even bothered to do the crucial ‘stir’ maneuver halfway through the suggested microwaving time.” Damn, she’s right! (“Obviously I am also a man” you say.) Well, the point is, someone you know is probably going to choke at some point in time, and you should know what to do in order to save their life. So watch this short, then do the exact opposite, and you should be fine. This applies to all haircuts, fashion and home decor seen in this short as well.
Tic Toc Time Clock tells the tale of a gym coach gone rogue. Instead of rope-climbing or push ups, he makes his students arrange themselves in clock formations on the ground, presumably as part of some ancient ritual meant to make people finally like gym coaches. He fails. As will any kids who learned to tell time from Tic Toc Time Clock!
Only available on the Christmas with RiffTrax: Santa's Village of Madness DVD
Mike, Bill, and Kevin encourage you to Say No To Strangers, and also to Evites, friends holding petitions, and pretty much anybody you’ve ever known, met, or loved. Just stay home by yourself.
Push your friend out of a boat! Start a fire in the yard with gasoline! Check out what’s happening at the bottom of a neat ravine! The only consequence is repeated trips to the hospital where you’ll get wrapped in bandages like a scary mummy by a friendly nurse, so you simply cannot lose!* Live and Learn! Or don’t and die, either way it makes for a very funny short. *Certainly don’t consider litigation against the ironic comedy website that gave you those ideas. Also we cannot guarantee your particular nurse will be friendly.
Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they try to pet a mangy dumpster dog while picking up venomous snakes, then call Child Protective Services on Safety With Animals!
Ten Long Minutes starts off like a classic grisly safety short. An unreasonably happy man goes to work in a factory, which experienced safety short viewers will know is a sure sign that brutal disfigurement and Play-Doh level gore effects are just around the corner. But then, a phone call, and a twist! This time the worker’s carelessness has put not himself, but his family in danger! Leaving him, and his sweaty “Wilford Brimley crossed with the Jump to Conclusions mat guy from Office Space” coworker to sit and imagine what went wrong for Ten Long (and, trust us, hilarious) Minutes!
Will Kevin be rightfully mocked and pantsed for his devotion to bus safety? Is emphasizing their own likely death the best way to teach children proper bus exiting techniques? Will Nic Cage urinate a stream of fire? Tune in to Ghost Rider and find out!
It checks all the bases for a classic 50s short: seven-year-olds who dress like fifty-year-old accountants, disembodied floating heads taunting helpless victims, and teachers who think the kindest solution is to demand answers from sobbing girls in front of the whole class. Plus, more taunts of “Stinky” than when Jabba The Hutt’s son was kidnapped. Buy the other fellow in your life a suitable gift depending on whether that fellow is a man, woman or wolf otherkin, then sit back on the couch and enjoy The Other Fellow’s Feelings.
Come for the beach drinking, stay for the narrator yelling at relatives and friends as they walk by his casket! Like one of these email forwards from your Grandma (complete with 36 point bright-red font and a million little arrows to scroll past) come to life, The Day I Died will scold its way into your heart!
What is the short actually about, other than clowns? It was something about showing you the pieces of a story and then seeing if you can put them in order. Just as a test, let’s see how your skills are before you watch the short. The pieces are: 1) Utter abject terror, gnashing of teeth and wailing at the horror. 2) The clown appears. Pretty tough, huh? You better watch the short.
The film stars Mr. Grimes, (or “Grimey” as he liked to be called), in a classic “Goofus and Gallant” scenario. Which role would you emulate? The hostile, shrieking Mr. Grimes who hands out detentions as if they were pennies wrapped in tinfoil on Halloween? Or the cool, mellow Mr. Grimes who one day lets it slip that he still lives with his mother. Of course you’d pick the first one. Whether he’s an effective educator is beside the point, because clearly the second one’s admission has lost him the respect of at least the next ten years of students who parade through his classroom. Find an eraser to hurl and synchronize your watches so you’ll know when to drop your textbooks. It’s time for Maintaining Classroom Discipline!
Rescueman teaches kids about bus safety the only way that the state of Pennsylvania knew how: incompetently with an absurd emphasis on bending your knees when you jump out of the bus. Join us, true believers!
But there’s still one thing plaguing the perfect life of this obviously wealthy “middle-class everyman” - that most treacherous of beasts, the common yard dandelion. But not for long, because the greenskeeper at our man’s country club has some advice - grab a big metal canister and drench every inch of your property in Weed-No-More! It’s safe for dogs, kids, heck you can stir it into your Yoo-Hoo if you want! So dig in to a lawn care commercial with a bigger budget than the last three Air Bud movies and join Mike, Bill, and Kevin in saying Goodbye, Weeds!
Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they work off their gambling debts (Still can’t believe that first grader tapped out to the four year old!) as they team up to riff When Should Grown-Ups Stop Fights?
In this thrilling opening episode, Batman Takes Over...an hour to arrive at the crime scene, because he drives an ordinary car instead of a Batmobile. And, standing in for stately Wayne Manor, a slightly-less-stately suburban home. Batman and thirty-something boy wonder Robin are hot on the trail of The Wizard, so named for his lack of magic powers or costume resembling a wizard’s in any way. Speaking of costumes, Batman & Robin store theirs in a drawer in a FILING CABINET. And, and, and...well there’s too much great Bat-wrongness to tell here, you really just need to see this. So squeeze into an ill-fitting costume, buckle your utility belt (ordinary belt), and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Batman Takes Over!
It’s a cook-off that makes the Iron Chef look like a line cook at Golden Corral, and the best part is, You’re the Judge! (You are not actually the judge. There is a judge in the short. It’s one of the girl’s dads. We don’t know why they called it that.)
In Batman: Tunnel of Terror, the second episode, our heroes continue their quest for the elusive Wizard in a frightening new setting. A terrifying tunnel of some kind, you ask? No, why on Earth would you think that? What are you even talking about? Forget tunnels, but the world’s greatest detectives DO manage to get themselves lost on some ordinary park trails, the kind retired grandparents walk for leisure, if the mall is closed. The action in this episode spans planes, trains, and automobiles (regular automobiles, the kind Batman drives in this series, definitely NOT Batmobiles) as the dynamic duo hunt for answers. But one question remains...WHERE IS GABE??? Join Mike, Bill, and Kevin in a swan-shaped boat for a romantic ride through Batman: Tunnel of Terror!
Fine, you’re right, that’s not really the wild ride, and Disneyland hadn’t even been built when this short was made. The ACTUAL wild ride is...completely absent. Seriously, if you can find anything that would count as Robin’s Wild Ride in this thing you must be under the influence of the villainous Wizard, or perhaps his rarely seen but much beloved henchman, Gabe. But never fear, this episode is packed with all the shlubby costumes, sleepy superheroes, ordinary vehicles, and stumble-drunk fight choreography you’ve come to expect! Join Mike, Bill, and Kevin for the Wildest, Ridey-est Batman short yet!
Yes, it’s back to the famous gentle rolling hills and remote forest cabins of Gotham City for another installment of this classic superhero serial! Picking up immediately after Robin’s Wild Ride (there was no wild ride) we’re thrown right back into the action when Batman gets trapped in Batman Trapped! Okay he doesn’t really get trapped, per se, but we do get to see the Caped Crusader climb a gentle incline with great difficulty! And it takes a while! He seems pretty tired! The mysterious Wizard and his squad of gangsters (except for Gabe, who spends this episode offscreen picking up Gatorades for the gangsters’ weekly pickup basketball game, he’s such a thoughtful guy) are still at it, kidnapping various scientist types and stealing various science-type things. What’s their endgame? Nobody’s quite sure, including the World’s Greatest Detective and the people who wrote this serial! Get Trapped with Mike, Kevin, and Bill!
Folks, there is no dancing around this issue: the plot of the first ever Norman short is that Norman uses a public restroom. Is this a pleasant experience for Norman? How dare you ask that question. This is Norman we are talking about. Having bad experiences with toilets is the closest thing he has to a personality.
As if to prove that Dunston wasn’t the only unpleasant, pest-ridden ape who knew how to Check In, here comes our old pal Norman! You’ll be pleased to know that Norman has finally cleaned up his act and gotten his life together: staying at a five star resort where everyone calls him sir, commanding respect with ease, women wanting him, men wanting to BE him...ahhh, we’re kidding of course. This installment finds Norman losing battles to a taxidermy convention, the magic fingers on a pre Civil War mattress, a television, and even exposing himself to a helpless maid. To reiterate: this short finds Norman in the bathroom once again, except this time, he is NUDE. So kick off your shoes, put your feet up on a motel comforter that’s never been washed, and check in with America’s least favorite guy, Norman!
Mike, Kevin and Bill served with Kotter, they knew Kotter, Kotter was a friend of theirs. Norman, you are no Kotter. Don’t miss Welcome Back, Norman, because when Norman suffers, the world gains!
If you’ve been following the Batman serial saga (in the same sense that your great aunt’s recent boil lancing was a ‘saga’), you certainly know what to expect by now: The event in the title, Robin Rescues Batman does not occur in the episode. Robin slurs his lines like your great aunt after she proved difficult during the boil lancing and had to be sedated. No actual plot developments of consequence occur. Oh really? Oh really smart guy? Are you so sure about that last one? Though there may not be an actual rescue of Batman by Robin, this episode does contain something which has been board certified as an actual plot development, possibly even an honest to god twist! Also, rumor has it that a certain henchman, heretofore only implied by our wishful riffers, may make an appearance. Join Mike, Kevin, Bill, Ives, and The Wizard’s mantrap installer for Robin Rescues Batman.
This classic music educational film, first seen on MST3K and riffed in its entirety for the first time ever as part of our Kickstarter rewards, is a chance to see an all new take on the beloved Mr. B!
For those who haven’t seen the film, or Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight video, it’s about a bunch of wizards, or maybe scientists, who fly a rocket into the moon’s eyeball, where they’re greeted by a bunch of freaky little monkey demon guys. In other words, the science is just as accurate as anything you’d see in a modern blockbuster. So grab a pointy hat, strap protective goggles on any lunar bodies you know, and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for A Trip to the Moon!
This sixth installment in the thrilling serial takes an unexpected turn when the Wizard and his gang, who previously had been targeting Batman and Robin, begin to Target Robin! Oh, and also still Batman. The bad guys are still targeting both of them, as they have from the beginning. These titles are meaningless. But the action continues! Just as our heroes continue to keep their costumes in a file cabinet in Bruce Wayne’s unfinished basement! And the World’s Greatest Detective continues to fall for traps set by a blundering crew of mobsters, who are really doing a great job keeping it together in the absence of their good friend Gabe, by the way. Will Batman and his middle-aged charge escape a chamber filling with deadly CO2 gas, which despite what you may have heard in science class is apparently completely visible? Tune in with Mike, Kevin, and Bill!
Having masterfully deflected that interrogation, Batman and Robin are free to pursue their archfiend The Wizard or perhaps determine where he keeps his secret magnetism machine. Technically, these goals are one and the same, as The Wizard never actually leaves the room with his secret machine in it, preferring instead to send his henchmen Earl, Neil, Gabe, Milo, Otis, and Slippy The Toad to do his dirty work for him. It’s something about capturing a train, or calling into Barry Brown’s radio show to win free tickets to Guy Lombardo, we think they may get around to addressing his actual goal in Episode 12. Batman and Robin audibly groan and pull several muscles as they inch ever closer to discovering The Wizard’s secret identity and perhaps getting themselves an actual closet to store their costumes as opposed to shoving them into a file cabinet in Episode 7 of the serial: The Deadly Blast!
Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they don their official Guardiana headbands and sunglasses for Safety Woman: In Danger Out of Doors!
In this installment of the vintage serial, Robin finally meets the Wizard! Yes, the boy wonder teams up with Fred Savage, strapping on Power Gloves to win the tournament and the hearts of gamers everywhere. No, sorry, wrong Wizard! Correction: Robin runs into Radagast the Brown, who confuses him with an ACTUAL robin and asks him to defecate in his hair like the rest of the birds do. No, no, no, also wrong, our notes are all mixed up here. Robin joins the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion on a trip to the Emerald City, where the Great and Powerful Oz gives him what he really needs -- a job cleaning up after the horse of a different color. Oops, nope, nope, deepest apologies, turns out the Wizard that Robin meets is actually the knob-turning bad guy who’s been plaguing the dynamic duo since episode one! Also, he doesn’t even really meet him. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they also don’t meet the Wizard in Batman: Robin Meets the Wizard!
It’s a meatfest of the highest order, and we feel like even Upton Sinclair himself would begrudgingly approve. Just don’t touch any machines operated by guys with less than four fingers. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for This Is Hormel!
Fresh off of not actually meeting Robin in the previous installment, Robin Meets the Wizard, it’s only natural that the Wizard would be ready to not strike back in this episode, Batman: The Wizard Strikes Back! The series is really coming into focus now. After slicing open the Penguin with his trusty lightsaber, Batman stuffs his faithful companion Robin into the villain’s guts and prays the other rebels back at Echo Base will see his bat-signal before the dynamic duo freeze to death on the ice planet’s unforgiving surface. From there, Robin undertakes a solo mission to the Dagobah system to seek wisdom from the ancient swamp-dwelling mentor, Gabe. Will he get what he’s after before George Lucas decides to go back and gunk up the whole thing with a bunch of digital effects nobody asked for? Did we mix up our VHS tapes again? Tune in to find out! Yes, the madness is really starting to set in and the lines of reality are becoming hopelessly blurred in Batman: The Wizard Strikes Back!
Yes, Norman, the sack of failure in a bad suit last seen soliciting strangers for money in a public restroom, now has to give the big speech to a crowd of investors. Why? We don’t know. Perhaps a stupid dog that won’t stop licking its crotch was unavailable. Will Norman triumph over the odds and wow the executives with a masterful speech? Or will he just Norman the entire operation down his leg?
No job? No credit? No problem! You can still join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for the long term career stability of How to Keep a Job!
Join Mike, Kevin, Bill, and your pals at the Centron Film Corporation in letting Adrilene know everything that’s wrong with her in Health: Your Posture!
So save the date, RSVP, and just generally waste as much paper and postage as possible with Mike, Bill, and Kevin for Writing Better Social Letters!
You’ll learn how to make the world’s worst planetarium. Yes, even worse than that one where the laser show is set to Dogs Barking Jingle Bells instead of Pink Floyd. Also: cardboard tube zebras! Because who hasn’t looked around their home and thought “It doesn’t look like a lunatic decorated. I should change that.” And last but certainly not least, a robot kite that violates all three of Asimov’s laws, plus several more you didn’t even know existed!
From Phoenix to Panama, there’s no blisteringly hot locale these ladies won’t be forced to suffer in their shiny plastic clothing. And might the narrator focus a little too much on the “Latin flavor” of Esther Fernandez, credited in the opening as “Paramount’s Mexican Discovery”? The answer is yes, yes, the narrator definitely focuses on that too much. Don’t hesitate, join Mike, Kevin, and Bill on this journey through the world of probably toxic glamour, Fashion Horizons!
Complete these lyrics: Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na… Batman? No, we’re sorry, those were the “na na na nas” from “Here Comes The Hotstepper” by Ini Kamoze.* Even though you failed the quiz, we’re still going to let you watch the tenth entry in the Batman serial, Batman’s Last Chance. In this episode, the Joker escapes from Arkham! Well, that’s not one hundred percent true. There is no Joker. But Arkham finally makes an appearance! Well, kind of. There’s a building called Markham. It’s not an asylum. It’s just a building. But for this series, we will classify that as a high point. And while this episode is lacking in iconic Gotham landmarks, it does have both Horse Art AND a Dog Statue, which you have to admit, are way cooler than Kite Man. Guys in hats run in hallways! The Wizard fiddles with knobs! The narrator finds hilarious ways to pronounce the word ruse! All this and more in the thrilling tenth installment Batman’s Last Chance!
Grab a mop and a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and join Mike, Bill, and Kevin for a journey into the porcelain and tile oblivion of Color it Clean!
If you’ve been watching the Batman serials up to this point, you know to expect disappointment with regard to the actions described in the title actually appearing in the serial. For example, Robin's Wild Ride did not contain a Robin partaking in a wild ride. Robin did not meet The Wizard in Robin Meets The Wizard; he was instead knocked unconscious from behind by The Wizard. One can only imagine that an episode called Robin Takes Oxygen Into His Lungs Then Expels it as Carbon Dioxide would involve the boy wonder standing around, cheeks bulging as he steadfastly refuses to draw a breath, only to eventually buckle onto the ground unconscious, hopefully dead. Which is why it comes as such a shock that Episode 11, Robin’s Ruse (rhymes with ‘goose’, of course) does in fact contain an honest-to-God ruse! Pulled off by Robin! And the ruse is this: Robin sort of crouches slightly outside a window and shines a flashlight into a room where The Wizard’s henchmen are gathered. Pretty clever ruse
Read On From Left To Right doubles down on the madness by throwing puppets into the mix. Just let that sink in for a second: an ACI short with puppets. Their names are Lem and Mel, and they make reading fun! And if you believe that, ACI has a fancy headdress to sell you. The lesson of the short is basically, don’t try to read things backwards. Most teachers simply find it easiest just to tell their students that, without subjecting them to the mind-warping powers of ACI. But if you do choose to watch it, you’ll be treated to the trademark ACI cutaways, disembodied limbs, confused children, and puppets who loathe each other. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for the latest installment with their favorite pair of inhuman, time-travelling hobbit-hobos, Clean and Neat with Harv and Marv!
Look both ways then join Mike, Kevin, and Bill, for Willy Whistle! WILLY COMMANDS IT!
After the shocking, pulse-pounding ending of Episode 11: Robin’s Ruse (rhymes with caboose), many Batman fans were left wondering how will they top that?! Will there be an episode where Batman debates between a name brand and store brand pancake mix? Will Gabe be forced to wait in line at the DMV for an additional two minutes when he forgets to take a number upon initially entering the DMV? Will Vicki Vale become briefly concerned when the check engine light in her car momentarily flickers? Sadly, none of these exciting options happens. We do however, inch ever so much closer to the finale of this series, Episode 15: Batman Disappoints Some Kids. We’ll also get to see some stuff that has never been seen before in this serial such as some thugs in a submarine—Wait, no… The Wizard fiddling with some knobs—hang on… A plane dropping bombs! That hasn’t happened before! Maybe it won’t be completely, totally, abjectly the lamest thing anyone has ever seen!*
Featuring video footage that makes the saucers in Plan 9 From Outer Space look like the aliens in Independence Day, Flying Saucer Mystery probes deep (ha!) into the mystery of our neighbors in the sky. Get it now before the government can [REDACTED]
As the latest episode of the Batman serial begins, Robin is speeding along in an...armored car? Hm, that actually sounds kind of cool… And it contains a remote control device called The Neutralizer? Intriguing, what's it do? Disables The Wizard's invisibility device!? Wow!! And in order to stop him, The Wizard's henchmen start dropping bombs out of a custom built plane!?! Holy cow! This must be the most exciting episoHAHAHAHAHAHAH you poor, deluded fool! Clearly, there’s no budget here to give that action sequence the treatment it deserves. There are however, scenes of octogenarian policemen, Barry Brown broadcasting, and three, count them, three scenes of the old rich cranky guy berating his butler. The titular superhero shows up too, we think, when he’s able to free his costume from the mess of old receipts and warranties that he also keeps in the file cabinet.
Oh, they all have their excuses: “I caught it on barbed wire.” “I snagged it on one of my mantraps.” “Gabe challenged me to Mumbly Peg.” “I hit the ‘stop’ button on my remote so emphatically during Episode 13 that it exploded, causing the injury.” So it’s up to Batman to do the trademark detective work that only he is capable of, namely, attempting to tell the difference between a barbed wire wound and a bullet hole. Will Batman be able to make this distinction? We have our doubts. We’re frankly not sure he’s been able to see a damn thing out of that mask throughout the entire serial. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for the penultimate entry in the Batman serial saga: Batman Vs. The Wizard! *I’m sorry, we’re being told this is actually just episode 14. We apologize for the entirely reasonable mistake.
Here it is, at last, the FINAL EPISODE chronicling Batman’s struggle against the Wizard! The suspense is thick, and everyone’s wondering: who will prevail and be victorious? Will it be the nefarious Wizard or -- wait, oh come on, it’s right there in the stupid title! That’d be like titling the Seinfeld finale “They wind up in jail” or the Lost finale “Don’t bother watching.” One thing the title doesn’t give away is the identity of the Wizard, most likely because the writers of the serial didn’t get around to deciding who that would be until they started shooting the final scenes of this episode. Is it the old occasionally-in-a-wheelchair guy? Or occasionally-in-a-wheelchair guy’s butler? Convenient-provider-of-exposition radio guy? Vicki Vale’s dead brother, who everybody seems to have completely forgotten about, including her? I think we all know the real answer: Gabe. Gabe, you beautiful mastermind, you’ve been pulling the strings all along! Bless you, sweet prince.
We’re not sure when we discovered puppets for the first time in order to make a rediscovery necessary, but Rediscovery: Puppets asserts that this has definitely happened. We find it best not to question the people who put the ACI in MANIAC.
One of these baggy clothes wearing schlubs is at the center of our tale. In a lapse of judgment, he wishes to never see another spring again, which a spring sprite named Coily is happy to instantly oblige. Coily evidently didn’t have much else going on. Schlub-o (our hero’s legal full name) then takes a harrowing, George Bailey-esque journey into an alternate reality, only instead of “Making Violent Love” to Donna Reed, he can’t get his glove compartment to stay closed. Needless to say, he cracks under the madness of this terrifying new world almost immediately and spends the rest of the short evangelizing springs, for fear that Coily will punch him in the face like Mr. Welch did to George after he told off his wife. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill in wondering why there are no Google image search results for “Coily tattoo” riffing A Case of Spring Fever! No springs!
Reached for comment, Kermit the Frog has denied all knowledge of Warty the Toad and categorically denies he is the father. There’s a little to learn and a lot to smell at this pond, join Mike, Kevin and Bill for Warty the Toad!
So hop on board, because your favorite shorts-making lunatics have 16 millimeters of pure crazy to mainline into your eyeballs. Roll up a big ball of homemade clay, gnaw off a bite or two (because you know that they were doing that), and form it into one of the various abominations depicted on screen. Because you can’t spell “The company that made these was likely shut down by the feds after parents complained that their children couldn't sleep because they were plagued by dreams of fancy headdress-wearing cylinders tunneling into their brains” without ACI!
Carrying on the proud tradition of Onerous Ones, Tautological Twos, and Thrifty Threes, join the guys for Frustrating Fours and Fascinating Fives!
Oh, it got off to a good start when a young boy was forced to drag the family goat off to sell at the market. Despair, bleakness, the tears of children - you know, everything you look for in a holiday special. But then he kept dragging it. And dragging it. Just how far away is this market anyway? We almost gave up hope. And then Zlateh showed us that miracles do happen – and that we had a new RiffTrax Holiday Classic on our hands.
Join Mike, Kevin and Bill for a heaping helping of holiday cheer wi-- “I CAN EAT CANDY”-- Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen!
...Oh you want to know the worst of it? Hm yeah guess that ominous ellipsis did sort of indicate that was coming, reasonable assumption. Okay, well the worst of it is...Bernard SINGS. And despite what you might expect from a clumsy troublemaking dog named Bernard, the singing is NOT VERY GOOD. He sings and stumbles his way through life, leaving a wake of bloodshed and tears behind him, and he feels no remorse! Bernard is unstoppable! Behave, Bernard!? Ha! You might as well ask a sandstorm to behave! Welcome to the century of Bernard, he’s running the show now! Hurry, while Bernard still allows it, and join Mike, Kevin and Bill for Behave, Bernard!
It’s time to crawl under your desk with Mike, Kevin, and Bill, then stick your head between your legs and kiss your Duck and Cover goodbye!
Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for the *Rashomon* of educational shorts: Getting Angry.
Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill to learn all about how to go EEEEEEEEEE in a really high pitched tone Verbal Communication!
Joining these little tykes are teacher’s casual sexism, impressions of Indians that are still stuck in the 1870s (or 2015 NFL teams), and a completely needless frame story, and you’ve got our latest baffling “educational” short: Starting School!
Strap on your bib, crack the seal on a new bottle of barbecue sauce, and get ready to roast and broil the greatest stars of all: With An All-Star Cast!
The Myths of Shoplifting is here to clear up all of these misconceptions. It does this using the controversial “all dork cast” method that was so popular in the seventies. Watch as they attempt to steal makeup, records, and a pocket calculator! Even more impressive is that they are attempting all of these thefts in a Sunglass Hut, which to the best of our knowledge does not sell any of those things. We believe it sells sunglasses. Of course, this short was not very effective, since all the cool kids were already cutting class to shoplift stuff. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for The Myths of Shoplifting!
Join MST3K favorites Mary Jo and Bridget as they Riff you through a “Happy-Go-Spending-Whirl” of 1957 consumerism, lust and greed. BUY IT BUY IT BUY IT (
Riffing together again for the first second time in world history! Bridget Nelson and Mary Jo Pehl bring you... A WORD TO THE WIVES Bridget and Mary Jo get a few pointers in this “how to” film from the 50s about getting a new kitchen. Jane and her new dark-haired schemer neighbor without a name come up with a plan to trick Jane’s husband into a brand-new kitchen, complete with new appliances so they can have more time to go shopping. In their panting greed for a new refrigerator that makes ice circles (we don’t know what those are either) and with poor hapless Jane as a pawn in her neighbor’s sinister plan, poor Husband George never knew what hit him. In a bloody, horrifying twist of events they get their new kitchen - and a little more than they bargained for. Tune in and see the new kitchen for yourself - if you dare!
Animal Antics takes a look at the day in the life of a cute little bunny the old-fashioned way: through the perspective of a half-delirious newsreel narrator, babbling words as quickly as he can in a vain attempt to voice every animal character while still providing a coherent story. Also, it’s not so much a real “day in the life” as it is “a series of bizarre situations the film forces the bunny to deal with.” The narrator also decides that the bunny -- again, a bunny, and thus a child -- is aggressively flirting with every animal that crosses his path. And not just animals, he’s into dolls, too! It all culminates in a dollhouse date that’ll have animal fans of all ages asking “why, why is this happening?” Let’s get weird with nature. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Animal Antics!
*The Relaxed Wife* A devoted wife teaches her husband the importance of relaxation only to have the narrator prescribe him Atarax. Bridget and Mary Jo do their very best to go limp all over by flip flopping their hands and drinking coffee. Sit back and relax as they Riff this important message from the fine folks at Pfizer. AND… Just for relaxing you will receive this bonus mini short! *Consuming Women (Women as Consumers)* Today’s Woman. She buys stuff. She buys stuff in a groovy way. If more merchants knew this simple fact then they would understand that they should sell things to woman. This short film teaches them that YES, women are in fact consumers and can, by law, be sold things they want to buy.
The sole plot keyword on IMDb about Naturally A Girl is “menstruation.” But Bridget and Mary Jo have plenty to add to this short health education film that tastefully and progressively explains the beauty of being a woman -- even boys are interviewed for their take on the matter. Hey, no matter who you are or how you identify, you’ll get lots of tips for having your period or someone else’s period!
Bridget and Mary Jo are your Riffers for Cindy Goes To A Party. A must see for those thinking birthday parties are supposed to be fun.
Harlem is a strange new world for William, as he struggles to get along with Calvin, a kid with an inexplicable and extreme hatred of tractors. When a terrifying hardcore gang (aka, a few kids who smoke cigarettes) attacks William and Calvin in the park, his small town values are put to the test. Will he survive? Will he remain “from Georgia”, and if not at what point does he technically become “from Harlem”? Will Calvin ever get over his weird tractor thing? Find out with Mike, Kevin and Bill as they take a trip with William From Georgia to Harlem!
Why, did you know prom is the most important social function? And viewers, play along at home, won't you? See if you can spot the product placement!
Weep with Bridget and Mary Jo as this simple question divides families, ruins friendships and ultimately cracks the very foundation of a prestigious east coast prep school. Rejoice with them as they celebrate the courageous teachers who dared to make a difference by implementing an afterschool program. Laugh with them as babies pee on people. Oh, Boy! Babies! will shatter all your sexist ideas about babysitting!
In The Snob, Sarah is a high school student who wreaks horror and despair in her small town by studying too much. She is regarded high-falutin' and snooty because she reads. Worry not - all Sarah needs to reign in the depravity is friends!
Ain’t no party like a Halloween Party, because Halloween Party is a LIVE short, performed and recorded on stage at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville! Now it’s ready to watch, whether you missed that show or want to relive the magic in the comfort of your home, where you host your own Halloween parties. And if your Halloween parties are anything like the one in Halloween Party, for some reason there’s a boy in a “lady scarecrow” costume. What’s a “lady scarecrow” costume, you ask? it looks just like a regular scarecrow costume, but you know it’s really a “lady scarecrow” costume because everyone goes out of their way to call it that. And, naturally, you make your son wear it to school. Also, there’s a very angry dog who seems better suited for protecting rusted-out fridges in a junkyard than, y’know, being allowed anywhere near children. All this plus pumpkins, “Indian corn,” and all the other 1960s Halloween staples that make your 1960s Halloween party the Halloween-iest ever!
In this measuring adventure, our hero teaches young Tommy the basics of, well, measuring. Tommy has somehow survived to the age of nine without learning concepts like “bigger” or “smaller.” Fortunately, Measuring Man is here to help. He uses his terrifying cosmic powers to whisk Tommy from the safety of his kitchen off to Measuring Land, a place beyond all imagination, assuming your imagination operates at the level of a hastily-planned middle school play. But that’s not all Measuring Man has! He also sports a belt full of measuring objects that are, well… suggestively shaped? Suffice to say, if you want to take the measure of a man, Measuring Man is your man. First performed live to immeasurable laughter at our Miami Connection live show, now available as a studio riff, join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Measuring Man!
All your favorite characters are back: Duncan, Stickman*, and soul-crushing 50s greyness and blandness. It’s Thanksgiving day, and guests that make Peppermint Patty look generous and gracious are starting to arrive. Fortunately, there’s still time for the kids to learn valuable lessons about politeness such as “Keep the profanity to a minimum when Tony Romo ruins your three team tease in the first game of the day” and “Don’t comment that it looks like a badger could carve the turkey better than father.” Order up a cornucopia of repressed fifties urges, set up your insanely large candlesticks (Seriously, those things could easily take out Professor Plum), and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Dining Together! * Doctors advise not swimming for half an hour after encountering a deep cut this deep
A Day of Thanksgiving is good for any day, including Thanksgiving. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill at the table, and help fight fear with fear!
Listen: can’t you just hear the snowflakes falling and the carolers caroling and the egg nog nogging? That means it’s time for A Mary Jo Christmas and A Bridget New Year! It’s a very special RiffTrax special, featuring yourses trulies, and some very special guest stars! So gather ‘round your technology device, pour yourself a hot toddy, gather the kiddos and granddad and Nana too, and make this special a special part of your happy holidays. Our Christmas gift to you! Includes riffs of "A Christmas Carol" (1952) and "The Little Lamb" (1955) - plus some surprises!
The film comes with the seal of approval of educational collaborator Lemo Rockwood, Ph.D and professor of Family Relationships, whose classes at Cornell University were considered quite progressive for their time. In fact, Dotty even says the word sex in the film - twice! (In her head, but STILL!) Bridget and Mary Jo learn a thing or two about marriage in this short’s frank depiction of bridge games and frosting cakes.
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you might just learn something (but only if you don’t know what a circle is). Don’t be a square, join Mike, Kevin, and Bill, the Riffers We Live With, for Shapes We Live With!
Join Mike, Kevin, Bill, and thousands of pounds of delicious litter for The Litter Monster!
Let the capable riffing of Bridget and Mary Jo lovingly guide you through all 28 minutes of this teen pregnancy hormone fueled event. They will help you figure out where exactly in relation to the beach is the abandoned house? How do Phoebe's white slacks stay so clean? Who are the strange top hatted dancers on the beach? And what’s the deal with Paul? * Extra credit essay question: Discuss the cultural impact Hungarian Political refugee filmmakers living in Canada have had on feminism in the Northwest Territories.
Will the boy save his mouse? Will the rocket launch go off as planned? Will Neil deGrasse Tyson butt in to point out scientific inaccuracies in the film? It’s time to head to the launchpad and find out, join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for The Tiny Astronaut!
What’s your Social Acceptability Type? Take the quiz! Circle the letter that best describes you. A. Happy following your own pursuits? B. Lower class, but good with people? C. Popular but lack a sense of security? D. Seem to ”fit in” but somehow don’t? E. Unusually popular, intelligent, a three letter athlete, come from a family with good income and high social prestige? Look below to find out your Social Acceptability. A. Voluntary Isolate (you’ve got this!) B. Climber (way to go!) C. Middle Case (uh oh!) D. Fringe (you’ll show them!) E. Handsome Leader!! (awesome!) Now watch the short film and match your type with the correlating character! Jot down helpful tips and get ready for fun and loads of encouragement!
A weirdly sullen boy and his cute and powerful dog, teaming up team-style! Join the team-iest team of all, Mike, Bill, and Kevin for the The Value of Teamwork! Teams!!!
If you’re anything like us, you’ll find it impossible to watch the whole thing and not go out and pull a few buncos of your own! In fact, here, have Kevin’s bank account number just to get you started!
Don’t get angry, get Don’t Get Angry! With Mike, Kevin, and Bill. Who are, of course, kind of angry.
Dorrance, a chemist with the Campbell Soup Company, (anybody else think it’s weird that a soup company had a chemist? No? Just me? Okay) invented condensed soup in 1897 and the broth world has never been the same. So pull up a bowl of soup, settle in, and prepare to be surprised, delighted, and - spoiler alert - shocked. (“Magic” loosely interpreted by filmmakers.)
This short film graphically depicts the harrowing journey of Miss Hayes, fresh out of secretarial school and in her first job working for a real estate broker. Miss Hayes thought she was prepared… then the unimaginable happens. (Bring a barf bag.)
Collectively we wholeheartedly agree that Girls Are Better Than Ever! But we do have a few recommendations: Some girls need to eat more cheese and play tennis, others should eat less of everything and ride a bike. Some girls would do best to not exist at all or at the very least go bowling. Across the board they all need to stop sitting on the sidelines and try their very hardest to be a pleasure to look at. Other than that Girls Are Better Than Ever!
Yes, the garbage-fusing enthusiasts at ACI somehow didn’t waste all the grant money they were allotted one fiscal year, and Safety As We Play is the unfortunate result. Now kids can learn how to cross the street from the same people who used monkeys to teach us “doing words.” Featuring a song that we believe may be the most nutless piece of arrhythmic garbage since The Calendar and How to Use It, Safety As We Play is another hallowed entry in ACI’s Pantheon of Crap. Pop a lude, throw out your rhyming dictionary, and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for the film that put the A-C-I in ‘Educational’!
Floss your way to fun as Bridget and Mary Jo pull on their neon spandex and take you on a 15 minute oral hygiene adventure. Go ahead, Flash That Smile! Show the world world that despite constant nagging from your mother you never once wore your retainer.
The story focuses on Zach, a quitter who quits everything but whose charm and charisma holds sway over an entire sophomore class and Gary, the hard working everyman who wears his baseball uniform to school. Set on a typical 1980’s day at a typical 1980’s mall, Zach and his gang apply peer pressure to Gary to enlist him in an evening of larceny. Meanwhile, his beautiful girlfriend Carrie bullies the popular girls (and Donna) into shoplifting at Cleo’s boutique. Sounds like a typical morality film you watch when there's a substitute teacher, right? Exactly!
Probably the sweetest installment in the beloved garbage crafting series from ACI Films, At Your Fingertips: Sugar and Spice is like the dreams you have after you eat a bunch of expired marshmallow Peeps and browse a bootleg Ukrainian version of Pinterest right before bed. Originally broadcast as part of RiffTrax Live: Santa Claus, it has all the classic At Your Fingertips thrills, but with the added bonus of not having to sit through more Songs of the World.
See how many things the 1967 short film “The Home of The Future: 1999 A.D.” gets right by playing along on this special bingo card!
Bridget and Mary Jo are cooking up a holiday viewing feast and they’ve set a place for you. The main course is an expertly prepared short called Carving Magic, a mid-century tutorial on meat carving starring Harvey Korman. Side dishes include commercials, Kevin Murphy, and a special guest appearance by MST3K’s prop diva Beez McKeever! Leave room for dessert! Family Christmas 1953. Yum!
Katy is the story of a young girl whose brother goes to camp leaving the responsibilities of his paper delivery route to her. It takes her a really long time to get dressed for her first day but eventually she gets to the paper boy shack to pick up the papers she is supposed to deliver. Upon arrival the manager of the paper boys says “Hey! Where’s your brother?” To which Katy responds: “He’s at camp, I’m taking over while he’s gone.” At first the guy says NO! Girls can’t deliver papers. But then, he says YES! It just wouldn't be fair to give away any more of the crackling dialogue or outrageous situations Katy finds herself in. You’ve got to buy it to believe it!
If you’ve never been convinced to try the metric system before, don’t worry, this short won’t change your mind. The phrase “cubic decimeter” comes up a lot. Yeah, “cubic decimeter.” Imagine a world where you were constantly saying things like “cubic decimeter.” It sounds like a bad, bad world, so join Mike, Kevin and Bill in running these Measure Metric hucksters out of our decent old-fashioned measurin’ town!
Are you mature? Identify as mature? Mature-friendly? Then this is just the short film for you! The Maturing Woman, circa 1977, appears to be a PhD project by a couple of Women’s Studies majors. No matter: it’s a useful primer for managing the aging women in your life. Enjoy it with Maturing Woman Bridget and Blossom of Youth Mary Jo!
What do children exercising and animals lounging at the zoo have in common? They’re both extremely inexpensive to film. And the people who made Busy Bodies seized on that big time! Stitching together footage of kids and animals doing vaguely similar actions, the short is truly a masterclass in how to get paid to make something that kind of feels like something, but actually isn’t anything. Just ask the “lazy lion” who’s one of the main busy bodies in Busy Bodies. How can a lion be both lazy AND busy, you ask? Watch the film! You won’t get an answer, but it’s still worth watching. Get busy getting Busy Bodies, riffed with maximum busyness by Mike, Kevin, and Bill!
He’ll hose down the clothes you hung up to dry without blinking an eye. He’ll toss a block at the cat just because he thinks you might give him the wrong dipping sauce for his chicken nuggets at dinner tonight. He’ll draw another mustache on your favorite doll even though it stopped giving him a thrill years ago, now it’s just something to do. He’s Allen, and he’s your brother. Increase your chances of surviving any Allen-being-your-brother that might occur: join Mike, Kevin, and Bill and learn from Allen Is My Brother!
In appreciation of the stylists of America, Bridget and Mary Jo along with Chevrolet* present American Look. A tribute to men and women who design. You’ll see lamps, chairs, counter tops, tea pots, door knobs, bottles and tons of other regular stuff you have in your very own house. A narrator will say a lot about how Americans like the “look” of things, but you'll never quite understand what he’s getting at, and there are no Chevrolets featured which will confuse you a bit. On the bright side, this short is beautifully photographed in Superscope 200!
When you think of truckers you think of a lot of things: CB Radios, speed, pee bottles, ridiculous arm wrestling training contraptions. Rarely would “The Uplifting Power of Song” be high on your list. Truck Song aims to change that! It of course fails miserably. Trucking is no better subject for a musical than say, one of our slightly more obscure founding fathers, one who never got to be president but still somehow made it onto our currency. It doesn’t help that the titular song sounds like someone asked the janitor at ACI to write you an “ACI style song” and then recorded what happened when he was drooling on a synthesizer in confusion. Based on a book (Finnegans Wake, we think), Truck Song is quite possibly the only short in our catalog that you can get to honk if you do that pulling down arm motion out your window. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for the short that puts the F-U-N in “Ten Four, good buddy!” (Provided you rearrange the letters and add in a bunch of other letters.)
Over the years we’ve faced down a host of shorts featuring anthropomorphic objects coming alive to haunt children in their rooms, from Coily to Mr. Paperbag to A Talking Car to Norman (okay, Norman never actually did that, but you know he WOULD if he could). Somehow, Soapy the Germ Fighter manages to be the least inspired AND oddest monster of the bunch. Least inspired because he’s just a giant bar of soap named Soapy. Oddest because he has arms and legs and dresses in Renaissance garb for no apparent reason. You’ll find him in the tub, waiting, watching, judging, and tuning his lute. Uh, again, sorry, that sounded kinda weird. But then... well, you know. You’re not clean, and Soapy knows it. Soapy knows everything. Get yourself sorted out and scrub the fear away with Soapy the Germ Fighter, riffed live by Mike, Kevin and Bill!
Everybody in the station wagon, we’re headed to rural Wisconsin to learn about life on a farm! Ever considered the goings-on of a Farm Family? Well now consider FURTHER the same family in the summer! Sure, it's less about everyday farming activities and more about scoring some funnel cakes, but it's really the journey — not the destination (especially if the destination involves funnel cakes). Join Bridget and Mary Jo as they hang out with a Farm Family in Summer - doing everything from milking cows to wearing colorful shirts at the county fair!
Before this groundbreaking film, boredom at work was known as the silent killer. This black and white short from 1961 was part of a series of films produced by the Mental Hygiene Division of the Oklahoma State Department of Health. Watch it with Bridget and Mary Jo and learn how to recognize the warning signs. You - yes, YOU - may be at risk! (For best results, watch while at work.)
Mike said it was "Too close to home," but Bridget and Mary Jo LOVE home, so here we are! Escape to Wisconsin! It’s beautiful this time of year with its colorful leaves and brisk fall air. And be sure to swing by the Markham place for pie and lukewarm coffee! Mary Jo and Bridget are visiting and as soon as all the chores are done, they’ll show you what life is like for a farm family in autumn. Don’t miss Farm Family in Autumn!
She comes at night. She watches television. She gives your child watered-down tomato soup. She puts your child to bed two hours earlier than needed. She talks on the phone. She plays record albums too loud. She is... THE BABYSITTER! She won’t be stopped. She can’t be stopped. But Bridget and Mary Jo will try to route the evil unleashed by THE BABYSITTER!
It’s Thanksgiving! Be sure to give your turkey a hearty thanks before cooking. It makes them ever so glad to be the meal. If you’ve never cooked a turkey or if you just want to hear A LOT of information about them then join Bridget and Mary Jo as they learn such terms as white meat, dark meat, giblets and viscera! Discover with them the many uses for America's number one flightless bird! C’mon, Let's Talk Turkey! You know you want to.
Studio version of Bridget and Mary Jo's 'The Griper', first riffed during RiffTrax Live: SUMMER SHORTS BEACH PARTY.
You know ’em, you love ’em - and so do Bridget and Mary Jo! Our favorite agrarians from summer and autumn are back once again to tackle the icy chills of winter. It’s Farm Family in Winter! Warning: graphic images of winter in the Midwest.
It’s the holidays, and you know what that means - time for weird old cartoons! And Gifts from the Air checks all the standard “weird old holiday cartoon” boxes: It’s got a poor orphan boy staring at toys in a window. It’s got those toys coming to life in terrifying bounce-up-and-down fashion. It’s got a cat being turned into an electric power source to run a bubble tree. It’s got Santa coming into a house through a radio to dump a bunch of toys in a stove. Okay, those last two might not be standard, in this or any universe. But that’s the magic of Gifts from the Air, it reminds you of Christmas without bearing any actual resemblance to any Christmas anyone has ever experienced. Riffs from the air on Gifts from the Air, with Mike, Kevin, and Bill!
Yes, poor Peppy, Zippo, and Click, who look like an Anne Geddes calendar that got Dorian Grayed, are here to help Santa deliver toys all around the world in one night. Perhaps they should have hired a logistics planner as well, because this short strongly implies that Santa returns to the North Pole to restock his sled with presents after every single house. Maybe he just wanted another look at Zippo, who is clearly a 1930s boxing palooka wearing an elf hat. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for an enlightening holiday look inside Santa Claus’ Workshop!
Hey kids*! Ever wonder what the Whizzo the clown of snowmen would look like? “No?” “Of course not?” “How did you get in here?” Wrong answers kids! The correct answer is Spunky the Snowman! He’s like Frosty’s dirtbag second cousin, the kind of snowman who’s had a tooth knocked out of his mouth at more than one wedding. Spunky’s like Frosty without the charm or the clean arrest record. Put it this way, when you hear him going “thumpity thump thump”, he’s not romping over the fields of snow, if you know what we mean. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Spunky the Snowman. Now you’ve got something else to worry about.
Christmas Customs Near and Far takes a very 50s look at these ‘far’ places, using the always culturally sensitive device of “forcing some confused kids into ridiculous costumes and pointing a camera at them.” Several of these children have lit candles strapped to their heads. At one point they construct something called a Mitten Tree that even the deranged bastards at ACI Films would have taken a look at and gone “That’s a little too stupid even for us.” Whether you’re near, far, or some horrible quantum flux state of both this Christmas, Mike, Kevin, and Bill’s riff of Christmas Customs Near and Far will hopefully fill your home with warmth, laughter, and whatever the hell a Mitten Tree is.
There are no fires in this short! And if there were, Fireman Bill would not be allowed near them, as he is technically only a trainee fireman. Instead, we get to see him eat meals in the firehouse kitchen, stand by as other firemen out an imaginary fire, and clean several hundred feet of dirty hose. We don’t want to promise too much excitement, but there may just be a completely separate segment devoted to drying the now clean hose! Join Fireman Bill to see if he can one day achieve his dream of being promoted to Fire Marshall, and severely injure himself for our amusement on In Living Color.
It would be easy to confuse this short with another release of ours, Drawing for Beginners: The Rectangle. Because, and only truly advanced high-level mathematics scholars know this, squares are rectangles. And yet, somehow, each film is mesmerizing in its own special “close-up of a hand drawing on paper” way. And the 3-D models of the “finished” drawings are unbelievably goofy, like a trash-craft project from an At Your Fingertips short but with an even weaker grip on reality. Yes, it’s a film where someone tells you how to draw four straight lines of equal length, but it’s still more interesting than any unboxing video on YouTube. Join total beginners Mike, Kevin, and Bill. and get your online art degree with Drawing for Beginners: The Square!
Bridget and Mary Jo have stumbled across the rare hygiene film aimed at canines! Harry The Dirty Dog is the saga of a beautiful but conflicted border collie who runs away from the only life he’s ever known when it’s bathtime. He finds his way back home filthier than ever. But don’t waste your tears - Harry is a survivor!
Be warned: if you haven’t watched this serious and important 1950s safety short yet, YOU MAY ALREADY BE DEAD! ...So, please take a second to check. No? Still alive? Good! But if you want to stay that way, you’d better take a close look at your life and make sure you don’t hold any of the SIX MURDEROUS BELIEFS! These beliefs are bad, and not just “the Tim Burton Planet of the Apes is the best version” bad. They’re seriously bad. Like one of the beliefs is “Safety is for Sissies” and then there’s a cartoon of the Grim Reaper sitting on a football player. See? You get it now??? This is serious, hardcore stuff, and you need to stop messing around or the dang Grim Reaper will SIT ON YOU. But football isn’t the only thing that can murder you. You know what else can get you all Grim Reapered? Basic carpentry! Doing science! Going outside! You’re doomed!!! There’s only one hope: learn to avoid the Six Murderous Beliefs with your Three Un-murderous Buds, Mike, Kevin, and Bill!
People Soup is the first short we’ve done that has been nominated for an Oscar. (Yes, Henry Slinkman’s moving performance in Buying Food was rudely snubbed.) Evidently, when Alan Arkin points the camera at his kids while they waste a bunch of food, it’s "art," but when one of us does it it’s "the last time you ever babysit." Seemingly shot without a script or purpose, People Soup gives hope to the maker of every pointless educational short that your efforts will one day be rewarded with critical acclaim. Best Cinematography for What is Nothing? Best Special Effects for Drawing for Beginners: The Rectangle? Best Supporting Actor for Norman Spear Jr. in Parade of Aquatic Champions? OK, maybe not every pointless short… Join Mike, Kevin, Bill, and the Arkin boys, Matthew and Adam, for People Soup!
The Water We Drink is The Short We Riff, full of The Jokes We Tell to inspire The Laughs You’ll Laugh! This is one of those vintage educational shorts that breaks down the complex details of something most people never encounter in their lives: water. What is it? Where does it come from? What can you do with it? Is the puddle under the horse water? No, no it isn’t, and you shouldn’t drink it. And there’s a lot more to learn about water, but fear not, this Coronet short is ready to bring all that moist knowledge right to our dried-up dusty brains! Not to be confused with The Shape of Water We Drink, that’s a much naughtier film. Get thirsty for The Water We Drink with Mike, Bill, and Kevin!
Farm Family in Spring: Your number one resource for farm information in the tri-county area! There's cows, corn, trips to town, 4-H clubs, a birthday party and most importantly incriminating evidence about Grandpa! If you enjoy spring and like farms you’ll LOVE Farm Family in Spring!
The Spring Collection offers you three stylish shorts at one sensible price! Includes Fashion for Go Getters featuring hunky Dartmouth jocks critiquing the latest trends. In Accent on Spring, a kooky gal takes a psychological look at mens sportswear. And closing the show is a far out trip from Westinghouse about coordinating your clothing to your refrigerator!
Susan needs glasses. We don’t mean like, “Oh, it’s hard for her to read a small font in a dark room.” No, Susan appears to be legally blind. Somehow she has made it to eight years old without wandering in front of a cement truck or mistaking a wolverine for her teddy bear. There’s a decent chance Susan is actually a large naked mole rat. But fortunately she realizes she needs glasses, not when a concerned adult intervenes, but when she reads (somehow) a children’s book about magical glasses. Thrill as Susan tries to mend all the social bridges she burned by finding a pair of glasses that don’t make her look like naked mole rat Elton John.
This DIY video shows you how to build your very own friendship, step-by-step! Start with traits like courtesy, kindness, and honesty, then add buddies Bridget and Mary Jo to laugh along with! Brought to you by Alfred Higgins, the brilliant filmmaker who also brought you VD: Prevent It, this short film explores the qualities that help you forge rewarding relationships with people you otherwise wouldn’t want anything to do with!
The “Beginning Responsibility” series from Coronet Films has already given us legendary characters like Mr. Bungle and Reggie the Dork’s Big-Lipped Talking Pillow. This next installment ups the ante by featuring a teacher who we’re pretty sure is 90% mummy. Based on the way these Coronet shorts usually work, we believe she was supposed to be only thirty-two years old. David has trouble following instructions. Namely, the instruction “For the love of god, do not appear in a Coronet educational short.” Fortunately, some animated creatures are here to help him learn, not only to follow instructions, but also how to push the definition of the term “animated” right up to its legal limit. There’s a friendly owl, three depressed elephants, and a turtle. There’s always a turtle. Please join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for what we believe is the 3,204th Coronet short they’ve riffed, Beginning Responsibility: Learning to Follow Instructions!
Mary Jo wants a puppy. Mary Jo gets a puppy. Mary Jo's family can’t sleep because the puppy is confined to the kitchen and cries all night. Everyone is pretty fed up with Mary Jo and her puppy until... Mary Jo comes up with a plan so “Out There” that it just might work! Bridget and the real Mary Jo riff on this adorable story, based on the book by Janice May Udry. It’s super cute! But not to be used as a dog training guide.
Jim and Bill are two of the classic “middle-aged teenagers” type we’re used to in Coronet shorts. They agree on most things: they wear the same white button-down shirt, sport the same haircut, rock the same sweater vest. One has brown hair and one is blonde, yes, but they’ve managed to be friends in spite of that. However they do disagree on something, something so big it could tear their whole world apart: THE IMPORTANCE OF OUTLINING AN ESSAY. Reckless Bill thinks you can just march into an essay on a topic like “Benjamin Franklin” without planning a meticulous outline. Cautious, wise Jim, on the other hand, knows that you must not only plan out your outline, you must first build an outline for an essay on the subject of how important it is to build outlines (he actually does this). Who will be proven right, in the end? Will their friendship survive the outline battle? Will either of their essays get deeper than “Ben Franklin flew a kite in a storm”?
All good things must come to an end, and the At Your Fingertips series is no exception. We’ve covered grasses, cylinders, boxes… Um… Those little plastic discs that keep the top of the pizza box from touching the cheese, probably? The point is, if it is identifiable by 99% of the population as “garbage”, the folks at ACI Films tried to get kids to make revolting crafts out of it. This final installment is an outlier in that it instructs how to build a general TYPE of garbage-craft, rather than focusing on utilizing a specific type of garbage to build a craft. Something this radical needed a bigger stage, and so we’re proud to present this live version of At Your Fingertips: Floats performed at our legendary RiffTrax Live: The Room show!
Ladybug, Ladybug, Winter is Coming is the sobering tale of a lady bug who does not know that winter is coming. The bug who happens to be a lady crawls around asking everyone she sees why it is so cold. She is told repeatedly it's because WINTER IS COMING and yet she persists in her willful ignorance. I'm giving away all the best plot points but I hope you will enjoy it anyway!
“Drawing for Beginners” may be the stupidest series of shorts we’ve riffed here at RiffTrax. The fact that we have riffed an entire series where kids make crap out of garbage should really drive home how insane these shorts are. Having already riffed rectangles and squares, it’s time to complete the trilogy in appropriate fashion with triangles. You see, because triangles have THREE sides…? Trust us, it will make sense after you watch the short. Pull up an oddly motionless, disembodied hand and lower your expectations and intelligence level, because it’s time to draw some damn triangles baby!!!
Does any holiday have more memorable iconography than Christmas? Decorated fir trees. Stockings hung on the mantel. Santa’s famous mask. What’s that? Oh, did Santa not wear a mask apparently made out of dried skin where you were from? It must be a Soda vs Pop thing! Because where we are from, Santa definitely wore a mask made out of dried human skin and in December we would watch A Christmas Fantasy every night until the social workers came and moved us into a safer situation. Enjoy A Christmas Fantasy, even if you were one of those weirdos whose Santa didn’t wear an awful, awful mask.
Because apparently “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” wasn’t enough for him, here’s A Song For Santa! It’s a classic Christmas situation ripped right out of your childhood! A small Texan boy, who’s exploring Germany alone for unexplained reasons, wanders into an old Bavarian church and admires the traditional music and architecture. Y’know, just like all small boys love to do! The boy proceeds to fall asleep, probably exhausted from his hours of walking around Europe without supervision. Once he’s asleep things get EXTREMELY WEIRD, as he ascends to some kind of heaven, where angelic children live under the rule of some kind of dictator Santa. Maybe it’s a dream? Maybe it’s… a tragedy? No matter what, it’s perfect for a RiffTrax Christmas short, so get out your sheet music and sing A Song For Santa with Mike, Kevin, and Bill!
The Shoemaker and the Elves, a cute little fairy tale about the rewards of doing a good deed, delighted small children for generations - then Coronet got their hands on it. Now, see it as it’s meant to be seen, in full demented puppet form! The elderly shoemaker and his wife are puppets in a little puppet village, where everything looks like it was made of damp papier-mâché that was already used for something else. They’re barely scraping by, and can’t keep up with their business, because honestly they’re pretty lazy. Fortunately, some sort of fairy king senses their plight and dispatches some little weirdos to break into their hovel and pitch in. Because that’s how morality works, kids! No further questions! Leave out some leather strips and tools and maybe Mike, Kevin and Bill will riff The Shoemaker and the Elves for you overnight. But they probably won’t, so you should get it right here!
Since every entertainment franchise that has ever existed has put out their own version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, it’s only fitting that the maniacs at Coronet Films decided to make their own. Apparently filmed during the Rutherford B. Hayes administration, Coronet opted not to use their stable of regulars in favor of a bunch of guys who probably were born before man had mastered flight. Which is a real shame: Mr. Bungle would have made a great Scrooge, that big-lipped pillow that harrasses Reggie could have been Marley, and Skipper the Racist Dog could have been Tiny Tim. Ah well, just be thankful that the folks at ACI never made one!
What is fifth-grader Charlie hiding from his family, his classmates, the customers on his newspaper route? What is it that keeps Charlie one step ahead of the law and living in constant fear, never using his own name and unable to set down roots no matter where he goes? Find out in Bridget and Mary Jo’s holiday special, Charlie’s Christmas Secret!
You think Jay Gatsby knew how to throw a party? Bridget and Mary Jo are just getting home from last night's celebration of plastic storage containers! Don't get FOMO - join them for these Tupperware shorts and promotional films!
Beginning Responsibility: Doing Things For Ourselves In School follows Steve, a classic crew-cutted Coronet protagonist finding his place in the world. Steve tries to follow the core principles of the Beginning Responsibility universe: 1) Don’t be such a pest, and 2) Stop whining about it! Steve has a friend named Ken who is slightly more boneheaded than him, as mandated by Coronet law. Together, Steve and Ken struggle to put their boots away, wear ugly painter smocks, and generally avoid the wrath of the scolding passive-aggressive narrator who lords over us all in Beginning Responsibility: Doing Things For Ourselves In School!
Featuring the finest “newborn baby calf stumbling around” scene this side of City Slickers, it’s Farm Animals! It’s a vintage short from a time when films were needed to show people things that they were never likely to see in real life. Exotic amazing things, like, uh, a horse! Some chickens, perhaps! Have you ever THRILLED at the sight of sheep? A nurse will be on duty in the theater to attend to those who faint! Buckle up (your suspenders), get a hose (for the amniotic fluid all over the barn floor) and wake up at 5am with Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Farm Animals!
Fee, Fie, Fo… Fun??? That is how you might start copy for a version of Jack and the Beanstalk that wasn’t a stark, joyless nightmare. This one, on the other hand, is like a Dorthea Lange photo that decided it wanted to become a fairy tale. We all know the story: family is starving, boy takes beloved cow to be slaughtered, mysterious man offers him magic beans instead, Billy Peltzer releases the electric gremlin and all the gremlins get electrocuted except the sexy lady gremlin, Jack steals the golden goose, etc. But, (and we believe this technically qualifies as a selling point) you’ve never seen it told with such careworn actors before! Pop a few magic beans of your own and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Jack and the Beanstalk!
The most popular film genre in the 70s was clearly Robert De Niro’s Pre-Dirty Grandpa Phase, but a close second was Dumb Kids Hurting Themselves. Emergencies - What Would You Do? is a standout, taking the critically lauded step of leaving the viewer uncertain if the endangered children were willing actors or not. Whether it’s drowning, eating bleach, or somehow not understanding how basic playground equipment like the swings work, you’ll witness future Darwin Award winners in action, all under the guise of teaching kids the valuable lesson that in case of emergency, you should immediately find someone smarter and stronger than you to help. Mike, Kevin, and Bill opted to remain humble freelance architects rather than transform into Safety Woman and help these kids, and frankly we don’t blame them.
Tommy’s Day begins with a big moment - young Tommy discovers his first loose tooth! So, naturally, this short will be all about that, right? Why we lose our baby teeth, how the new ones grow in, maybe a poorly-animated tooth fairy to bring the lesson home? Nope! The loose tooth gets dropped like a season 2 storyline from Lost. Instead we see Tommy’s morning routine, and then we leave Tommy altogether for a while to get much more of his sister’s routine. And then, it’s off to school! Will we get back to the subject of Tommy’s loose tooth there? Not really! But there is a pet bunny to meet, so it all works out. Experience the shame and hygiene confusion of the 1950s without living through them, join Mike, Bill and Kevin for Tommy’s Day!
It’s psychedelic, it’s aimless, and it’s all about FEET, FEET, FEET! Just kidding, that’s not all it’s about, there are also some shoes. Does it teach valuable health lessons about caring for your feet? No, it doesn’t even try! Does it teach about the various types of footwear used in different careers? No, keep dreaming! Feet at the park, feet in the dirt, combat boots stomping across the playground, they’re all part of the dark carnival that is Toes Tell / Whose Shoes?. This duo of shorts is honestly one of the weirdest, most inexplicable relics we’ve stumbled across (with our feet), and it’s the perfect blank canvas for Mike, Kevin and Bill to walk all over (with their feet!).
Jimmy is a plucky ten-year-old who just can’t seem to follow directions, causing no end of disaster in his personal life. He has a dream in which he is accosted by a morally superior robber who teaches him a very important life lesson. Join Bridget and Mary Jo for the cautionary tale of The Boy Who Didn't Listen!
During a subway-induced coma, teenager Victoria flashes back to her mother’s childhood and realizes, despite all their arguments, her mother had actually been a kid once herself. One with questionable judgment but nonetheless -- drop your backpack by the door, get some Fruit Wrinkles and Capri-Sun, and join Bridget and Mary Jo for this very special After School Special.
It’s the 80s and loads of British kids are dying in substations! We’re not sure why they’re going into substations. Maybe to find out what the hell substations are? This is clearly one of those sensitive issues that has to be handled with the utmost care. So someone poorly animated some cartoon birds and got them to lecture kids about the dangers of electricity. It’s a very powerful, sobering experience. In fact, during the moving scene where a kid’s pants literally catch on fire, our chortling was noticeably subdued. This is the version of Play Safe that debuted at RiffTrax Live: The Five Doctors; it has not been seen again since!
The teacher is really putting the squeeze on the kindergartners to bring something to show-and-tell, and the pressure is getting to one little girl. Out of nowhere, plucky Mary Jo kills it with a show-and-tell that forever changes the lives of her fellow first-graders.
James is on his way to school when he gets a small cut on his finger. And if you don’t for one second believe that that thin, thin gruel got turned into a seventies educational short, then what the hell have you been watching us riff for the past thirteen years?? Bleeding makes James feel Just Awful, which frankly, is good news. If it had been the opposite, say, if James felt increasingly stronger and confident as he watched his lifeblood seep out of his fingertip, the lawsuits would probably still be working their way through the court system. Instead, James gets to pay a visit to the school nurse, who is just relieved to for once have a student who is not going to barf up his Snack Pack on her. Slice off the top of a non-essential digit, preferably your own, and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Just Awful!
Student Mel just loves to stir the pot at his high school, casting aspersions on one classmate’s virtue, and the football ability of others. He even goes so far to rat out the quarterback for being out past curfew! At the dance following a game the team loses, Mel’s classmates have had it up to here and confront him. He is told in no uncertain terms to beat it! Fortunately, the narrator steps in before things get really ugly and asks the typical "Discussion Problems in Group Living" questions. So there actually will be a test!
What is a Map is a production of Young America Films, so you know the answers will be stern, severe, and delivered with the clinical precision of a crew cut. The explanation of what in the actual heck a map is starts small, with the layout of a girl’s bedroom. Lamps, chairs, that sort of thing. But after that, the scope of the short gets much, MUCH bigger - well, okay, only a tiny big bigger. We get a map of her house and the surrounding neighborhood. Okay, not even the entire neighborhood, it’s more like four buildings. But hey, that’s what a map is, right? RIGHT?? Oh no, we still don’t really know what a map is! Existential angst aside, What is a Map is a whole mess of non-informative fun. Get your compass and chart a course for cartographical adventure with Mike, Kevin and Bill!
It’s the 70s! The pants are flared, the disco is thumping, and the educational shorts are meandering and pointless! In Someday we meet four children who discuss their plans for the future. We are not talking “Someday I want to be a doctor!” type plans. Lower your expectations to more of a “Someday I want to watch daddy pump gas” level. So please enjoy this short featuring small children shopping for vegetables, carrying a wild chimp, and sailing a boat alone on San Francisco bay. Post-viewing discussion questions may include: Where were the adults? Did they reall sneak a camera into a professional baseball game? Huh? Think of a much better plan for what you want to do Someday and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for a short so aimless you’ll be stunned it wasn’t made by ACI!
Just in time for trick or treating, it’s Bridget and Mary Jo’s Halloween Special! Your favorite riffing twosome is back with four seasonally appropriate shorts ripe for riffing. We'll tackle the issue of Halloween safety, whether a man can also be a wolf, how to sort out marriage to a monster, and so much more! Have a graveyard smash in Bridget and Mary Jo's Halloween Safety and Monster Mash-Up!
Bernard is struggling in math class mostly because his teacher will not stop calling on him. After multiple failed attempts of trying nothing, Bernard turns to his friend David to teach him basic math. Wouldn't you know it - his grade goes up! The victory is short-lived, however, when his math teacher demands no outside assistance for the next assignment. Bernard comes to a moral crossroads in trying to improve his grade. What Will Bernard Do? Well, we won't actually find out 'till the next installment - but watch the epic classroom journey with Bridget and Mary Jo!
A hilarious short featuring Ronald McDonald and his pals(?) Stinky the Skunk and Merlin the Magician, who you may remember from our Christmas with RiffTrax holiday short.
Fun Days! All things considered, one of the better types of days. Beats the hell out of “crappy days” or “everyone you love contracts cholera days." One town loved Fun Days so much they had an entire Festival of Fun Days! As you would expect this involves tiny creatures terrorizing a small animated boy. Bunnies, a witch, and Father Time burst out of a calendar and wreak havoc, 1930s style. This mostly involves peeling eggs and singing while a kangaroo gets hammered. At one point in time there is a conveyor belt of babies. The festival’s permit was rightfully denied the next year.
Deck the halls with boughs of Bridget and Mary Jo in their latest RiffTrax Holiday Special! With fresh riffs for the 90s - the 1890s, that is. Featuring a Grandpa, a Virginia, a sing-along, and a Doug Llewellyn, this very special special will warm hearts yonder and nigh at this special time of year!
We know that, for all his other faults, Scrooge was good with money. What this short presupposes is: maybe he wasn’t? In Banks: The Money Movers, Scrooge, the ruthless financier, is not exploiting tax loopholes and favorable loan rates. No, he’s stuffing cash into a mattress. Sure, he’s missing out on valuable interest but on the other hand: Money Bed! The Spirit of Banking shows up to show Scrooge (his first name is Arthur in this one, we forgot to mention that because, well, it’s very stupid) the error of his ways. By the end of the night, Scrooge may not be a better person, but he may be marginally wealthier. And that’s really what Christmas is all about.
Squirrels. You see them all the time, and always the same question runs through your head: "Could one of these things pull a peanut out of a plastic tube with a string?" This short not only answers that question, but puts forth the notion that squirrels are actually super-brilliant geniuses, using the titular Squeak as an example. When he's not being forced to perform bizarre tasks for a mysterious team of squirrel scientists, Squeak spends his time eating, binge-eating, smashing his head against solid objects, and eating. You may not think of these as impressive feats now, but by the end you will come to truly believe in the astonishing brilliance of Squeak the Squirrel. For all this and more, join Bridget and Mary Jo on their nuttiest short yet!
Remember what life was like before we all had the Internet implanted directly in our corneas? Families talked during dinner, strangers said hello to you on the street, nobody got doxxed or swatted. It was a living hell! The Kids Guide to the Internet is an amazing snapshot of Online in the mid-90s, back when the Internet was something you still had to convince your parents to “get.” It covers all three things you could do in cyberspace at that point: sports scores, stocks, and away messages comprised of angsty KoRn lyrics. It was a simpler time, when every webring was Under Construction and your mom always seemed to pick up the phone and knock you offline just as the a/s/l check in the Red Dragon Inn was getting particularly steamy. Please join the extremely fake family The Jamisons, who invite their extremely fake neighbors into their extremely fake living room to get extremely online (at 14.4 bauds!) with RiffTrax Senior Writers Conor Lastowka and Sean Thomason.
Every kid hates it when their parents ruin fun by telling them to wear a bike helmet and follow the rules. It’s been a problem throughout history. But then along came the 90s, with a great 90s solution: have a lame gym coach rap the rules at them instead! The coach assembles a Burger King Kids Club-style rogues' gallery of bike riders and forces them to attend some kind of outdoor detention. There’s Rebop the bad kid and Arthur the bookworm, but the real stars of the show are the competing bike helmet safety regulation commissions, ANSI and Snell. Talk about fun!!! This day-glo rapping nightmare burned into Conor’s memory in childhood when a friend showed him the VHS, now join him and Sean as they exorcise bike demons in Bicycle Safety Camp! Stay tuned to the end for a corporate sponsor you definitely won’t see coming.
It’s a classic 60s informational short about improving your home, which means it’s really a secret commercial for something. In this case? A line of gardening tools! An exceptionally vintage American family, complete with an odd kid and a dachshund, sets out to landscape their massive average-family yard (again, it was the 60s, average people had massive yards back then). They travel to the gardening store, which fortunately for the wife has a section of “Lighter Tools for Women” (no, really, it’s in the short!). The married couple have a strangely deep bond with the guy who works there, considering they are new to gardening. What’s really going on between these people and Arthur, the friendly gardening store guy? It’s all in the subtext, and that’s what we’re here for! Rake, hoe, dig, but most importantly, buy buy buy, it’s fun to be a consumer who consumes! No gardening tools required to join Mike, Kevin and Bill for A Green Thumb for Macaulay!
A Lunchroom Goes Bananas is from their 70s era, which usually means lots of confused kids with shaggy haircuts and some kind of disturbing puppetry. And this one doesn’t disappoint! It’s got claymation food that goes on strike, student investigative reporters, and a boy with an unexplained rat on his shoulder. What it doesn’t have is a clear point or reason for existing, another classic hallmark of any good Beginning Responsibility short. Learn some lessons from a talking eggplant, get yourself a steaming bowl of banana soup, and join Mike, Kevin and Bill in the cafeteria for Beginning Responsibility: A Lunchroom Goes Bananas!
Little Red Riding Hood is one of our most beloved fairy tales, and for good reason! It’s got a little bit of everything: child abduction, elder abuse, and muffins. So it was just a matter of time before some enterprising filmmakers took a look at this charming story and thought “What if we made it super creepy?” This short, presumably filmed mere minutes after the motion picture was invented, features a wolf costume that was definitely once used in some sort of ritual. All the human actors seem deeply suspicious of the cameraman, possibly because they were worried his camera was capturing their soul. All in all, it’s the sort of delightful tale that you could easily imagine Santa telling a bunch of disinterested children on the beach right before the Ice Cream Bunny shows up.
Are you considering having an informal gathering where people serve themselves the food you’ve prepared? NOT SO FAST. First, you’ll need to complete this course, Arranging The Buffet Supper. Together with Bridget and Mary Jo, you’ll learn how to put food and forks on a table, and other hard stuff! (This counts toward Continuing Education credits.)
Whether riding a bike, shooting some hoops, or just attempting to use paper, kids can find all kinds of neat ways to injure themselves. And the world is full of dirt and grime that’s desperate to get rubbed into those wounds. Especially when this short was made, the 1970s, the grimiest decade in modern history. First Aid for Children will show you how to take care of those cuts, or get help from a kindly stranger (just temporarily ignore all the other shorts telling you not to talk to strangers). Horror buffs will be pleased to know the short doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to gore, there’s a papercut that looks like a real ER situation. Join Mike, Kevin and Bill for another fun entry in the “kids getting hurt” genre, it’s First Aid for Children!
As you might guess, Appreciating Our Parents has a pretty heavy pro-parent bias. It focuses on Tommy, a little boy who apparently thinks his room just gets magically cleaned while he’s away at school, and his meals delivered by angels, and his cowboy shirts mended by helpful gnomes. Oh yeah, the cowboy shirts - this kid Tommy goes through cowboy shirts like nobody’s business. Westernwear stores struggle to keep up with his insane demand for cowboy shirts. And his poor sweet mother? Spends her days hunched over a sewing machine, forever mending the cowboy shirts he keeps finding new ways to destroy. Appreciate your parents and cool it with the cowboy shirts, Tommy! So what are you waiting for, put on your best cowboy shirt and get to appreciating! Join Mike, Kevin and Bill for Appreciating Our Parents!
The story follows Sue and Bob, two kids dropped off at the airport by their grandparents to fly on this insane new technology all by themselves! Except they won’t be alone, they’re bringing their extremely nervous dog. But it’s the past, so the dog doesn’t ride in the cabin with them, she gets shoved into a metal cage for a safe and comfortable ride in the belly of the plane. Seeya on the other side, pooch! Maybe! It’s a fascinating glimpse into a time when air travel featured comfortable waiting rooms, friendly staff, and seats so big you could actually sit in them. Imagine! All these wonders and more await you in the friendly skies. Join Mike, Kevin and Bridget for An Airplane Trip By Jet!
It’s Parents’ Night at Andrew’s school, and nerves are on edge. Andrew is a fifth-grader who has alienated everyone around him with his vague instructions and confusing driving directions. Will his presentation on how to communicate clearly heal the wounds of his classmates?
It's a gritty, unflinching look at purse snatching and obscene phone calls, and the Senior Power that unleashes the hidden might of retirees. You’ll learn earth-shattering self-defense techniques such as dumping the contents of your purse into the middle of the street, playing a recording of dogs, and actually hanging up the phone. Oh did we mention there are high-intensity police chases too? They really balance out the five or so minutes nana spends drinking coffee at the bank. Join Bridget, Mary Jo and several narrators looking at cue cards for Senior Power!
Cats. They’re famous for many things: mouse hunting, napping in sunshine, serving attitude, and, of course, cleaning themselves. They spend roughly 80% of every day licking their own fur in this endless quest for hygiene. Does that matter to the two kids psychotically obsessed with giving kitty a bath in Let’s Give Kitty a Bath? As you may have guessed by now, it does not! It’s a live-action Looney Tune as this young boy and girl chase a cat around the house for bathing. It’s not even clear that the cat belongs to them, or that this is their house. There is a criminal air about these children, and the lengths to which they’ll go to bathe this undirty cat will astonish you. Let the ransacking commence. Order some cat-catching products from Acme and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Let’s Give Kitty a Bath!
For some people keeping neat and clean is just a far-flung dream. But it doesn’t have to be! This short follows middle-schoolers Don and Mildred through their daily personal grooming routines (SFW) and their quest to not be smelly losers.
The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears has been retold countless times. But it took those mad bastards at Coronet to decide to inject some life into the tired fairy tale. How did they do this? REAL BEARS! Yes, one day some parents dropped off their adorable four year old at Coronet Studios. As we all know, this was a huge mistake. But instead of being traumatized by a sentient pillow or Mr. Bungle, this kid shared a stage with REAL BEARS. Were they trained bears? WHAT THE HELL DOES IT MATTER, THEY WERE THREE REAL BEARS. Also, no, they were not trained, they were led around by extremely flimsy looking leashes. Clearly, dozens of laws were violated during this short, and possibly even the Geneva Convention. In other words, it’s a must-watch RiffTrax!
That’s right, The Big Yellow Fellow is all about the love between a boy and his bus. And you thought YOUR childhood was lonely! The bus, which is a sentient being that can smile but cannot speak, creepily follows Jackie home from school. But instead of offering him candy to go for a ride like in so many other educational shorts of the past, the bus just wants to be his friend. This is disturbing to Jackie’s parents, who inexplicably act like characters in a failed 60s sitcom. Then they get inside the bus to teach Jackie about bus safety. They also drive the bus, which had previously driven itself, opening deep philosophical questions about whether the bus has free will. It’s plenty weird, but none of that will prepare you for the third act twist. We’ll just tease it with this phrase “Professor Popper’s Pedigreed Pekingese Puppies.” To find out more, join Mike, Kevin and Bill for a ride on The Big Yellow Fellow!
Young Timmy is scared of everything: televisions, civil servants, and everything in between. His brother Martin tries to help, but he gets more and more frustrated with his lily-livered little brother. The worm turns when Timmy discovers the one thing he’s not afraid of! Tune in with Bridget and Mary Jo, and stick around for the special surprise twist ending to this short film!
Am I Trustworthy? It’s a question that can only be answered by the person asking it... but only if they’re trustworthy, which is the question being asked. Confused yet? We’re knee-deep in a logic puzzle, and a new Coronet short! The questioner in question is young Eddie. Eddie is upset because he lost the election for Treasurer of his “hobby club.” Yes, Eddie’s goals are quite low, but he can’t seem to attain them because the kids at school don’t trust him (also, his haircut is pretty bad). Fortunately, Eddie has a Classic 1950s Coronet Dad to help him out. Dad explains the importance of being trustworthy, not only for winning minor school elections but also for running a cash register, fixing a lamp, and other household chores that Dad wedges into the category of “trustworthiness.” Everything’s about trustworthiness, if you force it! We’re still not sure about Eddie, but you can trust Mike, Kevin and Bill for plenty of laughs in Am I Trustworthy?
Everybody loves elections, and they never cause any controversy or stress at all. But how do they work? It’s becoming quite clear that nobody really knows, but fortunately our new short U.S. Elections: How We Vote is here to clear everything up! Though here, How We Vote is really more how we voted back in 1970, shortly after the voting age was lowered to 18. The explanation of the process here is remarkably thorough - ready to see an Address-O-Graph in action, everyone? And if you’re worried about voting security nowadays, wait until you get a load of this short. Some voting centers were just set up in peoples' homes! You’d walk into a stranger’s house, fill out a ballot in pencil, hand it to them, and leave! As long as they had an American flag out front, you assumed everything was fine! None of this is an exaggeration! Let your voting anxieties be soothed by the terrifyingly casual elections of the past. Join Mike, Kevin and Bill for U.S. Elections: How We Vote!
What young citizen doesn’t look forward to the freedoms that come with turning 18? Lottery tickets, cigarettes, being able to click “yes I’m 18” on websites with slightly less shame. Oh, and also voting. Voting is pretty cool too, even if you can’t buy it at a convenience store. And if there’s anyone who understands “cool” it’s Coronet Films.Voting at 18 is especially cool, bordering on groovy, because it’s a rare Coronet Film from the 70s! Dig the haircuts, the clothes, the random shots of drug use and international strife meant to indicate “these difficult times.” Yeah, times were difficult back then too, who knew? Coronet did, that’s who! No matter your age, you’re legally allowed and encouraged to enjoy Voting at 18 with Mike, Kevin, and Bill. Strap on a big hairdo and some sideburns and head on down to the Place of Registration, baby!
Have you ever wanted to see how the Republican Party ran a local get-out-the-vote operation in the late 60s? You have?! Well then you’re almost certainly already familiar with Victory Squad, which is no doubt the defining classic of a genre that thankfully includes no other shorts that we know about. It’s hosted by Gipper and The Duke. No, not the Gipper and The Duke who have the third highest rated morning zoo show in the Quad Cities. The OGs: John Wayne (real name: Marion Morrison) and Ronald Reagan (real name: he forgot it.) Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for a hard hitting look at democracy in action. Because while the antics of those Gipper and The Duke DJs may be “too hot for the FM dial”, there’s nothing zany about Victory Squad. Seriously, it’s a bunch of 60s Republicans wearing suits while they sip non-alcoholic punch inside a converted Woolworth’s store front. It’s the least zany thing that has ever existed. Go vote, dammit!
It’s the first Tuesday in November, and it’s time to do your civic duty. It may not be fun, but it’s your responsibility. We’ve been doing it so long that sometimes we forget why, but it’s more important now than ever. Yes, it’s time to bitch endlessly about Daylight Saving Time. It’s also time to Vote, and there’s no better way to get someone to do that than showing them a film where ancient people explain our three branches of government until they run shrieking out of the classroom and directly into a polling place. This film is so old, we only had 48 states when it was made. Now it’s rumored that we have substantially more than that! There’s no way to know for sure since Coronet stopped making shorts 40 years ago. Please join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Tuesday in November.
Munchers! It isn’t a new budget horror franchise from the makers of Feeders, but it’s almost as disturbing in its own way. The Munchers is a claymation romp about your teeth, which apparently have faces and mouths containing little teeth of their own. Teeth within teeth, how deep does this thing go? The teeth also hop out of their gums to run around, square dance, and flee from their very own supervillain, Mean Jack Sweet. Mean Jack Sweet tempts young teeth with candy, then rips them apart with his giant metal torture device. You have to imagine the kids who saw this short never wanted to look inside their mouths again, knowing the hellish demonic realm within. Brace yourself (no pun intended) for a terrifying musical journey into the universe of your own gums. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for The Munchers!
Alias St. Nick is a vintage Christmas cartoon. It’s from the golden age of animation, when all toys were required to come alive and just kind of bounce up and down, and all character voices sounded like a helium balloon that’s very sick. This one belongs to the “Happy Harmonies” series, the forgotten loser in the war with Merry Melodies and Silly Symphonies. Alias St. Nick is basically Itchy and Scratchy meets Home Alone. A hungry cat finds a tree full of little mouse children and decides to eat them. So he stuffs a balloon down his pants and pretends he’s Santa to make his way inside for mousey murder. But the adorable mice see through his upsetting costume and put him through the ringer with a series of whimsical, deadly traps. It’s not the holidays without a little mouse and cat cartoon violence, throw on your creepiest Santa suit and join Mike, Kevin and Bill for Alias St. Nick!
Ah, the famous December Holidays. We wait for them every year. After the exciting fall festivities of Toyotathon and Geicoween, we settle into the colder months with the warm glow of Happy Honda Days, and of course, the Lexus December to Remember. Unbelievably, none of these holidays are discussed in this short. Instead, December Holidays brings focus to Chanukah, the Mexican religious festival Las Posadas, and some other holiday that happens in December… can’t remember the name, there’s some kind of tree, and socks over a fireplace or something? Anyway, all the information you need is here, along with 80s families showing you how they celebrate in 80s holiday fashion. Cozy up with a mug of hot December chocolate and enjoy December Holidays with December Mike, December Bill, and December Kevin!
While kindly old Frosty gets most of the attention, the Snowman canon is filled with monstrous examples. You’ve got RiffTrax’s own Jack Frost, Clayfighter’s Bad Mr. Frosty, the snowman the idiot couple in Winter Wonderland forced to pretend to be Parson Brown, and of course, Calvin’s Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons. The Snowman in The Snowman joins their ranks, and may be the most terrifying of all! He exists to wreak havoc on a squad of Old Timey cartoon characters. The kind that are usually just whistling as they whitewash a fence or something. It was the thirties, people would happily watch that crap for ninety minutes in between World Wars. Anyway, they bring the snowman to life, it terrorizes them and they melt the entire arctic in order to defeat him. Does that have devastating repercussions for the rest of mankind? We’re not sure, they didn’t cover that in the ten minute cartoon! Please join Mike, Kevin, and Bill, for The Snowman!
Hooligan Teddy O’Hara shoplifts a cake from the local delicatessen to give to his beloved aunt for Christmas. Aiding and abetting him is classmate Billy, who knows of Teddy’s hard-knock life and pleads his pal’s case to Sister Mary Benedict and Monsignor Thatoneguy. From the DuPont Theater’s "Cavalcade of America" series from the 1950s, this short film doesn’t pull any punches exposing the dark side of bakery larceny. Come for the cake - but stay for Francis Bavier in a rare non-Mayberry appearance!
Here come's Santa's Spaceship! Because, apparently, a magic sleigh that can fly all over the planet in one night wasn’t enough for him. Honestly, it just seems a little greedy! Santa’s Spaceship starts with a marionette cowboy singing a western song to an ailing reindeer, and gets weirder from there. All the marionettes living at the North Pole are worried about making the Christmas deliveries because the reindeer are getting old and tired. Rather than, say, try to help the reindeer who have served faithfully for so long, marionette Santa and his marionette friends decide to trade ‘em in for a used rocketship. The used rocketship salesman makes it pretty clear he will turn the reindeer into hamburger, but Santa goes through with the deal anyway. And still, somehow, it again gets weirder from there! Grab a warm mug of rocket fuel and settle in with Mike, Kevin, and Bill for the marionette madness of Santa’s Spaceship!
All we know about this short is what it isn’t: it’s not Lauren Schwartzard’s New York Film Academy project. It’s not Kosovan director Samir Karahoda’s short about local architecture. And it’s not a short film by Canadian social media personality Inanna Sarkis. Don’t watch those. Watch this one. There are teens, bikes, pools and vague dilemmas. Join Bridget and Mary Jo and we’ll all try to figure it out together.
Don’t be fooled. “Beauty” is the red herring in this short about Racine, Wisconsin’s seamy underbelly. Yes, that Racine: S.C. Johnson Wax's headquarters and meddling mothers-in-law. WARNING: graphic depictions of insoluble non-glycerin substances.
If you can suspend disbelief enough to think that Phyllis Diller ever had a garage sale, then you’ll appreciate the practical tips and corny jokes in this how-to video from 1987. It also features Brandon Scott in his Golden Globe-nominated role of “The Nitpicker,'' which forever changed how hagglers were portrayed on screen. Eagle-eyed fans of second-hand merchandise instructional sales videos will also spot the incomparable work of Russ Vogel, best known for, according to the sole notation on his IMDB page, “his work on How to Have a Money-making Garage Sale.” Join Bridget and Mary Jo for this straight-to-video video - which you’ll probably be able to find at a garage sale near you!
There are two kinds of RiffTrax shorts. The first are the straightforward ones, the ones where they teach a grown man not to use poisonous snakes as suspenders or a sentient belt sander shows a girl the error of her ways. Then there’s the nutty ones. The ones where, say, a depressed kid drowns his teddy bear, a guy dropkicks a turtle, or parents sleep in separate beds because their kid is too big of a weiner. ALL of those things happen in Fears of Children! It tells the story of Paul, a boy whose general vibe is “shellshocked Urkel.” He’s terrified to do things most boys love, like “riding bikes”, “exploring caves” and “being in the same room as your father.” This of course produces some of the best Angry RiffTrax Parenting this side of David & Hazel. If you had a nickel for every laugh-out-loud moment in this short, you’d be able to afford all the roast beef you want. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Fears of Children.
Rain. Skin. Fabric. Peanut butter? Your guess is as good as ours! Bridget and Mary Jo try to figure it out together, and you’re invited!
When a family moves to greener pastures, it's up to one housemaid to bring the American dream to a screeching halt. Who is the mysterious Mrs. Swenson and why does she threaten to destroy a loving marriage and break up a happy family? All in the name of housework? There’s no way to prepare yourself for the shocking twist ending of this short. Join Bridget and Mary Jo as they Meet Mrs. Swenson!
Do you think it might be “groovy” or possibly even “outta sight” to try those funny cigarettes your friends have been smoking? As Tom learns the pros and cons of getting high, the police keep showing up, and whaddaya know, they’re always level-headed, helpful and cool! Meanwhile the potheads are selfish greedy jerks out to ruin Tom’s life. Maybe the police were the real “hep cats” all along? Like we said, it’s completely unbiased! It’s like Reefer Madness, if Reefer Madness put on a hippie wig and peace sign necklace and said “how do you do, fellow kids?” Stay safe out there, join Mike Kevin and Bill for Keep Off The Grass!
She’s a lady. He’s a rocket. Can they make it work even though they’re different molecular compounds? A talent scout whose name we never get and his pal Flash are in search of the All American Sweetheart. Thus begins the feeble narrative of this short film showcasing the 1952 line of Oldsmobiles. Ya know, the kind of promotional film automakers made until they figured it was cheaper and easier to have bikini-clad women at car shows. Anyhoodle - and for all you This Island Earth fanatics: if you’ve been wondering whatever happened to Joe Wilson, have we got a surprise for you!
The Talking Car is also slightly misnamed, because it features not one but SEVERAL talking cars. A little boy playing in the street is nearly hit by a car, and next thing you know another car sprouts some eyeballs and a mouth and starts talking to him. In fact, the boy finds himself in a cloudy nether world full of talking cars… so maybe that car really did hit him, after all? A dark potential interpretation the short leaves unexplored! Instead, the boy and his growly little dog get many lessons and scoldings from the talking cars up in the clouds, including a cranky old jalopy who must’ve had kids saying “Do I really want to drive? Or even be inside a car, ever again?” Join Mike, Kevin and Bill up in Weird Car Heaven for The Talking Car!
The title of the short is Rhythmic Ball Skills, I mean, what else do you need to know? It’s Rhythmic Ball Skills! Rhythmic Ball Skills is set in some kind of gym class purgatory nether realm. There, children are instructed by an offscreen presence to go through the motions of waving various balls around in what no reasonable person would call “exercise,” let alone “fun.” The short itself describes what the kids are doing as “activities for demonstration,” which is maybe the most Orwellian phrase you’ll find outside of 1984. When the ball skills are this rhythmic, you really don’t wanna miss out. Brace yourself for the demonstration of activities and join Mike, Kevin and Bill for Rhythmic Ball Skills!
An amalgam of film footage in search of a narrative, The Box is a short film featuring a box in its breakout role as a box. You may never look at a square or rectangular container made from corrugated raw paper with a flat base and sides the same way again.
Is corn masks? The freaks at ACI Films return yet again with a twisted spin-off of the classic At Your Fingertips short. The parents have signed the waivers and headed to a bar, leaving their unfortunate kids to assemble “masks” out of various types of refuse. They’re potentially problematic, and definitely swarming with pests. One thing is for certain: nobody learned a damn thing the day this was shown in class. But it may have inspired a cult or two! Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Masks of Grass.
His name is Manners in School, but you can call him Chalky. Chalky the chalk demon, that is, with a little stick figure body and a big round Charlie Brown head. Chalky is accidentally brought to life by Larry, a surly lad who has to stay after class and clean the chalkboards on account of his poor manners. From there it’s a battle of wills between Larry, a boy who talks like a 1930s gangster, and Chalky, an upsetting 2D lifeform who loves to shame children. Who will win? It’s impossible to say, but one thing’s for sure - Chalky and Coily the Spring Sprite come from the same dark hell-realm. Clap some erasers together and join Mike, Kevin and Bill for Manners in School!
Sentient burlap sacks are running wild in our city streets, terrifying children and threatening to contain our yard waste! They dance, they ride horses, they generally just writhe in an unpleasant fashion. Meanwhile, they are pursued by their cruel master, a guy who could frankly use a bit of bag coverage himself. It’s possibly the most pointless short we’ve ever done, unless the point was to make you wonder what was in the bag, a shark or something? Originally debuted at RiffTrax Live: Summer Shorts Beach Party, please join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for this studio version of The Baggs.
When You Grow Up is a deeply 70s look at what becoming an adult and having a job might look like for kids in the 70s, from the 70s. Did we mention the 70s? This short is about what happens when the kids from At Your Fingertips: Grasses have to put away childish things, take off their headdresses made of weeds, and face the harsh realities of joining the workforce. From factory work, to paperwork, to construction work, then back to factory work, the world is your oyster, kids! When You Grow Up might sound ominous and grim, but at least it isn’t If You Grow Up. Plan your future and what kind of sideburns you should grow with Mike, Kevin and Bill!
In a world increasingly devoid of inspiration, firefighters are true heroes. Selflessly entering burning buildings, putting themselves in harms way to the ravages of wildfire, getting the occasional cartoon cat out of a tree. They are such heroes they make Captain America look like a mere Hawkeye. So what this short puts forth is: A chimp can do their job. A chimp named Shorty. Just put him in a funny hat and let him rescue the old lady who’s screaming from a second floor window, the rest of us human firefighter have a poker game that needs our attention. Oh, and see if the chimp will pick up some Thai while he’s out! They say to never work with children or animals, but to always riff monkeys. So we did. Please join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Chimp the Fireman.
It’s a rainy day, and the humanoid Frances and her pet bunny Hopper have nothing to do. After ruling out a cross-country bank-robbing spree, remodeling the kitchen, and space exploration, the two get their crayons and start drawing. Will what she ends up drawing blow your mind - or will it be approximately ten minutes of aimless doodling narrated by a disinterested man? Find out as you hop along onto the latest short from Bridget and Mary Jo!
A pleasant family camping trip goes horribly awry when Dad gets didactic about the virtues of science. In this 1950s nuclear family, teenager Jack wants to go to the moon some day; sister Betty wants to get married someday. Dad brings the hammer down with some tough talk about how much they’ll need science in their lives - and lots of it!
What could be better than a box full of kittens? Puppies. Anyway, we digress. There are so many kittens in It’s A Cat’s Life, it’s practically a Russian novel of feline-ity. From the fine folks at Frith, who brought you Mother Mack Trains Her Seven Puppies (which would have been much more fun) and/or The Littlest Puppy Grows Up (which would have been such a better choice for riffing), this short from the 1940s is not about puppies. Nevertheless, Bridget and Mary Jo manage to soldier through this primer on the small domesticated carnivore that has the temerity not to be a dog.
The Magic Shop is almost definitely the only short we’ve ever riffed that was based on a story by H.G. Wells - though there are rumors his work was a major inspiration for Moose Baby. It’s a tale as old as time. A young boy pressures his dad to take him into a magic shop. The creepy magic shop owner pressures them to join him in the back room where the REAL magic happens... and for some reason they actually go. The dad is stressed out by how much everything costs, but you’ll be stressed out by the creepy gorilla-hippo hybrid creature that even Dr. Moreau found “a little upsetting.” And the “magic” only gets more unspeakable from there. Join Mike, Kevin and Bill for the stone cold literary classic that is H.G. Wells’ The Magic Shop!
The title of our new short Basketball Is Fun comes off a little desperate. Basketball Is Fun! Everyone should hang out with Basketball! Basketball’s mom thinks Basketball is really cool, no matter what the kids at school say! But the title makes sense as a sales pitch when you realize this film was made roughly 10 minutes after the invention of basketball. On an endless field of black & white asphalt, young boys with letters on their jerseys instead of numbers try to understand wild new concepts like “passing.” The concept of “actually making a shot” apparently hadn’t arrived yet, though. Basically, these kids suck at basketball. Before man could run, he had to learn how to dribble. Join Mike, Kevin and Bill for a sports film from the dawn of time, Basketball Is Fun!
Long before Garfield gorged on lasagna, the Little King was feasting away and, presumably, hating Mondays. The Little King: Christmas Night is an animated short that allows the raw, unadulterated roundness of the king explode across the silver screen. He feels lonely at Christmas, so he picks up a couple of old-timey hobos and takes them back to his castle. There he feeds them (nice) and makes them take a bath with him (maybe not so nice?). What will happen to the Little King and the hobos when Santa arrives? A power struggle? Long underwear with butt-flaps? Unexpected tattoo reveals? One thing’s for sure: it’s never quite clear if the Little King is a child with a beard or just a deeply immature man. But he is fun in a weird, confusing kind of way. Join Mike, Kevin and Bill and help us try to make sense of The Little King: Christmas Night!
There’s a Jingle Bells music video that would be unimpressive even if you learned an ape had animated it. Then some toys come to life and bump into each other. And just when you think you couldn’t possibly take anymore Christmas cheer, there’s a short where a poorly animated guy goes into poorly animated space to get a poorly animated star for his Christmas tree, which is shockingly a lush, detailed animation, worthy of a Flemish master. We're just kidding - it’s poorly animated as well. Then, just because they’re sickos, the Canadians tie the whole thing together with a clown. There’s also a bit of trivia here that is one of the most shocking things in the history of RiffTrax, but you’ll have to watch the short all the way til the end to learn it. It would ruin the surprise to tell you before you’d experienced the magnificent lump of coal that is Christmas Cracker.
“Silent night, holy night…” Yes, you’ve probably heard the famous carol dozens of times in your life. And every time, you surely thought to yourself “What is the story of this Christmas carol? I must know!” No? No, not even once? Even now, you find yourself nodding off at the idea of learning where this Christmas carol came from? Well snap out of it, because Coronet Films is here to give you the origin story you never asked for! Join the live-action kids watching the weird cartoon and wondering “Is this really all we get for Christmas? Does dad hate us?” He might, but Mike Kevin and Bill don’t. All aboard the poorly animated sleigh to Toyland!
Silent Night: The Story of the Christmas Carol opens on a family being bothered by carolers, ironically making the night less silent with their droning. From there a narrator whisks us off into history, specifically the tiny village of Oberndorf, Austria where the song was born. We don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but it involves a priest walking down a hill, a musician with the sideburns of a 60s country singer, and the true hero of the tale: a traveling organ-mender. Yes, somehow wandering remote European villages and asking if they had any organs to mend was once a job. Nowadays doing that would just get you dirty looks, and possibly arrested. We’ve had enough depictions of Batman and Spider-Man’s origin stories, it’s time to learn one that nobody else at the holiday party will know. Buckle up for the soothing ride of your life, join Mike Kevin and Bill for Silent Night: The Story of the Christmas Carol!
Worried your childhood didn’t live up to Encyclopedia Britannica standards? It’s time to find out! You’ll be laughing your warm wool socks off (or should we say, on) as we follow Bill, Nell, and Charlie through a film that only an Encyclopedia could produce. Sure, you thought sledding was fun, but did you know there was a proper form to it? Have you been building snowmen wrong all these years? Do you have what it takes to win in a high-stakes game of “Fox and Geese”? Maybe you better think about taking notes before the next time you... Play In The Snow!
There are times when you need to ask yourself: "Have I been realizing perfume’s full potential?" Have you been living, breathing, eating, seeing, tasting fragrance in every way possible? By the end of this hearty bit of infotainment, you'll be applying perfume and cologne more aggressively than you had ever dreamed. Part travelogue, part educational, and a whole lot promotional, this short film from Avon won’t rest until perfume has altered your very DNA.
Most vintage Christmas shorts fall into one of two categories. One: a suburban 1950s family with two children eagerly awaiting the arrival of Santa Claus. The other: a demented black and white cartoon that feels like it came from some other terrifying dimension. For the first time ever, Toyland is both! We start with the classic nuclear family on Christmas, notable for their small dog who sits upright in a chair. Then dad pulls out a projector and screen and forces the family to watch another film, a cartoon of the ancient variety. Complete with creepy Santa, dogs fighting over bones, and anthropomorphized household objects bouncing up and down to music. There’s a parade of mediocre toys and some kids who look like Felix the Cat. Yes, Toyland has it all! Andy is a kid with a lot of problems. He drops a pencil in his elementary school classroom, and then has to sharpen the pencil in front of the whole class. Sharpening a pencil, so embarrassing, can you even imagine the shame?
Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time. Proudly wearing the number 23, Jordan played 15 seasons in the NBA, winning six championships with the Chicago Bulls while galvanizing the league with his dazzling showmanship. Unfortunately, this short is about a school bus known as Ol’ #23. The “Ron Howardy” looking bus driver has a routine meeting with superintendent of schools and convinces her that students love “Ol’ #23” so much that they will give up a Saturday to paint and reupholster cushions. The project is a success until the baseball team threatens to ruin everything!
Coronet, who had previously enriched our lives with insights into how to drink water, and how to keep a job, now tackles the herculean task of general hygiene. Specifically, Good Grooming for Girls. That’s right ladies, this short is packed with the mind blowing beauty secrets you’ve been waiting for like: washing your clothes, washing yourself, washing your shoes… and SO MUCH MORE! According to this short, the best rule of grooming is “to do it, then forget it.” Well, don’t you forget to join Bridget and Mary Jo down at the salon with Good Grooming For Girls!
"Holiday from Rules?" follows four children who exist in abstract space, an empty void, a community theater set without any actual set pieces. These cranky, whiny kids are mad that rules exist, and they make one of the classic RiffTrax short blunders: they wish to live in a world without rules. You fools! You should never make a wish like that! Did you learn nothing from the teachings of Coily?? As you might expect, the omnipotent narrator takes the kids up on their wish and transports them to an island where they can try to live rule-free. So basically it’s Lord of the Flies with a lower production budget and not quite as many homicides. It’s fun to think about a world without rules… just imagine, you could eat all the old ham you wanted without any fussy “expiration dates” holding you back. Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as they study the pros and cons of life in this new utopia, this Holiday from Rules!
The title "A Magical Field Trip to the Denver Mint" is a bit redundant, since obviously ANY field trip to the Denver Mint is going to be magical. What makes this particular journey to a penny factory so special? Well, naturally, it all starts with a vacuum cleaner! The vacuum cleaner in question is wielded by Rosie O’Flanagan, a whimsical supernatural being whose main power is… being extremely Irish. When three youngsters are bored in their school library, Rosie and her vacuum appear to whisk them away to, you guessed it, the Denver Mint! Does this make more sense when you watch the short? Not really! The kids get to explore the ugliest, dullest rooms at the industrial plant, all while Rosie does her magical thing of… well, being Irish. Rosie O’Flanagan should really team up with the Grocery Witch from Magical Disappearing Money and use their combined powers to bother people about small change.
Thirteen-year-old Danny Coleman, played by 13-year-old Ben Affleck, thinks his single mother needs to meet a Mr. Right.
Bridget and Mary Jo make fun of a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation educational film about a middle school girl and her obsession with school buses.
This is the story of Skippy Gordon, who, in the fall 1953, did unknowingly fall prey to the influence of Miss Temple and her nefarious cooperation in a federally planned routine which would envelop him for one half of his waking hours, and which would continue for the next ten, fifteen, or twenty years of his life. Suffer with Skippy as he endures the joy-ending trauma of realizing that all his toys and nice mom are at home while he's stuck in a stinky room with twenty paste-eaters painting endless pictures of his house with thick, unruly paintbrushes. Feel, with him, the betrayal as his love and desire for a big-boy bike is twisted by the duplicitous Miss Temple into a sick plan to teach him to read, write, and do arithmetic. Finally, an exposé that has the courage to shine a light on first grade as it truly is.
In this short film from the days of landlines, the great Jack Klugman does a lot of soul-searching about dialing long distance.
Scared of the dentist? Well, a hideous CLOWN should take care of that. Turns out the "this" in "Now I've got this to worry about" was gingivitis. There are two redeeming things about this short: 1) Nobody carves their initials into a young boy's fingernail, and 2) The clown does appear to be in quite a bit of pain.
o refresh you: it's all about lenses. And gangsters. And a mysterious villain named The Scorpion who wears a hood and also stole... a scorpion. But like, a statue of a scorpion. Which is also where the lenses came from. Billy Batson has a very high voice. So does his friend, Whitey. They all have fistfights and car chases, and just a general good time. Oh, and now and then some guy called Captain Marvel shows up. Last episode's big reveal: young Billy Batson hosts a major radio program. This episode? He's also suddenly a pilot. With his own plane. If only he had the ability to fly in some other way. Especially since there may or may not be a Time Bomb hidden on his plane.
A long long time ago before the invention of sweatpants by Thaddeus P.J. Comfy sparked a worldwide activewear revolution, the American woman was considered the best dressed and most dressed woman in the world.
It’s a big red flag for Nora when her boyfriend doesn’t order the Lobster Cantonese on their double-date with his brother and fiancée.
Medieval peasants had it pretty good. Bold trends in seneschal headwear. Exciting new plagues. Early retirement (due to death, caused by aforementioned plagues.) Plus, you were never more likely to encounter magic beans or wee little imps who would grant you wishes!
June 10 1967 – President Lyndon Johnson signs Proclamation 3700, designating "the week beginning June 11, 1967, as 'National Succeed With Brunettes Week' and directing 'the appropriate Military officials to begin training Naval personnel in appropriate dating techniques including, but not limited, to: Walking on sidewalks, putting on coats, ordering food, and shaking hands.'"
Gumby, everyone’s favorite malleable substance / god-king, is back in our first RiffTrax Gumby Double Feature.
We all know you can Shake Hands With Danger on a construction site. But did you know that bountiful opportunities to greet danger exist in the standard American office?* Deadly hazards lurk around every corner: cords to trip over, filing cabinets to get pinned under, and co-workers who insist on telling you about their fantasy football teams. And who better to teach us about these hazards than the U.S. Navy? It turns out that while the troops were off winning WW2, the Navy home office was full of people who needed helpful tips like “Actually, don’t slice your thumb off with the paper cutter!” Miss Dipple, Lockenbar, and Lumbering Louie are essentially the Jackass crew of the 1950s, injuring each other for our amusement. (Their antics came to an end after Lumbering Louie controversially stapled his sack to his thigh in front of the First Lady at the Eisenhower Inaugural Ball.) Uncle Sam wants you to lumber on down and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Safety in Offices! *You can get
In the fourth installment of The Adventures of Captain Marvel, we get plane crashes, kidnappings, and high speed chases. Remember, this is one guy’s quest to track down some lenses. Thankfully he’s not after something more interesting, like an atomic bomb or the Mona Lisa. Things could really get out of hand quickly! Billy Batson narrowly escapes a plane crash by remembering that he has insane super powers and doesn’t even need a plane to fly. This knowledge is somehow not enough to prevent him from getting tied up in the basement of a local antique shop soon thereafter. Evidently, The Scorpion didn’t have a lot of budget left for Plan B. Meanwhile, Betty is nearly taken out by a falling flower pot on her way to investigate an evil rental car agency. Just another day in the thrilling world of comic books! Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Death Takes the Wheel!
This educational short elucidates the fun and responsibility of urban pets, be they dogs, cats, birds, or rhinos. How deeply will rhinos factor into this short? You'll have to watch to find out! Learn the joys of pets, fun, and responsibility with Bridget and Mary Jo! Written by: Bridget Nelson and Mary Jo Pehl
Two children sit in an abstract shell of a house surrounded by mid-century modern details that would make HGTV swoon. They can’t stop talking about health and food groups - you know how kids are! And of course, the short reveals that the solution to all health problems is to eat more bread. White bread, cereal, more white bread: that’s the key to a healthy diet, kids! Might that have something to do with the fact this short was funded by the American Bakers Association? Nah, we’re probably just being cynical.
Why was such a thing produced? Were they focus grouping the two options in different test markets? Is “Moose Baby” some sort of horrible slur in non-English speaking markets? Were they blowing through absolute mounds of cocaine at the Moose Baby studios? No matter what, it’s an incredible historical oddity that fortunately found its way into the hands of the only group of people on the planet who would care about it. Thirteen years after we riffed that wet rat on stilts, Moose Baby, we’re riffing the same short but where the narrator says “Baby Moose” instead of “Moose Baby.” If that doesn’t sound like the greatest thing on Earth to you: A) What the hell are you still doing reading this? B) Please join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for The Tale of Baby Moose.
We’re living in the age of the Seneschal, baby! Seneschal T-shirts, Seneschal themed restaurants, and we recently learned that Seneschal was the number one baby name in 2022, regardless of gender. What is a Seneschal, and why is it so hard to spell? You can learn all about it with this newly recorded studio version of Life in a Medieval Town! But there’s more to the short than just the Seneschal - as if he wasn’t enough! The film gives us an exciting low-budget window into feudal society in Europe, and a real historical appreciation for how much life sucked back then. You want a new hat? Better bring your best cow to town! And don’t forget to pay the “bringing your cow into town” tax, or you’ll probably be executed. It was a simpler time, and a worse one. Unless you were the Seneschal, of course, then you were heaping green fabric on your head and living large! Pull up a milking stool, bleed yourself with leeches, and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Life in a Medieval Town!
The Scorpion’s goons have left Betty spiraling. Not spiraling in an emotional sense: literally spiraling down the parking ramp while passed out at the wheel. She’s unconscious, but still somehow guides the car to the bottom without crashing - a feat more impressive than anything Captain Marvel does. That being said, the marvelous Captain does eventually get around to showing up and helping out. Specifically, he helps out by casually murdering a guy who was no real threat, and just sort of annoyed him. Yes, they were still figuring out the whole “superhero” thing in those days, folks! Remember Chapter One, when the boy-turned-hero shot a bunch of guys in the back with a gatling gun? We sure do! Billy Batson becomes suspicious that the masked Scorpion might be one of the archaeologists he hangs out with – a reasonable suspicion, since they are the guiltiest-seeming group of men ever assembled. They scold Billy for his lack of faith, and next thing you know, he’s off to a showdown in a
Mad Libs? Some primitive 1950s version of A.I.? Perhaps they threw darts at a board covered in wholesome, bland words? We may never know, but rest assured after you watch the short you’ll say “Oh, I guess the title tracks… sort of? Hmm.” The “citizens” in question? 50s kids in striped shirts, slicked-back hairstyles, and frilly little dresses made from tablecloths. The “play”? All kinds of good clean moral fun, from roller skating to ping pong to baseball in the style of The Sandlot. And the “good”? Well, we’re still trying to find that part. Things really come to a head when this little gang of background characters from a Peanuts cartoon put on a play to raise money for the baseball team. The play’s theme is cowboys and Indians, of course, because it’s the 50s and nothing says “good citizenship” like violent struggle between settlers and indigenous peoples! Let’s riff shorts at play for good time happiness things, shall we? Grab a bowl of world salad and join Mike, Kevin and Bill
School Vandalism is from the 70s, when kids were wearing bell bottoms, feathering their hair, and just vandalizing the ever-loving heck out of their schools. The film follows four boys who decide to bust into school after hours on a whim. They don’t like the lunch lady, and that’s enough motivation for them! The vandalism they commit is… well, it’s pretty weak, really. They sort of mess up the cafeteria kitchen, and leave a stove on. But that’s enough to bring out the town’s entire police force and fire department to give these lads the public scolding of a lifetime! Death row penalties are strongly implied. Grab a handful of cherry bombs and join Mike, Kevin and Bill for School Vandalism!
The dimwit in question here is Jack, and you’re gonna watch him count to ten. You’re gonna watch him count to ten a whole bunch. Probably more than ten times, but we can’t be sure: the numbers that come after ten must be covered in another short. Jack is counting his army men, and we’ll consider it a success that he never gets one lodged up his nose. Then he moves on to counting real army men, and honestly, if Colonel Jessep had ordered a Code Red here, Tom Cruise probably would’ve just been like “Yep, kid had it coming.”
Where were you on November 12,1980? Were you highlighting shows that you wanted to watch in your TV Guide with a marker you took from your guidance counselor’s office? If so, this after-school special would have been of extra special interest, because it happens to star the very person whose photos covered your locker and Trapper Keeper. Wednesday, 4:30pm: “Jack Thinks Smoking Pot Is The Answer To All His Problems! Jack Melon is a good student, one of the best in class - but he's shy, has no friends, and can't talk to girls. Getting high makes Jack feel popular, but it also gets him into deep trouble. If you smoke pot, know somebody who does, or just want to understand what it's all about, don't miss this very important show. Stoned, Wednesday Afternoon at 4:30pm - starring Scott Baio of ‘Happy Days!’”
Little Jimmy is on a quest to discover how every animal on grandfather’s farm fits into their own little capitalist artifice. Eat your heart out, George Orwell! Cows are there to provide food. Chickens? Also food. Sheep? Clothing and food. Mink? Just clothing! Good for those lucky, lucky minks! Will more animals and their vocations be discussed at arduous length? You’ll have to tune in to find out. Join Bridget and Mary Jo as they look for a job down on the farm to learn How Animals Help Us!
By middle school, they’ve basically stopped asking questions. Around this time, the article points out, student motivation and engagement plummets. In our opinion this is great news for adults who can finally get something done because they aren't being bothered all the time with questions that could be easily Googled. This cautionary short film dramatizes actual situations in which youngsters ask questions about cats, cops, plants and death. You can really mess up a kid if you answer incorrectly, so pay attention along with Bridget and Mary Jo as they Answer The Child's Why.
Yes, words can be tricky, as the young star of our new short learns. Jerry buys some binoculars out of the back of a comic book, somehow resisting the allure of X-Ray Specs and Sea Monkeys. This is a good thing—Jerry seems like the kind of kid who would have definitely drank the Sea Monkeys and possibly tried to eat the Specs. The binoculars are advertised as “powerful”, and Jerry, who thought he would be able to gaze at neighboring planets with them, is disappointed. Evidently the lesson is, “Yes, words can fool you, if you’re as big a dope as Jerry.”
Unlike most educational shorts from the 50s, Don’t Be Afraid centers on the terror of being alive. Buckle up for the existential dread of simply being Billy, kids! Billy’s afraid of everything, and his mom’s not afraid to shame him for it. Things in the closet, warm stoves, climbable gutters, friendly school janitors - they all chill young Billy to his core. Mom tries to help Billy by pointing out that other kids are afraid of things, too, like dogs and bringing home bad report cards to judgmental parents. But those kids are wrong to be afraid, Mom says. The world is full of scary things, Billy, and everyone is afraid, but you shouldn’t be, because being afraid is wrong. Get it, Billy? Do you feel better now, Billy?? Suffer the icy fear of a 1950s childhood and join Mike, Kevin and Bill for Don’t Be Afraid… if you’ve got the guts!
Specifically the Lens of Death, like when a soft contact rolls back behind your eye and you can’t get it and it’s driving you crazy and you just want to die. Or, perhaps more accurately, a lens-based scorpion contraption stolen from an ancient tomb way back in the first episode that can be used to melt mountains, trapping Captain Marvel in a gooey lava inferno. Both lenses are equally terrifying! But the real star of this episode isn’t the lens, or even Captain Marvel: it’s a butler. An anonymous, library defending butler who takes on all comers and kicks an extraordinary amount of gangster butt. We’re not kidding, the episode absolutely should’ve been called Butler of Death. Join Mike, Kevin, Bill, Captain Marvel, and the world’s most savage butler for Adventures of Captain Marvel Chapter 6: Lens of Death!
It’s the late 70s and Ebenezer Scrooge is mired in a deep malaise. Not about Christmas: his coworkers are begging him to join their carpool. Usually Scrooge is an unsympathetic character, but him not wanting to jam into a van full of chattering accountants before he’s even had his first cup of coffee is one of the most relatable things in the RiffTrax library. Scrooge needs to be taught a lesson about conserving fuel, and it was either “be visited by three spirits” or “be forced to watch a beige educational film.” You know the drill: Marley’s chains, Fezziwig, “Boy, what day is it?", etc. But no other adaptation has been bold enough to show a televised Jimmy Carter speech smack dab in the middle of the story! Too bad, that really would have been a bold choice for The Muppet Christmas Carol… As Ol’ Charlie Dick himself said, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor (this was the first quote on Goodreads, we didn’t even have to scroll!) so ple
The Christmas Spirit is set some time in The Past, an ambiguous era full of prairie dresses, wool caps, and men wearing wide ties too short to reach their belly buttons. The story centers on two young brothers obsessed with ponies - it’s boys who famously adore ponies, right? - and the gruff old man they rent the ponies from. Turns out the gruff old man is gruff because his son died. Bet you feel bad about judging him for his gruffness now, don’t you? Well you should! The great drama of the short is that the older boy may have to settle for a slightly inferior pony to the pony he really wants for Christmas. Can you imagine anything sadder?? Trust us, the gruff old man can. And so can his eyebrows. Join Mike, Kevin and Bill and spend a little time in the disturbing Norman Rockwell painting that is The Christmas Spirit!
Does this have anything to do with the fact that Daddy’s been getting out of bed around 11AM these days, unshaven and mumbling about how he’s gonna “show them all” as soon as the dog track lifts his lifetime ban? Who’s to say! The kids surprisingly take this in stride, probably because they know if they throw a fit it’s going to wake Daddy, and he’s been in such a bad mood ever since he stopped going into the office after that nice policeman brought him home that one day. They decide to turn the tables and give Santa a present this year. The viewer is left to wonder which will be worse: Santa’s crumpled, half-scratched lotto tickets, or their handmade “coupon book” you can redeem for things kids should be doing anyway like cleaning their room or eating their vegetables. Do they end up learning the true meaning of Christmas? Does Santa’s luck take a turn for the better? Is a puppy humiliated? Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for A Present for Santa Claus and find out!
Was he a plumber who climbed ladders to fight an ape? Was he pro wrestler Captain Lou Albano? Was he Bob Hoskins going up against a spiky-haired Dennis Hopper in an industrial dystopia? And again, the plumbing, how much was that a part of his deal? The animated Christmas adventure Koopa Klaus answers none of these questions, and raises several more. Koopa, who you may know better as Bowser, has a plan to freeze Santa’s workshop in the North Pole so he can’t deliver toys. Why would freezing the North Pole be a problem, when it’s pretty famously a cold place already? No clue. How long has Santa Claus existed in the Mushroom Kingdom, let alone the faith upon which Christmas is based? Hard to say. Does Mario use a plumber’s snake as a weapon at some point in the episode? Yes, yes he does. Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, and Toad find themselves coincidentally in the North Pole as well, thanks to a “wrong turn” underground on the way to Hawai'iland. If you’re gonna steal, you might as well
In search of just the right Christmas tree to soothe their mother’s aching heart, three seemingly wholesome Canadian siblings go all “daring heist” and filch a fir tree from a crabby neighbor. Come Christmas Day, they set out to right the wrong, and give Old Man Neighbor Guy all the gifts they didn’t want.
When park ranger Uncle Hal (voiced by Hal Smith, Otis on Andy Griffith) tells bear cubs Chinook and Nikomy about Christmas they decide to skip hibernation and stay awake several months to meet Santa Claus. This makes Nana, their mother, (voiced by Jean Vander Pyl aka Wilma Flintstone) very annoyed and so she goes to yell at the ranger but ends up hatching a plan involving a fake Santa. A blizzard… oh wait, before the story even starts there's a live action part with Uncle Hal (not played by Hal Smith, Otis on Andy Griffith) who takes his nieces and nephews to a porpoise show at Ocean World, which is part of Pirates World in Florida. The nieces and nephews ask him to tell them a Christmas story which turns into the animated part and, um, oh just watch it so you can be as confused/enchanted as we are!
True to the original, The Little Match Girl is a heartwarming Christmas story of one child’s brutal struggle for survival against impossible odds. Ho ho ho! Enjoy a warm mug of cocoa while this penniless orphan dreams of an extravagant gift, like a crust of bread or a leather shoe to boil. But don’t worry, it all turns around when Santa appears to show the girl bizarre magical visions of dancing snowmen and toys and family members who are long gone and… oh no. Oh dear. This thing isn’t going in a Zindy the Swamp Boy direction, is it? Please open your heart and spare some pennies for The Little Match Girl, she ain’t doing so good!
Hansel and Gretel, the beloved fairy tale of neglect, torture, and murder, is finally a film the entire family can enjoy! Because everything with these old shorts has to be needlessly weird, Hansel and Gretel are played by two adults in their late twenties instead of grade school children. The effect is quite creepy, which is ends up feeling rather appropriate, given all the aforementioned neglect, torture, and murder!
FIELD TRIP! The good news: you’re all excused from school. The bad news? We’re going to Golden Corral. Yes, that’s right. After years of crafting extremely respectful new slogans, we’ve finally sent Mike, Kevin and Bill to the source itself, in search of the true Gold that can only be found in buffet form. Somewhere at the corner of a strip mall in the wilds of Minnesota, on the grayest day known to man, the guys enjoyed the meal of their lives. Was it also the last meal of their lives? You’ll have to tune in to find out!
With the landmark cartoon Steamboat Willie, Walt Disney showed his genius by setting up two core elements of the Mickey Mouse character that have lasted to this day: he’s always on a steamboat, and his name is Willie. Such vision!
From the mind of Educational Collaborator William E. Young, Ph.D., Director of Curriculum Development Center at The University of the State of New York, and in collaboration with Coronet Films, comes the eternal question: is it considerate to bore your classmates?
Making friends is one of those paradoxical situations where, if you have to watch a Coronet short about how to do it, it’s already too late.
Are You Listening? From the educational minds of Educational Learning, Inc. Are You Seeing This? I Mean, Really, What Are We Even Looking At? should be the real title.
Gumby is back in two unspeakable adventures that test the limits of claymation and decency!
The ending of Adventures of Captain Marvel Chapter 6 left us all with a serious cliffhanger… would our valiant heroes find the strength to keep going and riff another episode? The answer is here at last, with the sequentially named Adventures of Captain Marvel Chapter 7: Human Targets!
Superjock is a look back at a simpler time, when workout clothes didn’t need to “breathe” or “weigh less than twenty pounds” and doctors argued about which brand of cigarettes to recommend. We first meet Jim, who was once a high school jock but has spent every moment since speedrunning “needing quadruple bypass surgery.” Jim’s diet appears to have mirrored The Guy From Harlem’s room service order for about two decades, but now it’s time to get in shape. How is this going to happen? Perhaps by imitating Vic, a man who, based on his haircut and facial hair, was last seen heading up a polygamist sect in 1877. Vic has started eating healthier, cutting back on drinking, and exercising. The result is about what you’d expect: every day is agony. He’s extended his lifespan by years, but with every bite of grapefruit or iceberg lettuce, he wonders “Is this misery worth it?” It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a man getting winded while searching for his ashtray!
Lots of people are afraid of the dentist. Perhaps it’s because they have seen Danny’s Dental Date, a short film that tries to assure kids that the going to the dentist was nothing to worry about and instead makes the entire experience seem like an unspeakable eldritch horror, but with fluoride. First of all, there’s puppets. The puppets are so scared of the dentist that they flee into the woods, which, once you discover that the puppets have puppet teeth, you may want to do too. Then the puppet turns into a real boy and decides to face his fear, but not before the short stops for a couple minutes for a Parade of Vegetables. Many shorts could use a Parade of Vegetables, we feel one would really have taken Setting Up A Room to the next level. Strap in because this dentist doesn’t wear gloves or wash his hands. But don’t worry, he also uses his tools to carve things into his body in order to show off how safe they are. To answer the question of another famous dentist: Is it safe? NO!
The Skating Rink follows Tuck, a farm boy whose family home seems to exist in the Great Depression, even though everything else around them is from the 1970s. Could it be a sci-fi time portal situation? Tuck’s Pa doesn’t care for his son’s odd ways - for example, it drives him crazy that Tuck chooses to walk home from school instead of riding the bus. What a little hellion! Fortunately for Tuck, a big city ice skating guy has decided to build a huge skating rink in this small farm town. It’s obviously a terrible business decision, but lucky for him the short ends before he’s totally ruined. The skating rink's owner somehow guesses that Tuck would make a great figure skater if he gave it a shot, and he’s right! From there, it’s a matter of building up Tuck’s confidence so he can put on a show for the town. But what will Pa think? Is he still fixated on the school bus thing?
In the '70s, everyone started getting in touch with their feelings, probably because there was nothing good on TV. Embracing what makes you feel good, addressing what makes you feel bad… Sure, it sounds good on paper! But when the result is a short like Feelings, it’s probably better just bottling up your emotions for several decades until you die resentful and alone.
The Hell’s Angels. The Yakuza. The Five Points Gang. The Crips. The Bloods. None of these groups inspired as much terror in their communities than the subject of our new short: the Fishing Vagabonds. They ruled the Central Coast with an iron fist. Mothers would cover their children's eyes when one of the Fishing Vagabonds passed by. “Don’t look them in the eye, sweetie, or you’ll wind up as bait.” It’s rumored in many a seaside tavern that the hooks they used were made from human bone… Okay, fine. The Fishing Vagabonds are fun-loving married couples who go on a fishing jaunt in full 1950s style. Are you happy? Well you should be, because they are. In their white swim caps and fine matching boats, these “Vagabonds” recklessly obey all sea-fishing rules and go out of their way to mention how “girls are useless on a fishing trip.” They also plan a “chowder party” which has to be something unwholesome, right?
He doesn’t have his drivers license, but Olympic diving hopeful and recreational beer consumer Buddy Elder (Scott Baio) receives a really rad car for his birthday. Yet despite repeated warnings from the elder Elder (George Dzundza), and close calls with the cops, Buddy continues to drink and drive. It’s no big deal - until an ironic turn of events. Directed by Henry Winkler, All The Kids Do It also features the work of renowned Production Manager Ephraim "Red" Schaffer.
The year is 1975. Try as they might to “Whip Inflation Now,” Americans were feeling the devastating reality of the polyester embargo. Holiday Inn International decided that the only thing they could do was to make a weird “A Christmas Carol”-type training film for their employees. So they did! Then they panicked and tacked on a bunch of commercials and showed it during a sales conference or something. We’re not really sure. Maybe you can figure it out! Put on your best cotton-poly blend and try to Stay Alive in ‘75 with Bridget and Mary Jo!
Before Turner got Hooch, before Jim Belushi met whatever the dog from K-9 was called, before Chase from Paw Patrol got written up for gross misconduct, there was… Police Dog! Police Dog gives a fun inside look into how boring everyday civilian German Shepherds get transformed into terrifying instruments of the state! These lovable pooches learn to sniff drugs, navigate obstacles, and rip into the meaty underarms of suspected purse snatchers. Aw, heckin good doggos, 20/10! We follow one particular dog, Duke, as he learns the ins and outs of police work with his new partner. Inexplicably, Police Dog is narrated by legendary actor Joseph Cotten, known for films like Citizen Kane, The Third Man, Gaslight, and, well, Police Dog. Will the official Scooby-Doo dog voice be used? There’s only one way to find out: join Mike, Kevin and Bill for the canine clampdown of Police Dog!
Billy is a middle school misfit who can’t seem to get his locker unlocked. Things go from bad to worse after an awkward social situation with the cool kids. Walking home through the park, a dressed-for-success sorcerer suddenly appears from a crumpled pop can. Though Bill is slow to catch on, the warlock gives him many pointers on setting boundaries. Will Billy accept unsolicited advice from a magical being? Find out with Bridget, Mary Jo, and The Wizard of No!
Grady and Lori need to get to school. Unfortunately, dangers abound along their walking route: radio controlled cars, breakdancers, the Grim Reaper. Sorry, those are the dangers that abound in the 80s video game Paperboy. These kids deal with antique stores or something, it’s way less cool. Lori owns a Heathcliff lunchbox, yet neglects to implement such basic safety techniques as employing The Garbage Ape for protection, or wearing a helmet that says “HAM”.* Grady, on the other hand, carries a red playground ball, though he is still at least twenty years away from joining an Adult Kickball League as a flimsy excuse to binge drink on a weeknight. Can they make it to school safely in time for their spelling test? Or will their skin be flayed from their bodies in a horrific ice cream truck accident? Find out, you sickos, in Safely Walk To School!
Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K. He knew he had done nothing wrong, but one morning he was arrested. No wait! Wrong story. Hmm.. Oh yes! Jennifer got busted for shoplifting at Publix, and instead of an automatic ten years at Leavenworth, she's handed over to the newly formed Student Court. A group of nine teenagers will, over the course of several hours — including a salad bar break — determine whether Jennifer should be forced to clean her room, talk to her mother and break up with Phillip Rodman, or be handed over to an actual judge who could put her in actual jail. Jennifer is one tough nut, so the intrepid '80s teen stereotypes must work together to reach her hardened heart, bring justice to the community, and get to basketball practice. You have been served. See you in Student Court!
It’s All Hallows' Eve and you’d better watch out for tricksters! You never know when one of those scamps might soap your windows, or jump out and scare you, or destroy your home while simultaneously causing third degree burns! Oh, those felony-committing rascals! This is the tale of two of those mischievous boys, who venture out on Halloween in search of delicious treats and find only loose jelly beans and alarmingly damp fudge. Eventually they encounter a bitter old man who threatens to punch them. If you’ve ever had a teenager wearing a football jersey as their “costume” demand free candy, you know the feeling. The kids pull a prank, the man suffers immense physical harm, and we’re left to ponder the morality at hand. Namely, would he have deserved worse if instead of nothing, he’d been handing out banana Now And Laters?
Anyone with an advanced film degree knows that Video FX peaked in 1992 when Snoop Dogg turned into a doberman in the “What’s My Name” music video. But back then, if you wanted to achieve that level of technical wizardry at home, the deck was stacked against you. Amateur videographers who wanted to take their home movies to the next level used to have to send them off to a random Culver City P.O. Box and hope for the best. Adding a star wipe to little Susie’s seventh birthday party footage would cost upwards of five hundred dollars — and you’d be lucky to receive it by the time she turned eight. Then came the Video Toaster 4000. Powered by a Commodore Amiga, it revolutionized the field of cheesy transition FX and crappy word art graphics. To announce the new product, Team Toaster released this infomercial featuring celebrity testimonials from pro skater Tony Hawk, magician Penn Jillette, and sentient mayonnaise smeared on white bread Wil Wheaton.
Captain Marvel! Faster than the speeding bullets he shoots at fleeing victims! Able to throw petty criminals to their death in a single bound! Star of episodes whose titles have no bearing on what actually happens in them! That applies to Chapter 8, Boomerang, which features neither self-returning throwing sticks nor basic cable networks airing children’s cartoons. It does however feature henchmen with names like Barnett, Ives, and JG Wentworth who are currently holding Betty and Billy prisoner at a bombing range, which frankly, sounds a helluva lot cooler than TopGolf. Their fate will be decided by The Scorpion, whose identity we’re rapidly getting closer to learning and going “Huh…” with the maximum amount of disinterest allowed by federal law. Will Betty get knocked unconscious again? Will Billy’s voice crack? Will Captain Marvel execute civilians without fear of reprisal? The answer to all of these questions is of course: Boomerang!
If a small child seems upset on Thanksgiving, there’s three likely reasons: One, they accidentally tried a forkful of rutabaga casserole. Two, they caught a glimpse of Jerry Jones in the Cowboys owner’s suite. And three, all their classmates make fun of the way they dress and how they talk because their family fled to America from Russia to escape religious persecution. Molly is in the latter camp, though we can’t rule out the possibility that Jerry Jones is haunting her nightmares like some sort of Football Facelift Freddy Krueger. Even though she’s a brilliant gymnast and smart as a whip, she’s still an outcast because she doesn’t know about basic American traditions like “Thanksgiving,” “Black Friday,” and “Starting to water down dad’s drinks before he tries to take his shirt off and fight his brother in the driveway like he did last year.” Never mind that Turduckens are essentially edible Matryoshka dolls; these second graders know what they like, and it ain’t Comrade Molly!
Nothing says “Christmas” like Khruschev’s Soviet Russia! Move over, Frosty the Snowman, there’s a new festive cartoon in town. And by “new” we mean from the 1950s. And by “festive" we mean there are lions, whales, themes of isolation, and Santa in a fighter jet. Though, to be fair, putting Santa in a fighter jet seems like an extremely American idea. Maybe we’re not so different after all! A Christmas Journey tells the tale of Kolya, a sweet boy who seems to live alone in a swanky penthouse apartment in Moscow. His father is away at Christmas because he is a weatherman in Antarctica. To repeat, he is a weatherman in Antarctica. "Sorry, son, I have to leave you alone because the penguins need to know the relative humidity!" Kolya is saddened to think his father won’t have a Christmas tree down in the frozen wastes, so he dreams of bringing one to him. Kind of an odd dream, and dad would probably prefer a nice flask of vodka, but it’s the thought that counts. Fortunately for Kolya, San
At first glance, something as trivial as a Christmas pudding might seem beneath Sherlock Holmes’ concern, until you remember that he canonically used a lot of cocaine. Where will his nose lead him this time? This Christmas short is fun and festive right from the outset, when a man is convicted of murder, sentenced to death, and swears violent revenge upon Sherlock Holmes. The convict has murdered his previous five wives, which is the kind of thing a brilliant detective like Sherlock notes is a bit of a pattern! The prisoner enacts a devilish plan for escape, ripped straight from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon: to have his current, not-yet-murdered wife bring him a Christmas pudding with a file hidden inside. Yeah, not really sure we need Holmes & Watson for this one, maybe bring in the B squad? Pack your pipe, break a string on your violin and get fully hounds-toothed with Mike, Kevin and Bill for Sherlock Holmes In the Case of the Christmas Pudding!
Who doesn’t love Christmas? After all, it’s “the most wonderful time of the year” as someone, perhaps Gibby Haynes, once sang. Many of us, after one too many egg nogs, have wondered what it would be like if it were Christmas Every Day. An entire year of beautiful light displays, rosy cheeked carolers, and endless overflowing vats of figgy pudding! What could possibly go wrong? Christmas Every Day tells the story of a little girl who makes this exact wish and turns the planet into a cursed hellscape of tinsel and misery. Turns out that when Christmas comes every single day, it loses a bit of its luster. Ralphie’s Red Ryder antics will have you wanting to shoot your own eye out after a couple weeks, Mariah Carey’s warbling will drive you mad by mid-March, and where the hell are we supposed to put all these damn turtle doves? Two was more than enough to begin with!
Stripes and Spots: they’re cops. No, sorry, scratch that, bit of a habit! Stripes and Spots are clowns. Even worse, they’re puppet clowns. Even worse, they’re a type of puppet clown that can only be described as a bowling pin wrapped in burlap. Who better to bring some festive seasonal despair to Christmas with The Santa Claus Suit!
Nowadays, it’s extremely common to put a Christmas tree up in your house. It’s a festive symbol of the season and a wonderful opportunity to exclaim “They cost HOW much now??” But it wasn’t always this way!
A Cosmic Christmas is an animated TV movie from 1977 about three aliens visiting Earth to learn the true meaning of Christmas. The whole film feels like someone spilled bong water on a black light poster of Santa Claus in space: in other words, it’s pretty far out, man
The Christmas canon is full of magical destinations, where the snow is always newfallen, the cheeks are always rosy, and there’s just a little hint of peppermint in the air. The North Pole. Whoville. Bedford Falls. And, of course, the General Assembly building of the United Nations.
Continuing the passive-aggressively named Let’s Be Good Citizens film series, it’s Let’s Be Good Citizens While Visiting! Because even children on vacation can fail and disappoint their country if they aren’t polite enough. Susan and Jack are classic 1950s children on a classic 1950's vacation: visiting their boring aunt and uncle at their boring farm. Meanwhile mom and dad are presumably sipping Mai Tais at a swingers resort in the Bahamas. Susan and Jack make the most of their “vacation” by carefully selecting the appropriate shirts to wear, buttoning and tucking those shirts in precisely, and then being chastised for trying to climb up a 3-foot fence. Good citizens don’t have fun! Good citizens get punished, and they’re grateful for it! Come on children, are you trying to make Uncle Sam cry? Will the kids get their carefully pressed clothes dirty on the farm, like the devil wants them to? Will they accompany their aunt and uncle on some chores in town?
Bicycles have traditionally had only two purposes: going from point A to point B and making the worst people in the world froth at the mouth with rage in comments sections whenever it’s suggested that cars should watch out for them. But back in the '80s, a third purpose was discovered: Bicycle Dancing. Yes, there was nothing cooler than getting a really tiny BMX bike and making it go Bouncy Bouncy! While the potential of this new art form was teased at during the opening credits of Rad, its screen time was vastly cut due to the breakout success of its co-star, Ass Sliding. But with nary an ass to be slid in this short, it’s time for tricks like bunny hops, tail whips, spin dizzles, raspberry rotorooters, marleybone weekends, capitol critters, hamburglar therapists, and several other terms we also just made up to take center stage! If you found the concepts of Helltrack and Walking This Sucker too intense, please join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for this intensive crash course.
Mike works in a factory, and he’s angry at everything! His broken-down car. His co-worker who laughs at him. People who point out that it’s insane that he considers tomatoes an essential part of any fruit basket. Mike’s going to be receiving a lot of gift fruit baskets going forward, because he’s in the hospital after losing several fingers in a belt sander accident. Fortunately, his daughter is there to salt his tomatoes, then feed them to him. That is, until he gets a hospital roommate who is also named Mike. The entire RiffTrax universe would collapse in on itself if this second Mike lapsed into a rant about how bananas are actually vegetables, so we’re glad that he never actually speaks. The point of this short is evidently something about not losing your temper at work but you’ll most likely just come away from it with a strange desire to bite into a whole tomato. It must have been something subliminal they did…
Last year, Mike, Kevin, and Bill went to Golden Corral. This year, they decided to go play mini golf. They thought they might have better odds of enjoying the food there! Mini golf is, of course, the brainchild of a guy who had eight or nine beers and decided that what the sport of golf was missing was windmills. We of course use “sport” lightly because golf is the only sport where a guy nicknamed “The Walrus” could become a world champion, and where that guy is a totally different guy than John Daly, who was also a world champion despite being the aforementioned guy who had eight or nine beers. Last summer, Mike, Kevin, and Bill hit the links for 18 holes and approximately 368 strokes of mini-golf. There are birdies and eagles galore… at the Thomas Sadler Roberts Bird Sanctuary, approximately 27 miles west. So instead, you’ll learn new terminology such as “What comes after the quadruple bogey?” (The answer is: blatant cheating when the other two guys aren’t looking.) Grab your scor
CRIME- Senior Alert: Important life saving advice clearly presented in a short film starring Seniors just like you! A message from: Crime Prevention For Seniors of Montgomery County, Maryland; Pinellas County Florida Sheriff Department's Crime Prevention Unit; and The Mansfield, Ohio Police Department: "We don't pretend to have all the answers for every possible crime, but if you follow a few simple rules you stand a darn good chance of not being a victim: 1. Secure your house against easy entrance. 2. Never let a stranger in. 3. Develop safe car habits. 4. Get a soft little purse which holds no more than five dollars, your credit card, and one check for groceries and hide it on your person!"
Let's pretend for a moment that you're a 5th grade teacher. It's late Thursday night, and you haven't prepared one thing for tomorrow's class day. It’s also early May, so there's no chance for a snow day to save you, and getting a sub means you have to write up a lesson plan anyway. What do you do? Here’s an idea: show your class this short film from the 1950s about a teacher who obviously hadn't prepared for his class day, so he decides to have his class “act out” scenes from Tom Sawyer, claiming it helps students to “learn better.” When you're done watching Acting is Fun, apply what you’ve learned in your own classroom. It will eat up at least an hour before lunch, smart kids can take a break from excelling, and most of all, it’s fun! *Your students are sure to be charmed by the educator’s mid-century modern eyebrows.
When we last left Billy Batson, he was passed out. That isn’t really news; the cast of Captain Marvel spends most of their time either unconscious, riding in boxy cars, or when they get really ambitious, both. Now and then there is a lengthy board meeting, or perhaps the murder of several civilians by our titular hero. The Scorpion needs just a few more pieces to complete his project. We think it’s some sort of lamp, or possibly a toaster. Doctor Lang is holding out on him, so The Scorpion tries to put him in a device that’s half iron maiden, half birdcage. We don’t know why he owns this device. Perhaps his side hustle is cockatiel interrogation? What’s important is, you’ll find the reveal of the Dead Man’s Trap janky and hilarious, even more so when you remember that the final season of one of the most acclaimed TV shows of all time, Breaking Bad, employed a nearly identical device. Next thing you know, Billy will be tossing a pizza onto The Scorpion’s roof. Only three more episod
Five minutes of alternate riffs for What It Means to Be An American
Five minutes of alternate riffs for The Case of Tommy Tucker!
Bonus version of "A Boy of Mexico: Juan and his Donkey" riffed by Cole Stratton and Janet Varney.
Bonus version of "Borrowed Power" riffed by Cole Stratton and Janet Varney.
Bonus version of "At Your Fingertips: Boxes" riffed by Cole Stratton and Janet Varney.
