The RiffTrax Factor

Mystery Science Theater 3000 is the biggest purveyor of the concept of riffing movies. They would take some old B-movie like Robot Monster or Teenagers From Outer Space and some guys would “riff” and make jokes while the movie played. Precedents include It Came From Hollywood (1982), which had segments of Cheech and Chong making fun of Reefer Madness (the 1936 anti-marijuana propaganda film) and some comedic redubbing of old movies like Fractured Flickers (1963) and What's Up Tiger Lily? (1966). MST3K brought that fully into the modern era, first on an independent TV station in Minnesota before moving to basic cable, and eventually having revivals for the streaming era.

Where a lot of comedic movie commentaries are improvised, MST3K was fully scripted, which let them make more and sharper jokes. It also had the conceit of the main host being a guy trapped on a satellite and being forced to watch cheesy movies by mad scientists (“the Mads”), with the robots he built to help him stay sane joining in. The “host segments” where the human host and his robot friends mess around—and take calls from the mad scientists and occasionally characters from the movie—were one of the highlights of the experience. It went on long enough that the show’s creator Joel Hodgson retired from his on-screen role as the host and Mike Nelson took over, with the robots’ voices changing as well. The more recent revivals brought comedian Jonah Ray in as the human host.

MST3K gained a dedicated fan following, which never went away despite the show having a fallow period from 1999 to 2017. Reviving it in some form was an obvious step. It had gotten 10 seasons and a movie, but there were still people who wanted more. Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy did a short-lived riffing show called The Film Crew, which had the conceit that a deranged rich guy was paying them to record commentaries for old movies that didn’t have them. It got a total of four direct-to-DVD episodes before its cancellation. 2007 saw several of the other cast members reunite for Cinematic Titanic, where five people riffed B-movies at the behest of a vague, shadowy organization. They put out a dozen episodes and did numerous live shows, but packed it up in 2013. In 2015, Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff (who played the original mad scientists) launched their own riffing show as “The Mads Are Back,” which is still going.

In 2006, Mike Nelson launched RiffTrax, a new riffing endeavor, originally with the conceit of providing downloadable mp3 commentary tracks that you could sync up with your DVD of the movie with relative ease. (I got extremely good at that with practice.) That let them riff blockbuster movies without having to worry about untenable licensing fees or outright refusals from studios. It cut out the host segment concept entirely—the new medium didn’t really allow for it—and the riffers are framed as just some comedians joking around.

It didn’t really come together until Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy joined him, and it shows how the artform was still evolving, with even some of the most experienced practitioners still learning what works. Having watched a lot of riffs, a three-person team seems to work best. Two-person riffs are decent, whereas Mike Nelson’s solo riffs just aren’t very good. They also had to further learn what kinds of movies actually work for riffs, especially with the shift to riffing major releases. MST3K always called them “cheesy movies” rather than “bad movies,” and intentionally or not, I think that’s revealing. Some bad movies are “good-bad” movies, which lack conventional quality but can still entertain; think of The Room, The Apple, or Plan 9 From Outer Space. Other bad movies are just really boring, and it’s hard to imagine a riff turning, say, 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau into an enjoyable experience. Looking at a list of the lowest-rated movies would provide some ideas for riffing fodder, but a movie's Rotten Tomatoes score is not inherently inversely proportional to its comedic potential. The higher quality classic movies don’t typically lend themselves to riffing either, but a movie can be excellent and cheesy at the same time. Their riff of The Wizard of Oz was really fun, whereas their attempt to challenge themselves by riffing Casablanca didn’t work nearly as well.

Along the way they added a pair of dedicated writers (Sean Thomason and Conor Lastowka), who the main cast say are responsible for every video game reference that shows up in their riffs. Mary Jo Pehl (who played Pearl Forester in later MST3K seasons) and Bridget Nelson (a writer and occasional performer on MST3K, and also Mike Nelson's wide) became a riffing duo with their own style that has a bit of a feminist bent. There's also the British duo of Matthew J. Elliot and Ian Potter, and guest riffers have included Weird Al, Fred Willard, Neil Patrick Harris, and Joel McHale. The RiffTrax family is fairly big!

Now here’s the really important part of this essay:

I became a bit of a RiffTrax superfan, and for a while I was at least trying out basically everything they released. There were definitely riffs I liked of movies that I unironically enjoyed, like the original Star Wars trilogy, The Matrix, and the MCU movies they’ve covered. MST3K routinely cut parts of the movies they riffed, for time, content, and comedic potential, whereas in its mp3 commentary form, a RiffTrax has to sit with the entire movie as released to the public. That can be surprisingly different from how the memory of the movie might appear in your head, which can both benefit and hamstring efforts to make it funny. The original 2000 X-Men movie has a lot of goofy superhero stuff ripe for riffing, but it also has a flashback scene in a Nazi concentration camp. On the other hand, their Star Wars riffs highlight some truly bonkers moments in the films that you probably don’t remember. Darth Vader makes some really weird noises on occasion.

I don’t watch RiffTrax as much as I used to, but even today I sometimes put riffs on as background noise. Sometimes I’ll just watch my way through the entire series of Star Wars or Harry Potter, and if I try to watch one of those films without a riff, my brain will start filling in the jokes. It’s… kinda messed up, and I definitely remember more of those riffs than the guys who wrote and performed them. RiffTrax also wound up being weirdly important to my development as a person, because of course they don’t take the movies they riff seriously. That’s more important than it might sound at first, because one of the biggest problems with nerds in general is taking the media they like too seriously.

At first I was a little put off by Mike Nelson essentially saying, “Why in the world should I care about this glowing cube thing?” during Avengers, but he has a point. I enjoy the movies, but they are a bit silly and self-important. We get it, there’s a cube-shaped MacGuffin they’re fighting over. A lot of media companies want to sell you an identity because it lets them sell you more stuff. A nontrivial portion of the human race goes to see MCU movies, but “Marvel fans” will also buy T-shirts and popcorn buckets and wait in line to see the Marvel areas at very expensive Disney theme parks. That’s questionable in itself, but investing your identity in a media franchise also makes you vulnerable. I haven’t completely shed the tendency to get upset when people criticize or mock stuff I’ve enjoyed, but the RiffTrax influence has done a lot to reduce it. I still watch the Harry Potter riffs now and then (in ways that don’t give JKR any more money, for the record), but they made it a lot easier to let go of my fandom of the series when the cracks started to show.

RiffTrax eventually started doing VOD releases, where you could purchase and download the entire movie with the riff already applied, and these became the core of their business. They still occasionally do “Just the Jokes” riffs of big movies—around three of them per year—but their focus is on B-movie riffs more in line with the kinds of titles that MST3K did. They’ve been doing roughly two of these per month for over a decade, in addition to countless shorts, occasional live shows, and “RiffTrax Presents” riffs with other hosts. With so much volume they can’t all be good (looking at you, Ghost Baby), but there have been some real gems like The Apple, The Godmonster of Indian Flats, and R.O.T.O.R. They’ve done some new riffs of movies featured in beloved MST3K episodes like Space Mutiny and “Manos” The Hands of Fate too, and covered some relatively mainstream movies like Timecop and the live action Super Mario Bros. in VOD form.

Technology has improved since 2006 too, so they’re able to offer VOD riffs in HD and via an app available for Roku and FireTV, plus they have a separate app for audio riffs that can automatically sync with movies via audio fingerprinting. They’re niche, but there are other apps like TheaterEars that use the same technology for audio descriptions and other kinds of alternate audio tracks. Being so used to hearing recordings of people talking during movies eventually led me to habitually turn audio descriptions on when they’re available, but that’s a whole other topic I should write a whole other essay about.

Early RiffTrax weren’t totally without problems, and aside from their movie selections occasionally going awry (Eragon, Aeon Flux, and The Island of Doctor Moreau were all slogs with or without riffs), the biggest was that they were not above the homophobia and transphobia that were depressingly common in the 2000s, particularly in comedy. I’ll still put their riffs of the Matrix trilogy on now and then, but I could not in good conscience show the original versions to any of my trans friends without some very heavy caveats beforehand. The RiffTrax guys have since grown as people though, and both produced more acceptable jokes in newer riffs and cut some of the mean-spirited material from older ones. For the record, it’s possible to do jokes about trans people without being an asshole, but jokes grounded in actual experience will have both less pointless antagonism and more laughs. When Joe Rogan makes “jokes” about trans people, it feels like he’s barely met any and has a weird complex about them. When trans comedian Riley Silverman jokes about trans people, she’s drawing on her own life. Rogan makes me want to yell “What are you talking about?!” while Silverman makes me laugh while helping me better understand what it’s like to be a trans woman.

For a while, RiffTrax was promoting a program called “iRiffs” that let people upload their own movie riffs to sell. It was never a huge success, and while they didn’t take the iRiffs off the site, they did stop linking to them on the main page. There was some mediocrity, but flashes of brilliance too. Riffing troupes like Cinester Theater, Riff Raff Theater, and Blame Society did some hilarious riffs. A few of those troupes struck out on their own too, offering their wares independent of RiffTrax, most notably QuipTracks. They’ve mostly faded away, which I think is a shame. I love movie riffs as an artform, but I’d like to see people take on different approaches from the MST3K/RiffTrax lineage. Blame Society often had one of the riffers perform in character, with an impersonation of Nic Cage joining in their hilarious riff of Ghost Rider and Chad Vader (Darth’s loser brother from their comedy skits) joining for both A New Hope and The Running Man and making guest appearances in a few official Rifftrax releases). When RiffTrax was more willing to embrace iRiffs, they even had some of the top troupes do official RiffTrax Presents riffs, which are still available on the site.

The RiffTrax approach, which mostly involves joking about what’s happening on screen moment-to-moment, works well enough, but I’d really like to see riffs that serve to satirize the content of films. The Last Ringbearer (1999) is a Russian novel that retells the events of Lord of the Rings from the view that Tolkien’s novels were revisionist history, written by the winners. In the world of the new novel, Aragorn was a total bastard and a puppet of the elves, and and "orc" is a slur for another human ethnicity rather than humanoid monsters birthed from weird goo. Doing Lord of the Rings commentary tracks that comment on the movies as though they were similarly propaganda would be a massive undertaking, but the results could be phenomenal. Ultimately, the process of making a riff essentially just requires a lot of time and one or two friends who can be funny talking into microphones, but making it worthwhile financially or even just for reaching people is a whole other issue. I’m not much of a vocal performer, but I have a slight urge to try to make my own riff just to explore the possibilities.

What we get more often is improvised commentary tracks. These can be genuinely great, but they’re a surprisingly different artform. I’ve enjoyed commentaries from podcasts I like, such as when What a Time to Be Alive and ‘Til Death do Us Blart have done them, but Hello From the Magic Tavern’s in-character commentary for the original Star Wars is by far my favorite of those. Where the others were from standup comedians and podcasters, the HFTMT cast are improvisers playing characters they’ve portrayed in an absurd number of episodes, letting them fluidly throw out all sorts of gags from fantasy characters colliding with an iconic piece of Earth culture. There’s also the case of Robert Downey Jr. doing the commentary track for Tropic Thunder in-character, owing to a throw-away line in the movie. Making the riffers into specific characters who interact with the film in a unique way is another way that riffs can chart new territory.