Rifftrax, the cast of MST3K and the Night of the Living Dead

     Tonight was the live event, Rifftrax and the Night of the Living Dead. I was pretty excited for this event, being a huge Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (coined MST3K) fan since childhood. Laughing at someone else's best attempts was a frequent feature at home.

     A little background on MST3K, for those of you who don’t know and are too lazy to go over to wikipedia;

     MST3K was started in Minneapolis in 1988, where it grew into a cult following before it was moved to Comedy Central. The show ran for six seasons and had two Emmy nominations before being cancelled in 1999. The MST3K premise features a man by name of Joel, later replaced by writer Mike Nelson rather inexplicably after Joel decided he didn't want to be famous/was losing some creative control. Joel, later Mike has been launched into space and forced to watch B movies with his two robot companions, Crow and Tom Servo. Yea, the plot line doesn't make much sense, but it's not the true focus.  During the entirety of the movie the cast picks apart, unmercifully I might add truly terrible movies. Some directors found it amusing to see their films highlighted on the show while others most certainly did not. The latter has been the major reason why DVD’s of past episodes are unable to be purchased as the creators would be sued over and over again by the original studios.

     In the years since the crew has embarked on numerous collaborative projects.  In 2006 they had figured out a way around the lawsuit issue. Rather than release the commentaries of the cast with the films they started to release the commentaries separately via MP3’s that could be then played with films (you’d have to provide the actual movie yourself of course)and thus Rifftrax was born. This by-way opened up the film repertoire. Past guest “riffers” have included Weird Al and Neil Patrick Harris. Check out their site commentary dialogue catalog here.  

     *A hilarious note: They recently had running a kickstarter campaign to raise funds to buy the rights to Twilight for a live event, unfortunately they fell short and instead purchased Starship Troopers (event was held in August).

     We had purchased tickets for the live stream at 7:00pm at the Icon Showplace in the West End. The crowd, was as nerdy as you'd expect but it was fun to be in a room for a people who thoroughly enjoyed the show even though you had to overhear them discuss comic books and space travel prior to said event. My only major annoyance was that loads kept getting up during the event to travel to the bathroom and a few were chatty. The unusual experience where regular, open laughter was punctuated by the voice actors talking out-loud over the film itself apparently broke the usual theatre decorum, where one would normally shut up and sit still enough that some felt the liberty to do as they pleased (super annoying).

      I had no expectations for how the live stream would work out. I had concern I wouldn't be able to actually see the actors but I was pleasantly surprised that when the feed began that they showed the amphitheater from which it was streaming in it's entirety before starting off on short film, "Norman Gives a Speech." The short film is apparently a series they're planning to do and while amusing, I was ready for the main event.

     *Apologies for the terrible photo quality, took some quick pictures during the short film only as the lights were still on*

        The feed would alternate between the actual film and later movie with just commentary  to a split screen which had each of the three voice actors in spotlight. It was great to transition back and forth. I really appreciated that we got both angles and the transition between just the movie and the split screen was very seamless.

       The Night of the Living Dead was the first movie that featured zombies, it set up the whole zombie lore foundation despite not actually ever referring to the creatures as "zombies" but rather as the dead or "ghouls". Released in 1968, the black and white horror story was actually heavily influenced on the novel, I am Legend, sound familiar? However the original creatures in the novel were actually vampires, something the director George Romero wasn't a fan of, he wanted to change it up, make it his own. What he ended up with was a cornball story about dead people rising again and eating people. However the film itself, while badly written and horrendously acted was revolutionary for it's day for not only the sheer amount of violence and gore but because there were no heroes. Spoiler alert: Everyone dies!

     It was an easy target for the MST3K crew and more than a few times I caught myself continuing to laugh long after a joke had been told. The jibs and jabs were not only well written but well timed and delivered so it almost seemed spontaneous, even though you knew it wasn't. It was a perfect event for Halloween and even Todd enjoyed it a lot and he hadn't even watched MST3K that much. I'm looking forward to the next one.



          Kevin Murphy, aka Crow- good night folks!

Rifftrax is hosting another live stream event on December 5th for the movie "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians."