Alongside The Simpsons and Monty Python, the movie-mocking puppet show Mystery Science Theater 3000 helped shape my adolecent sense of humor. But now that show has long been shuffled off of the TV airwaves, several replacements and hyrbids have popped up. Here is what I think of a few of them.
Cinematic Titanic: More than a decade after Joel Hodgson left MST3k, he and four other Best Brains alum do a pretty good update on the formula. The five cast members, Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu (Crow/Dr. Forrester, Season 1-7), Josh Weinstien (Servo, Season 1), Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forrester, Season 7-10) and Frank Conniff (TV's Frank, Season 2-7), play versions of themselves, watching bad movies as a part of some vague government experiment.
I'd say it's the exact same thing as MST3k, but it's actually more refined than that. Sure there's breaks in the film for some black sihouette skits in the theater, but they never lose focus on what people really want - movie riffing and simply sight gags. And they're both actually good on a consistent basis. The same can't be said for...
RiffTrax: Mike Nelson, (who I thought was a better host on MST3k but apparently I'm in the minority of that opinion) started the post-show riffing first with this website with Kevin Murphy (Servo, Season 2-10) and Bill Corbett (Crow, Season 8-10). But instead of taking down bad monster movies that nobody has ever heard of, they much fun of bad current movies, like Battlefield Earth, The Happening and Road House in downloadable MP3s which are supposed to be played along with the movie.
It's a novel concept and good way of getting around the pesky liscencing issues that comes with doing doing MST3k style videos. But without the characters to hide behind, the humor comes off a bit like your wacky dad. Nothing against your dad, but there's only so much of that I can take during a movie.
One very subtle, often missed aspect that makes the MST3k formula work is that the riffer is supposed to be forced to watch the movie - otherwise it's just some guy talking for the sake of talking, and that's just not as compelling to watch or listen to. Furthermore, Rifftrax also occaisionally mocks GOOD movies like the first Star Wars and The Dark Knight. And that just completely forgoes the whole motivation to riff a movie in the first place.
Still, I do like what Nelson has done to encourage a community of fans and riffers, hosting fan-made commentaries and even providing handy tips. Apparently, writing a script before hand is a lot funnier than winging like what a lot of the next category does.
And everyone else: Take any funny concept and you'll find about 20 or so people on YouTube trying to imitate it. The same goes for MST3k and the vast majority of them suffer from lacking personalities, lame jokes and, like RiffTrax, the feeling that they're just riffing for riffs sake.
However, there is a new weekly series on the video game website, Escapist Magazine called Unskippable, wherein two dudes riff on opening cutscenes from video games. It's still a young series, so it at times feels like just another amateur stab found on YouTube. But there's no denying how much the slight change in formula helps. With video game cut scenes being just as overacted and ridiculous as the B-movies on MST3k, they're practically begging to be ripped apart via commentary. So far, the best one has been for the zombie game "Dead Rising," in which a jocked-out freelance journalist is helicoptered into a quarantined city. ("Sim City of the Dead!")
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