"StarTrek VI RiffTrax"

posted by Tygrrius @ 12:04 AM

I must admit I had two slight reservations about the rifftrax for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

I wasn't worried about Mike Nelson & company making fun of one of my favorite movies. Though I love (most of) them, even I must admit that all of the movies we cover here on The Film Frontier are ripe for riffing. Maybe that's part of their appeal.

The great thing about rifftrax on a movie you love is that you can enjoy the movie even when the zingers occasionally aren't top-notch.

My first reservation, though, was Bill Corbett, who joins Kevin Murphy and Mike on this rifftrax. Bill took over for Trace Beaulieu as Crow when MST3k moved to the Sci Fi Channel way back when.

There's only one Crow. For me, the show was just never the same after that.

Though similar in some ways, RiffTrax is also quite different from MST3k. Mike and Kevin are funny here, but I already expected that from listening to them on the Star Wars: Episode I rifftrax.

I'm pleased to say that Bill was funny, too. Why the difference? Because he's Bill here, not Crow. Having three on the commentary seems to work better, too. Joel Hodgson was on to something, all those years ago. From the trio, the jokes just keep rolling.

Not long ago, I mentioned how Things We Thought We'd Never See tend to come about eventually. Another item that should've been on that list was MST3k-style riffs of Star Trek. Thanks to RiffTrax, we finally have that one, too.

Star Trek VI is actually the second Trek film to get the rifftrax treatment. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was one of the first rifftrax released, back in August. At the time, I was still on dialup so my Internet connection was so slow that had I started downloading it back then it wouldn't have been finished until, well, right about now.

One of the best riffs comes early on in the movie. Sulu mentions that the Excelsior has been cataloging gaseous anomalies in the Beta quadrant.

"Turns out all the gaseous anomalies came from Scotty."

As I'd always suspected.

Not much time to laugh, though, because it's soon followed up with another soon-to-be classic, "Starfleet instantly regrets their whole 'Let's make Sulu a captain' idea."

My other reservation was that I was half-expecting a couple hours of non-stop Shatner bashing. Let's face it, he's an easy target. I was glad to find out that there are plenty of jokes to go around for the whole cast, though. These guys are the riffing pros, after all.

As far as I'm concerned, Paramount should make these commentaries available on the actual Star Trek movie DVDs. And why not? They're fun and add a new layer to the film. Won't happen, but at least we have the RiffTrax option.

Incidentally, this rifftrax is for the two-disc "Special Collector's Edition" of Star Trek VI, which is a slightly different edit than the one-disc version (which, itself, was a different edit than the theatrical version . . . gotta love Paramount).

I have finally downloaded that Star Trek V rifftrax, and I'm actually looking forward to that one even more than this one. If ever a movie begged for the rifftrax treatment, it's Star Trek V.

As for Star Trek VI, this rifftrax is definitely worth checking out, too. If you frequent this site, the odds are you already own this movie. So download the rifftrax and enjoy it like never before.

(Overall Experience: 8 out of 10)

View The Film Frontier's Star Trek VI section.

Link: Mike Nelson's RiffTrax

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"Star Wars Ep 1 RiffTrax"

posted by Tygrrius @ 12:42 AM

Jar Jar under attack by Mystery Science Theater 3000 alumni Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy? Surely, the Gungan doesn't stand a chance.

Having only recently acquired enough Internet power to actually download anything over 1 MB in less than six hours, Episode I is my first rifftrax experience.

I started watching MST3k during the Comedy Central days, at about the time Mike took over the hosting duties from Joel. As such, I generally prefer Mike's episodes though I am somewhat of an oddity in that I enjoy both hosts. I loved the show.

And then Trace left.

Around the same time, MST3k was retooled for the Sci Fi channel. And it just wasn't the same. JS hung in there and kept watching episodes, but I couldn't do it. I left MST3k behind.

Though obviously curious, I wasn’t sure what to expect from rifftrax. Could Mike and Kevin be funny without Trace?

Absolutely!

Though they seemed a bit lost at times on how best to handle Jar Jar (maybe the joke potential was just too high), it definitely felt like the good old days.

In fact, in some ways--without the restrictions of the series’ framework or network interference--it was better than the old days.

Yeah, they go after Jar Jar but one of my favorite running jokes was the soft clucking whenever the Queen’s handmaidens appeared on screen wearing decidedly chicken-esque costumes.

When Darth Maul is introduced, he is noted as “Insane clown Sith.”

Pop-culture references are an important part of riffing, and the nature of rifftrax allows them to be timelier than they ever could on a taped TV series.

Even DisembAudio gets into the act, warning Mike and Kevin about an upcoming dialogue-driven scene about politics.

Since I am not hip enough to have an iPod and didn't feel like moving equipment around, I chose an easy path and simply played the rifftrax MP3 file through Windows Media Player while watching the Star Wars DVD with PowerDVD on the same PC.

Since both players use the same volume control, I wasn't able to tweak the audio levels as I would've liked. Fortunately, rifftrax was the louder of the two. Sadly, I know most of the Star Wars dialogue anyway, so it wasn't much of a problem that the movie dialogue was a bit lower than I would’ve preferred.

Though my audio would slowly get out of synch, DisembAudio cued me in each time and it was extremely easy to fix. In fact, the natural flow of riffs makes it obvious when the timing begins to get off and makes it easy to fix it yourself even with the help of DisembAudio.

If you’ve been undecided about purchasing rifftrax, stop hesitating and do it. This was definitely the most fun I've had watching Episode I in a long while!

(Overall Experience: 9 out of 10)

Link: Mike Nelson's RiffTrax

Related Film Frontier Articles
Mike Nelson riffs Star Wars: Episode I
RiffTrax adds new titles, including X-Men
REVIEW: RiffTrax--Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Michael J. Nelson takes on Star Trek V

“RiffTrax- Star Trek V: The Final Frontier”

posted by JediSheltie @ 7:50 PM

It's incumbent on me, to meet the highest journalistic standards to which this site aspires, to fully disclose any bias I have in writing this review. Said biases are as follows:

Michael J. Nelson is God.

Mystery Science Theater 3000, WITH TRACE, is the finest comedic endeavor ever undertaken by any sentient beings in the entire Universe.

Okay, now that we've gotten that out of the way, I can continue with this highly dispassionate, impartial review of the Star Trek V Rifftrax.

The Prelims

Well, I'm told by my editors that some you reading this might have no idea who Mike Nelson is, or for that matter, what Mystery Science Theater 3000 was. I'll repress my rage at that ignorance long enough to say that you should just use the Wikipedia god gave you to find out what it was. For those even too lazy to type it in, I'll provide the link: The Link.

The RiffTrax

Picking up RiffTrax is easy, when you allow all the scripts required to do so through your FireFox “NoScript” plugin, otherwise you might, like myself, encounter a white screen with no information on it right before you theoretically add something to your cart. Really, I'm trying not to sound too mentally impaired here, it was an honest mistake that cost me some time and further hair loss. The cart works through PayPal, and includes a straight credit card order option if you don't have a PayPal account, like us cool people do.

It's a short hop to the roughly 30MB download which includes an MP3 and text file instructions. You might be thinking this sounds fairly... rudimentary. And it is. As instructed by the text file and the opening of the MP3 file, your steady finger on the play/pause button is required in order to get a good sync going. Basically, you'll need to have your TV/DVD setup somewhere in the vicinity of something that can play an MP3 file. In my case (pathetically perhaps), my formerly awesome 3 year old home-built gaming computer is naught but 5 feet away, so I played the MP3 there with the speakers pointed at me. If you have an MP3 player, etc., you can use them as well, or even burn it to a CD, like all you young whippersnappers do these days.

Included on the RiffTrax, roughly every 10-15 minutes or so, is the helpful synthesized voice of “Disembaudio”, who will speak a line of dialog straight from the film. If Disembaudio and the DVD line sync up, your RiffTrax is on target. Judging from the RiffTrax forums, some folks have trouble with “drift” in later parts of films, possibly due to very tiny lags when some DVD players change chapters. Imperceptible, mostly, but over time they can build up and throw off the audio a bit. The solution is equally as rudimentary- simply pause either the DVD or the Rifftrax, depending on the nature of the miss-sync, for a second or so, to get things back in harmony. I didn't experience this issue myself.

Star Trek V- The Final Frontier

Um, do we need to do this? You know the score right? Harve Benett was ritually sacrificed over this movie, if I recall correctly. Just in case: Spock's emotionally overwrought half brother kidnaps some wholly uninteresting people in order to lure a starship to the Planet of Intergalactic Peace in order to steal said starship, which naturally turns out to the Enterprise, and take it beyond the Great Barrier, which, between the Original Series and this point, magically inverted itself from being on the outside of the galaxy to the inside. He does this in order to find "God."

Kirk and company tag along, and after some really "emotional scenes", such as implied nudity on the part of a 57 year old woman, they end up face to face with "God." Kirk astutely points out this can't really be God because, 1. he needs a starship, and 2, he doesn't look like Mike Nelson. There's some kind of electrical disturbance and it turns out Klingon disruptors can destroy spectral beings.

The End.

Star Trek V- The Rifftrax Experience

Ah, bittersweet, is really the only good way to put it. While enjoying the antics of Mike and special guest riffer, Tom Serv-, er, Kevin Murphy, one couldn't help but be brought back to those good old days. Granted, if you never experienced them, this won't be an issue for you. In terms of films the MST3k fan base desperately wanted to get “the treatment,” The Final Frontier was always at or near the top of the list. Well, it's finally happened, just not in the way a lot of us expected.

But it has happened.

It's all here- the jokes about Shatner's greed, ego, and directing prowess, fake Klingon sayings, the slightly resigned, calm “ugh” when the first few frames of the “fan dance” appear on screen. That's pretty much the same “ugh” anyone utters when that happens, in fact, but they make it funny, dammit. Honestly, if Comedy Central had any sense, or even a long term memory, they would have gotten Mike to do the Shatner Roast.

The jokes keep coming, stopping only to let that next bit of riffable dialog through. Anyone familiar with the MST3k “formula” knows the score, if you're not, you should try to keep the laughs under some control, as you'll end up missing the next joke if you're too busy yuking it up from the last one. MST3k fans shouldn't expect any of the “classic bits”. Everything here, though representative of the style, is fresh. Kevin doesn't lapse into any “Servo” routines. Depending on your point of view, that might be a good or bad thing.

I've focused a bit tightly on the point of view of an old MST3k fan. Uh, I am one, that's why. Don't let your complete unfamiliarity with MST3k deter you from trying this out. You'll find it funny without knowing a lot of “back story.”

Removed from the pretext of the show, Mike and Kevin's smooth banter sounds a lot like the same casual exchange of riffing any fans have when doing their own group viewings of awful movies. Though perhaps a lot more consistently funny. Mike isn't “Mike Nelson- stranded astronaut/guinea pig” and Kevin isn't a small hovering robot named “Tom Servo”. They're two guys making fun of a bad movie. Even if you haven't ever watched MST3k, a lot of you know that feeling of camaraderie from a shared “bad movie experience.”

I've been there myself with the guy who runs this place, exchanging acerbic one-liners while enduring bad b-horror and sci-fi. You don't have to be a crazed devotee of a dead television show to like RiffTrax.

I mean MST3k, by the way.

Any problems I have with Rifftrax are just the ancient, misguided ramblings of guy who desperately wants a long-dead TV show back on the air. This is (partly at least) a Star Trek fan site, so many of you should be familiar with that point of view. I want Mike, Kevin, and Trace to pick up their little cow-town puppet show and come back to me. It just not going to happen.

For now, Rifftrax will fill the void nicely.

Related Film Frontier links

Michael J. Nelson takes on Star Trek V

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier section