Season 3 2007 - 2024

TV-14

(1963) 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.

(1949) 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!

(1959) 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!

(1951) 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

(1969) 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 Coffeehouse Rendezvous makes a strong case that what these kids need is a coffeehouse rendezvous.

Mike, Kevin and Bill remain unconvinced.

(1974) 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.

(1947) 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.

(1976) 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.

And there's clowns!

The affable John is our tour guide through this carnival mirror nightmare, and at the end, as we babble on cold and terrified like Nietsche's madman ("Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker?") we're just glad that Mike, Kevin and Bill were there to mop up the despair!

(1963) 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!

Mike, Bill and Kevin are there with you, shivering in terror in the dark.

(1979) 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!

If you like your safety shorts served with a heavy dose of groovy, then this is for you! Down and Out lays out a litany of dangers inherent in your every move from one location to the other, no matter how small. Bone-shattering death awaits around every corner. Every surface, every object, every molecule conspires with all others on earth to kill you dead! See your own tragic fate played out again and again, all backed up by a smooth drum-based soundtrack. You WILL die in an accident, but Down and Out will make the few moments until you do all the more pleasant. Mike, Kevin and Bill share the pain.

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.

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 sons bicycle: They weren't his fault! It must be the neighbors!

Take a journey of neighborly blame with three of the finger-pointingist, buck-passingist neighbors you know—Mike, Kevin and Bill!

“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 & 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 & 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.

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!

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.)

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 it is hilarious. Mike, Kevin and Bill seize Their Chance to Riff!

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 jump from the last guy to leave the building, usually the creepy guy from IT who breathes really loudly in the elevator.

After watching this short, Mike, Kevin and Bill are no closer to Understanding Their Ideals. They do, however, Understand Your Ideals, and frankly, are very disappointed with how you've turned out.

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 We Like It puts these horrible little busybodies in their place using sound reasoning, gentle persuasion and a few tall frosty ones. Mike, Kevin and Bill belly up and tap into As We Like It.

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 advantage of the zero percent financing on the hedge trimmer I want to buy?"

Carnivorous Plants! 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 neighbors 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.

Yes, Carnivorous Plants are a big let down. Which is why it's a good thing that the short Carnivorous Plants deals mainly with stock footage of transportation and discussions about mousetraps. We believe the plants do not make an appearance until the short has actually ended. The whole thing is tied together by a narrator who babbles his way towards an irrefutable conclusion: Carnivorous Plants are way cooler in the movies.

Mike, Kevin and Bill declare this their finest Carnivorous Plant-related riffing not containing a character named Seymour Krelborn.

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, birthdays and everybody pretending that you're taking grandpa to the Baseball Hall of Fame when you're really dropping him off at a home.

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, Kevin and Bill kept their fingers crossed throughout this entire short hoping for a Mr. Bungle cameo.

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 braising and blanching, and as a result their Hungry Man frozen dinners have never tasted better.

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.

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 like a pretty sweet time.

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 Mike, Kevin and Bill go Back to School with Joan Miller.

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, Freedom of Speech. It's a delightful romp where a pale Nazi goon rants outside of a synagogue and gets his ass handed to him by an enraged mob. So all things considered, it is far less creepy and disturbing than the episode of Schoolhouse Rock would have been.

Mike, Kevin and Bill exercised their freedom of speech by getting tattoos of the "Conjunction Junction" conductor. They're not telling where.

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 jingles we've ever heard.

Mike, Kevin and Bill have never shaken hands with Danger, but they did give Danger that "fist bump then explosion" thing, and then Danger called them all "Bro-seph."

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.

Yes, despite sounding like a sleazy Nevada law firm, or perhaps items from a LARPer's daily checklist, Wing, Claw and Fang is actually a cavalcade of Hollywood's animal stars. Jimmy leads the way, with his hilarious signature bit of stealing freshly laid eggs and devouring them in front of the distraught hens. But there's also a heapin' helpin' of tricks form Pete the Penguin, who wows as he "Goes Down the Stairs" and Jesse the Lion, who "Appears to Maul his Trainer Quite Severely." Yes, Wing, Claw and Fang proves once again that there's no better way to entertain humans than humiliating animals for our amusement.

Mike, Kevin and Bill gave up on stealing their eggs straight from the hen house after Farmer Dan installed a particularly effective scarecrow.

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 for pointing out that their seats did not properly recline during the recording of this short.

Where should one turn when looking for beauty advice? To the fashion magazines that litter our grocery store checkout aisles, with their fresh-faced starlets with perky bods and millions of dollars? Hardly! Instead, refer to the comforting, matronly advice of Constance Bennett, an actress you've never heard of from the 1930s.

Yes, despite being dead for well over half a century, Constance Bennett's Daily Beauty Rituals remain as relevant as ever, for girls of any age. Husbands, boyfriends and homecoming dates everywhere will issue a contented sigh as they see you descend a staircase, having followed Constance Bennett's advice and applied a coat of makeup thick enough to bury a small cat in. Then they will hastily remember that they left something on the driver’s seat of their car and excuse themselves.

Completing the "Rituals Trilogy" that also includes Constance Bennett's Daily Voodoo Rituals, and Constance Bennett's 45 Minute Long Hand-Washing Ritual, Constance Bennett's Daily Beauty Rituals will leave you wondering how you were ever beautiful without it!

Someone has to be on trial. It may as well be teenagers. And they deserve it, too, what with their shenanigans, the hell-raking, their common thuggery, rough manners and unkempt flat-top haircuts. I don't think it would be overstating things to say that teenagers are the largest threat facing this great nation, causing more destruction than the boll weevil and potato weevils combined! Teenagers on Trial does not shrink from showing us the hard truth, which is that your average teenager would knock you off your bike and take it just as soon as look at you. (That is, if he wasn't currently at his Model United Nations meeting.) Thankfully they get what's coming to them, and that's a darn good trial!

Kevin, Mike, and Bill, two of them former teenagers, give the teenagers a stern, but sympathetic hearing-out in the thrilling new short Teenagers on Trial!

If there's one thing that a small niche of people like, it's car racing! It's all there: the drama, the passion, the guy who for some reason shouts "Boogity Boogity Boogity." But we understand that for some people, sitting for hours and watching cars do five hundred laps around a track can be a bit too much excitement to handle. For them, Cork – Crashes & Curiosities provides a thrilling glimpse into a time in racing when the stakes were much lower, and cars were not capable of going nearly as fast.

And when you think of the great hotbeds of car racing, such as the American South and Further Down In the American South, no doubt third on your list would be Ireland. Yes, the land where they grow Lucky Charms cereal is the setting for this short, and a babbling Irishman provides a narrative that at times can actually be considered moderately coherent.

May the road rise to meet you as you take a manic jaunt in your jalopy through Cork – Crashes & Curiosities!

In 2009, if you ask someone What It Means To Be An American you'll get a simple response: a willingness to deep-fry anything and everything. But back in the fifties, before anyone had invented deep-fried cigarettes, it wasn't as clearly defined. School children, construction workers, zoo keepers, cosmonauts-in-training, gaffers, carnies, unemployed janitors, First Lady Eisenhower, TV Clowns, drifters, tight ends, falconry enthusiasts; none of them had any idea What It Means To Be An American.

Nowhere was this more clear than with the producers of the short, What It Means To Be An American. Clearly the recipients of a Brewster's Millions-esque financial windfall that they were forced to spend within a certain amount of time or else lose it, they created the most incoherent and rambling testament to American-ness since the inaugural address where Grover Cleveland asserted that leprechauns were controlling the world's supply of tea.

Falconry enthusiasts Mike, Kevin and Bill team up to riff Part One of What It Means To Be An American, despite its appalling lack of falcons.

This extraordinary film dares to do something no other safety short has ever dreamed of: killing its 9-year-old title character and sending him to hell; a hell run by two doughy, charisma-free demons wearing sensible jackets. Yes, Tommy Tucker, our protagonist, is a whiny, friendless little twerp who devotes himself to the petty hectoring of his fellow citizen. His dream of transforming his local institutions into an all powerful nanny state is cut short, however, when one fed-up individual decides to polish his bumper on Tommy's midsection. And so Tommy goes to hell (which would have been a fine and fitting end to the matter, but alas, it's not to be), and instead of reacting with horror and regret at his eternal separation from God, Tommy sizes the place up and finds it not half bad, but all things considered, he'd rather be home bothering folks.

Kevin, Bill and Mike try their best to find a reason, just one reason, that Tommy shouldn't, in fact, spend a nice long eternity in hell.

Several of us were left frustrated when What It Means to Be An American: Part 1 ended without answering the titular question. In fact, many of you noticed that it did not in fact appear to address the question, or even show the faintest hint that it was aware that it would later be titled What It Means to Be An American. But lest you grow so disgusted with the WIMTBAA series that you decide not to show up to find out how the saga ends (See: The Matrix Reloaded), rest assured that What It Means to Be An American: Part 2 provides adequate* closure** to the series, answering*** all of your questions.****

Mike, Kevin and Bill stand at attention to riff Part 2 of What It Means to Be An American, truly the Godfather***** 2****** of Shorts Sequels.

When last we left Tommy Tucker he had died and was just beginning an eternal stint on Safety Island, a particularly dull outpost in the vast Hell empire. The demon in charge of enslaving his soul (a big-chinned guy, as most evil people are) had been extolling the virtues of the dead Tommy Tucker, while Tommy himself was making noises that, all things considered, he’d rather be home pestering his fellow students and occasionally snacking from the paste jar.

Women in Blue tells the tale of one of baseball's most storied franchises, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Actually, that's not true. We just have an Oakland A's fan on our staff who remains incredibly bitter about the 1988 World Series. In retrospect, it was a poor decision to let him write this description's opening sentence.

No, Women in Blue does not tell the tale of Kirk Gibson, Orel Hershiser and the rest of the Dodgers squad that shocked the nation and cost our mailroom guy thousands of dollars in "sure thing" bets. It is instead a peek behind the scenes at the "WAVES", an all female division of the Navy during World War II. Take a look around the exciting life of a WAVE which involves marching, calisthenics... trips to the dining hall... bed making... zzzzzz. Wait! They also shoot guns! And not just pistols, we're talking GUN guns. Guns that make the Guns of the Navarone look like super-soakers! Then several more hours of classroom studies, but, hey! Guns!

Mike, Kevin and Bill attempted to dress as women and enlist in the WAVES but were denied admittance for violating rule 106-F, "No 80s comedy movie clichés shall be allowed."

Contrary to what many of you are thinking, A Circus Wakes Up is NOT a wrenching adaptation of a short story by Philip Roth that recounts the heartbreaking tale of Bernard Circus, a Classics professor at Columbia, who is forced to confront his shattered marriage, his failure as a father, and a decidedly lackluster academic career. No, it is in fact a rather bizarre little behind-the-scenes short that very quickly confirms what we’ve always suspected: the dizzying revulsion we all feel when confronted by a circus is entirely—ENTIRELY—justified. The inhuman stunts, the macabre animal acts are, in fact, performed by exactly the type of twisted outcasts you cross the street to avoid (of course your choice gets tough when that guy from Radio Shack is on the other side…) And if you think you can get through this without being very, very disturbed by a clown, then you need to seriously reset your expectations vis-à-vis being very, very disturbed by a clown.

Mike, Kevin and Bill don their shiniest top hats, their most resplendent red cutaway jackets, and their tightest bun-hugging jodhpurs and say, “Oh, we’re riffing A Circus Wakes Up today? What an amazing coincidence.”

American Thrift is a touching tribute to the “Woman American”, brought to you by Chevrolet. Just who is the Woman American you ask? Why, she is the one that those who sell and manufacture what is sold know is the one who decides what we come to buy of what is sold and manufactured. From budgeting the purchase of puppy dogs, packs of pens, and canned eel at the local Food Giant, to planning trips to Nassau, the Woman American is the solid rock on which the home is built.

Unfortunately, one power the Woman American does not seem to have is the ability to prevent the Man American from driving around endlessly until he runs out of gas looking for parking meters with time still on them. In fairness, she did try, but he clobbered her with a tirade of saliva-spewing expletives that the laws of decorum do not allow us to reproduce here. Of course, that was in the Martin Scorsese director’s cut which is unavailable for riffing. We assure you this version is safe viewing for the entire family—except maybe for a disturbing scene in which a room-full of young Ron Howards get naked and exchange their pants.

Mike, Kevin and Bill are joined by the definitive example of the Woman American herself — Veronica Belmont — co-host of Revision3’s tech-centric show Tekzilla, and Qore on the PlayStation Network.

Fortunately, Call It Free brings all your grease monkey fantasies to life. A Dizzy Dame, whose husband affectionately nicknames her Hank (due to her resemblance to the legendary country musician, Waylon Jennings), has car trouble. How will the local gas station manager treat her? With respect and helpful advice? Or will he nickel and dime her for repairs she doesn't need on parts her car doesn't even have? If you have to ask these questions, it's quite obvious that you are a visitor from a foreign planet. You might have luck finding employment at a nearby gas station.

George Bailey running down the streets of Bedford Falls. Linus explaining to a hushed audience what Christmas is really about. A desperate Arnold suiting up as Turbo Man for the Christmas parade. In no specific order, these were our top Christmas movie moments. But we think that after watching Christmas Rhapsody, you will agree with us that the scene where the The Forester's family sings an off-key version of "Silent Night" to their Christmas Tree has to belong in our top three. So goodbye George Bailey! Happy new year to you—in jail!!! Or just not on our list, whatever.

Yes, Christmas Rhapsody, the latest entry in the Rhapsody series, comes fresh on the heels of Thanksgiving Rhapsody and Cyber Monday Rhapsody. And though Webster's defines Rhapsody as "A highly emotional utterance or literary work", most of us know that the true meaning of Rhapsody is a depressed sentient Christmas tree, bemoaning its own "No Account" status in the world. If Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree and Eeyore the Donkey had a baby whom they denied the prozac it so desperately needed, it would still be more fun to talk to than the tree in Christmas Rhapsody.

Yes, we just created a donkey/tree hybrid baby who is evidently able to talk and has been prescribed Prozac by a medical professional. We need help. You, on the other hand, just need a dose of Christmas Rhapsody!

Santa Claus, famous fat Saint, is best known for his advances in forced deer flight and his work as a firm-but-fair elf foreman. But the man is even more gifted than his great big sack (cough), as we learn in the supernatural thriller Christmas Dream! Call him Professor X-mas, as his telepathic powers will awe and terrify you. (Did you call him Professor X-mas yet? No? Fine, whatever.)

One Christmas Eve, a foolhardy young girl discards a toy she is no longer interested in upon seeing her new, less-horrible toys. Never mind that the forgotten toy was little more than a hot dog with hair, this is a transgression that the patron saint of creepiness cannot forgive! While the girl slumbers peacefully, like the total selfish jerk that she is, St. Nick enters her dreams to give the monstrous doll life. It proceeds to torment her with its special brand of high-pitched Christmas horror. Will she learn her lesson and accept that change is always bad, or crack under the pressure and find herself in an asylum for children, gnawing on her own hair? Either way, this doll is gonna break a lot of her stuff!

Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they dance the mad carnival dance our dark lord Santa demands in Christmas Dream!

The story of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer has been told and retold countless times, in film, TV and song. All of those other versions are better than this one. Even the cold war-era East German version "Rudolf van der Schlittenfahrt", which features far more marching and distant machine gun fire than a Christmas special ever should.

The short begins with the bold step of having a song which relates the entire story of Rudolph to the audience, rendering itself redundant. It then takes the even bolder step of completely disregarding the well-established Rudolph canon to tell its own twisted version of the tale. A version that involves ice skating reindeer and provocatively-dressed reindeer moms. A version where Santa and the reindeer deliver presents to other reindeer and rabbits. Where are the human children? What kind of vengeful god created this world? Why is Rudolph's luminous nose referred to as being "twice as bright as a beet" multiple times? Why? WHY!?

These questions are best pondered over a warm mug of eggnog, with the assistance of Mike, Kevin and Bill. (Please refrain from adding your own "Like George Washington!" at any point in time during the short.)

It’s the sunniest Night Before Christmas yet. Not a creature is stirring, not even the stuffed, mummified mouse that’s lovingly stapled to the floor. Sugarplums dance in the heads of children, causing the children to wonder, what’s a sugarplum, and why would it dance so suggestively? At the heart of it all is a man with one simple goal—a long winter’s nap, uninterrupted by any sort of clatter. Boy is he in for a surprise!

Hold on to your stocking cap (or, as we know them today, sleeping hat) and prepare for a holiday home invasion the likes of which you’ve never seen. Unwantable toys will be given, boys will wear dresses, and the reindeer will test all limits of tiny-ness! It’s a story as fresh and timeless as that 4th of July egg salad you’ve been meaning to take out of the trunk. So check out The Night Before Christmas now, before Disney adapts this half-page poem into a 4-hour epic next year.

Have you ever been on the Disneyland ride, "It's a Small World After All"? Wait, where are you going! Come back! This short isn't about that ride. It contains no references to that ride. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have brought it up so abruptly. Here, breathe into this paper bag. Stop muttering to yourself, it'll be alright.

But seriously, the song from "It's a Small World After All" is going through your head now, isn't it? Well Three Magic Words features a song that is twice as catchy! What keeps it from making you want to rip the Hammer, Anvil and/or Stirrup out of your ears using needlenose pliers? It's about Pork!

Yes, Pork, the delicious substance we've been known to indulge in every now and then here at RiffTrax. And since we buy it using the titular Three Magic Words, we'll always know we've got the best pork. What are the Three Magic Words? Quality, freshness and flavor! How do we remember these? Because they are repeated approximately 837 times during this ten minute short!

Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as they are serenaded about the joys of quality, fresh, flavorful pork. Over...and over...and over again.

Aquatic Champions. For years their achievements went largely unnoticed, mainly due to the fact that everyone can quickly come up with a list of dozens of things they would rather do than watch someone swim competitively. Five just sprang to your mind while reading this sentence alone. But in 1948, on a warm summer day in Beverly Hills, the world stood up and took notice for the first annual Parade of Aquatic Champions. The world then quickly realized why they had never thrown one before or ever would again.

Abandoning many of the traditional parade conceits on the grounds that in water, floats tend to sink quickly and cause mass death, the Parade of Aquatic Champions instead focused mainly on introductions. One by one, the breathless narrator introduced the chlorine-bleached heroes, whose names spring readily to mind even over sixty years later: Norman Spear Jr. Stubby Kruger. Anita Lowez. To call them mere cultural icons would be to spit in their faces. Instead, the participants in the Parade of Aquatic Champions transcend greatness itself. Especially when they're demonstrating something called the "Trudgeon Stroke".

Take a belly flop with Mike, Kevin and Bill into the sea of tedium, bacteria and greatness that is the Parade of Aquatic Champions.

For the past four months, there has been a gaping hole in Thrift-related RiffTrax content. After the release of American Thrift Part I, Thrift lovers everywhere were high and dry, left to wonder, much like Lost fans, whether or not the show's creators had an ending in mind the whole time, or whether they were making it up as they went along, a panicked narrator struggling to piece together the seemingly random footage whizzing by in front of him, first a woman trying on shoes, then a parade of red-headed children and now...a lighthouse?! Seriously, a lighthouse? You just spring a lighthouse that can see into the past out of nowhere?! There's only like a dozen episodes left, you had better make some progress towards a resolution quickly or els...

Sorry about that! The previous copy writer has been assigned to full time duty on the 4815162342.com forum. Meanwhile, we're happy to report that American Thrift Part II easily joins Three Ninjas Kick Back and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses II on the short list of the greatest sequels of all time. Everything you loved about the first one is back. Yep, that's back! That too! I know, it's great, isn't it?!

OK, we admit it. We have no idea what American Thrift is actually about, and we doubt anyone involved with its production did as well. But it's the special kind of enthusiastic incoherence that makes it a joyous short to riff. And as far as "Tributes to the Woman American" go, it sure as hell beats "My Humps" and "Cougartown."

Mike, Kevin and Bill did their part and drastically reduced their lottery ticket spending, just to be able to bring you part II of American Thrift.

There are some conversational topics that most men will avoid at all costs. Guessing a woman's age, Barbra Streisand's Yentl, and the appeal of Justin Bieber rank high among them. But there is one subject that rises above even these, one issue guaranteed to turn even the proudest male into a red-faced, mumbling fool. And that particular health concern is...well, you know. With the discomfort, and the products...come on, don't make me. Lunar cycles, and that thing you hear about girls living in the same dorm--oh YOU KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!! Go to your room.

Molly Grows Up is the story of a girl asking the tough questions. Like most children, she can't wait to become an adult, despite all evidence that it's really not all it's cracked up to be. When will it be her turn? When will she finally get to be encumbered by a cruel monthly beast hell-bent on her misery and embarrassment? There are plenty of women in her life ready to provide ambiguous information that hardly qualifies as "advice". There's the school nurse, who is far too interested in Molly and probably smells like cats. Then, Molly's mother, who seems to be sedated with those "nerve pills" they used to give unsatisfied housewives. And of course, Molly's sister, the middle-aged teen. Will Molly learn the horrible truth? Will her father successfully avoid the conversation altogether?

Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as they try desperately to be excused from Health Class before the showing of Molly Grows Up.

Call It Free Part 2 continues the madcap service station antics that viewers of Call It Free Part 1 demanded More, More, More* of! All of your favorite characters are back. Herb (not a woman). Jerry (not a woman). Hank, (astute viewers will recall that Hank is a woman.) But the second half of Call It Free also introduces a new character: Captain Jinx.

Captain Jinx is, (and we are not trying to oversell him by any stretch of the imagination), the greatest cartoon character the world has ever seen! Morbidly obese, bright red and nude, he lives in the engine of your car, and has a big bag of rust that he spreads around if the engine if not properly maintained. This is how former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda spends the offseason. This spreading of "Rust", combined with the complete absence of any substance known as "Jinx", makes one wonder why his name is not simply Captain Rust. Seems like that would make a great deal of sense. But when you're dealing with a woman named "Hank", you sort of let the suspension of disbelief carry you where it will. Captain Jinx is wreaking havoc on Hank's engine, and Hank's beloved husband speeds off to the mechanic to see what can be done about it. Will punches be thrown? Will Jinx junk Jerry's jalopy? And for all that is holy, what, who or when will be called free?! Find out these answers and more, when you join Mike, Kevin and Bill for the exciting conclusion to Call It Free!

*The shrugged shoulders and confused expressions of Call It Free Part 1 viewers has been interpreted as them "demanding More, More, More"

Lindsay Lohan's meteoric rise to fame, and subsequent collapse in the glare of its harsh spotlight, is just a recent iteration of a tale as old as time. Many are quick to judge her, but in a world where the lines between tabloid news and honest journalism are increasingly blurry -- excuse me? Say what now? Who? Oh, my mistake. Yes, I see.

The Story of a Teenage Drug Addict is the story of a teenager with plenty of reasons to become a drug addict. Everyone insists on calling him a teenager and making him attend high school, despite his obvious age of 40. He lives in a shoebox of a tenement apartment with his corpse-like mother, trading stories about why dad left in their constantly-shifting New York-ish accents. And, perhaps most damning of all, he has a unibrow that would make Captain Caveman blush. Unga bunga, indeed.

With circumstances like these, what chance does our protagonist have against the temptations of dope, H, uppers, downers, sidewinders, lefties, righties, Betty Boopers, flim-flam-dongs and other fake drugs of the past? Will he turn back from the brink in time, or be consumed by a life of late night jazz parties with unfortunate-looking teens? Where on Earth are his tweezers?

Learn the answers to these questions and try to achieve a contact high with Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they turn the grim pages of The Story of a Teenage Drug Addict!

Kids love to play games. It is an indisputable fact, much like the existence of former Yankee outfielder Oscar Gamble. But for a while, the only two games kids had to play were "Push a Hoop with a Stick" and "Hide Benjamin Franklin's whiskey." For obvious reasons, (in order: "This game blows" and "Getting sat on by a furious Benjamin Franklin"), kids eventually needed new games to play.

Enter Hungry, Hungry Hippos. For centuries, it was rightly regarded as the pinnacle of game-dom and children the world over entered the "Race" (and/or "Chase") to "hurry up and feed their face." However, recent revisionist history has begun to shift this perception, and a challenger to the throne is now regarded by some academics to be the greatest game of all time: The Following Instructions Game.

"How do you play," you ask? Simple..you do what adults tell you. "But wait," you say, "that doesn't sound like a game at all. It sounds like a thinly veiled scheme to get our stupider children to shut up and do what we want." And you would be right. But that didn't stop the makers of The Following Instructions Game from spending their substantial budget on a short film to convince children that Following Instructions could be just as fun as actually having fun. And oh what fun it is, as our hero, a dimwitted lad who is prone to coming into contact with wet paint, takes a clock to a repair shop before buying a loaf of bread! And there's an odd old man who speaks in rhyme! (Note: It is not Slick Rick, though that would have been awesome.)

For years the skunk has been the butt* of many a joke in pop culture. Due to our society's inherent anti-skunk bias, roles for these malodorous mustelids have been hard to come by. Pepe Le Pew is the go-to guy if you need a skunk in your picture. This is in spite of the fact that he is A) a shockingly offensive stereotype and B) a touch rapey. And for a while in the 80s, Stinkor: The Evil Master of Odors was getting a lot of buzz, before his secret Febreze addiction was discovered.

But before either of these skunks ever skittered down a red carpet, one pioneering stinker broke the stench barrier, paving the way for all future Hollywood skunks and/or cats who accidentally got a white stripe painted down their back. That skunk was Gregory, the star of Little Lose Scent. Gregory comes from a time when men were men, women were broads and our president was bald. Feisty and fetid, he's a putrid pugilist who won't back down from a showdown, be it with man, beast or heavy industrial machinery that at one point in time really looks like it comes about three inches from killing him. Dogs? Gregory lays the smack down, Old Yeller style. Cats? Forget Cheezburgers, Gregory can has their asses. Two grizzly bears? Yes, Gregory fights two grizzly bears at once. You have to watch this short!

Aquarium. Translated literally from the original Latin, it means "boredom box". Every day, thousands of aquariums are completely ignored by passersby in our nation's dentist offices and Chinese restaurants. They are also popular suicide destinations for little plastic scuba men. Aquariums are mainly known for making homes smell funny and, sooner or later, winding up empty out in the garage.

An Aquarium In Action seeks to change all that. A rallying point for aquarium owners, or aquarists*, the film demonstrates just how exciting these bacteria farms can be. It does so by simulating the experience of staring at an impressively ordinary grade school aquarium for an extended period of time. Shiver at the intense action as the children struggle to save baby guppies from certain death in the maws of their own parents. Then watch the children wonder why they bothered saving these ugly little things in the first place, when seeing them devoured would have been much more awesome.

Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as they see who can lick the most scum off the sides of An Aquarium In Action!

Without knowing who Mr. Moto* is, you're probably slightly confused about why you would want to watch him take a walk. "I can watch Mr. Jensen, the bald guy four doors down, take a walk anytime I feel like it," you say. Yes, we all know Mr. Jensen. He carries a miniature baseball bat and the neighborhood kids (mostly Bobby) started a rumor that he uses it to hit dogs with.

While the holes in Bobby's story are numerous (Why a miniature bat Bobby?), there is one thing that is indisputable. Watching Mr. Moto take a walk is far more entertaining than Mr. Jensen. For starters, Mr. Moto takes a walk through the zoo. So right off the bat, you're seeing some crazy stuff. Second, a somewhat attractive lady accompanies Mr. Moto on his walk. Those of you who have seen Mrs. Jensen are now strongly in the Moto camp. But finally, sealing the deal firmly in favor of Mr. Moto is this: Mr. Moto is a monkey. On his walk, Mr. Moto (who is a monkey) undertakes the demented quest of traversing the entire alphabet, from A to Z, seeing one animal for each letter. Why he has chosen to spend his day this way is a mystery, especially seeing as he is a monkey. But it's an action packed journey full of mischief and exotic animals. And did we mention that he is a monkey?

Do you hate stuff that's designed to save your life? Does the inconvenience of having to flip the safety off your handgun before you use it to open a beer bottle drive you INSANE? Do you snicker and point at children wearing bicycle helmets, contemptuous of their willingness to believe "The Man"? Do you wiggle your way out of roller coaster restraints so you can raise both middle fingers boldly in the air?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you're going to absolutely hate Seat Belts: The Life-Saving Habit. This plea for reason provides a snapshot of some anti-seatbelt sentiments from the early 1980s. For example, "I've never worn one, but they look uncomfortable," "Hey, I'm a busy guy, I don't have time for this," and "Children are invincible." The film confidently (or, more often, passive-aggressively) debunks these powerful straw-man arguments in a noble attempt to save lives and subliminally advertise the safe, luxurious Audi sedan. One assumes the filmmakers went on to champion other controversial stances, such as "you probably shouldn't let your kids swallow broken glass."

Climb into the back of a pick-up truck with Mike, Kevin, and Bill and ride down a bumpy road to a destination called Seat Belts: The Life-Saving Habit!

Can genius be taught? It is one of the great philosophical questions. With enough time, patience, and dedication, can the next Van Gogh be created? Or is the mastery of an artistic discipline something that only a few people are born with the inherent capacity for? The producers of the series Drawing for Beginners believe that a great artist lurks inside all of us, and with the proper attention and guidance, it may one day emerge like a beautiful butterfly, to bestow artistic gifts unto humanity the likes of which the world has never seen.

Step one? Rectangles! Four lines, four right angles. Sounds easy right? WRONG! Improperly drawn rectangles are the second most common mistake witnessed by elementary school art teachers, right behind birds in the shape of lower case m's which most biologists agree make no evolutionary sense. It turns out rectangles are the foundation of all art. Don't believe us? What do the Mona Lisa, American Gothic and The Scream all have in common? Innovations in painted light, aerial perspective and irony? WRONG! The answer is rectangular frames! The next time you're in the Sistine Chapel, why don't you look up at the ceiling and tell us what shapes you see up there. Hint: not rhombuses. Still don't believe us? Pull a DVD off your shelf. Yeah, that one will do. Wait, is that...you own What About Bob? on DVD? No, no, I'm not saying it's bad, it just doesn't seem like the kind of movie you'd really want to watch repeatedly. Well, saying it's a gift doesn't exactly explain it, the person who gave it to you would still have to assume that you would want to - LOOK, the point is, what shape is the box? A rectangle! Art! Rectangles! They just go together!

It therefore goes without saying that if you want to create art, you better damn well learn to draw your rectangles. And Drawing For Beginners: The Rectangle is as good a jumping off point as any...for weeding out the dullards who actually need instruction about drawing rectangles and who c

Cats have a come a long way lately. They "hung in there", indeed, on the wall posters of America's cubicles. And now they are widely acknowledged as the foundation of the entire internet, and thus all modern culture. Remove the cats, and you're left with nothing. If not for the existence of confused-cat-dressed-like-Napoleon videos, people would have to send each other links to articles about inconsequential matters like foreign politics, science, or even discuss and examine their own feelings. In a word: ew.

But little is known about where cats come from. Are they advanced alien beings, here to exploit our obvious delight at seeing them barf on our stuff? In exchange for pointedly ignoring us, they are given food, shelter, and an open-air toilet right in our living rooms. Cats form emotional bonds with humans so strong that they will wait 5, maybe even 10 minutes, before nibbling on the ear of a beloved owner after she has choked to death on a heart-shaped box of chocolates she bought for herself. What is the origin of these marvelous, sophisticated creatures?

Kittens: Birth & Growth answers this important question, and teaches kids valuable lessons about getting excited for, and then immediately neglecting, adorable new pets. Watch and learn now, because you can rest assured the cats are watching and learning everything about us.

Mike, Kevin, & Bill can has kitten short nowz?

Reading. Like it or not, (and as a people, we've cast a resounding vote for 'not'), it's something most of us have to do every day. Whether it's selectively combing news stories for the portions of them you agree with, figuring out what your $1.14 in change can buy you from the Wendy's drive-thru window, or trying to decipher the unspeakable, misspelled profanity left on the youtube video of your infant son laughing, reading is a part of our daily lives. But more and more often, people are starting to ask themselves Reading: Who Needs It? Granted, most of these people are biased against reading having just finished reading a Dan Brown novel, but it's still a question worth debating.

Reading: Who Needs It? The Short attempts to address Reading: Who Needs It? The Question. We witness the daily lives of three illiterate High School students. The short intends to cast these kids in a negative light, but truly the achievement of progressing into your junior year of High School while all the while A) being illiterate and B) somehow keeping that a secret from everyone is quite remarkable in itself. We are told that these students are just three of "hundreds" of illiterate students in this high school. It is clear that this high school must be located in [insert part of the country you do not think highly of.]

Will the illiterate actress learn to read in time to snag a role in the big school musical? Will the mechanic put down the socket wrench and pick up the books? Will the burgeoning basketball star continue doing things exactly as he was before, while still making more money for one game than most families earn in a year? Tune in to Reading: Who Needs It? with Mike, Kevin and Bill to find out!

The Families series of shorts is a beloved franchise with many proud, vital installments. Some other favorites: Families: Food and Failure, Families: Lies & Videotape, and perhaps most popular of all, Families: Dead and Loving It. But true connoisseurs, those with the complete Criterion Collection set and no friends to speak of, know that Families: Food and Eating was the creative pinnacle; if you ask them about it at a party they will not leave you alone until you agree. Then they'll awkwardly inquire if your younger sister is single and you'll leave the party so quickly you forget your jacket.

The film presents, in vivid detail, what a "Family" might do with some "Food" (no spoilers here). Shockingly, it seems there was a time when family eating consisted of more than choosing individual Hungry Man dinners to devour in front of separate bedroom televisions. We've come so far! Further, people in faraway countries like Japan, Mexico and "San Francisco" eat dinner in very different ways. Do you feel guilty about the ease with which you procure fine foods at your local supermarket? No? Well you should. Try to remember that next time you spend five minutes crafting a Facebook post about how irritating it is when Facebook doesn't load your Farmville statistics immediately, won't you?

Mike, Kevin and Bill will take away that stupid PlayStation if you don't come down here RIGHT NOW for some Families: Food and Eating!

We all have a certain summer memory. One that we find ourselves fondly reminiscing over as the days get longer and hotter. A memory of a different time, when we still retained our childlike innocence, but possessed a desire to stretch our wings and explore the world around us. These days, even though we are very different people, we still watch the sun go down, and our thoughts drift, however briefly, towards that moment when the world was so much simpler, and yet boundless with possibility.

Ours is the time when we got a Bubble O' Bill pop from the ice cream man, then threw a tantrum when our mom wouldn't buy us a second one, then opened the second Bubble O' Bill pop our mortified mother eventually bought for us as tears continued to stream down our face and people stared, then throwing it on the ground in disgust because the bubble gum nose was kind of smooshed and proclaiming that we wished we had never been born. Yes, the summer of 2007 was a heady time.

The point is,Summer Is An Adventure. And whether your summer involves speedboats, hiking, or mostly just ice cream related petulance, you can certainly agree. The two young protagonists of Summer Is An Adventure are slightly better behaved than we were, (despite the bathing outfits they are forced to wear.) They even tolerate a narrator who occasionally lapses into speedboat-based poetry! But we know that deep down inside, the forced nature walks and firefly collecting of Summer Is An Adventure will eventually unleash a sweaty, sandy, sunburned hellbeast of a child, one that even the sweet, sweet allure of Bubble O' Bill's candy nose cannot tame!

But they might be willing to listen for a Choco Taco...

Mike, Kevin and Bill are always willing to riff for a Choco Taco

Every now and then you meet a child who forever changes your perception of how stupid a child can be. There's your second cousin's boy, Leon, who spends summer afternoons black-widow-huntin' in the woodpile. Or little cross-eyed Margie, with her affinity for drinking liters of pond water. And of course Stephen, the kid who insists Notes from Underground is Dostoevsky's finest literary accomplishment when it's clearly one of his mid-level works. I mean, honestly, Stephen, grow up.

But all of these little morons are blown away by the force of Reggie, star of Beginning Responsibility: Taking Care of Your Own Things. Reggie sleepwalks through life. He's perpetually confused and overwhelmed by his bedroom full of toys, which are all in such sorry shape Goodwill employees would spit in your face if you attempted to donate them. Since his parents have given up on Reggie long ago, it's up to this deranged menagerie of busted junk to come to life and teach him threatening lessons. Yes, it's Toy Story on acid! But not the fun kind of acid, more like battery acid that spills out of an old remote control dog toy you haven't picked up in twelve years.

Mike, Kevin and Bill try to keep little Reggie from swallowing their keys while they watch Beginning Responsibility: Taking Care of Your Own Things!

Reading: for now, it is the only way to experience the approximately four remaining books that have not been made into movies (three, after this summer's CGI heavy adaptation of Frog & Toad are Friends. Sam Worthington will play both title roles.)

So you'd better be sure that your Basic Reading Skills are not lacking! How can you be sure? We've prepared a simple test. Just identify the subject of the following sentence: "Totally grape ape, should our snorkel rubadub the two step, moon for sure." Ready? The answer was: Chester A. Arthur.

First of all, if you got that wrong, SHAME ON YOU. But there is hope (amidst the SHAME!) The hope comes in the form of Reading Growth: Basic Skills which provides several helpful strategies for mastering reading, most of which make about as much sense as our example. Also, there is a frog, but it's not played by Sam Worthington. He is, however, much more successful at masking his Australian accent.

Mike, Kevin and Bill identify the subject of this sentence as hilarity! And then feel deep SHAME because it turns out it was actually Chester A. Arthur again...

Many times we find ourselves mocking the content of the educational shorts we feature here at RiffTrax. Most of the time it is quite deserved; if you will recall, not too long ago we did a short entitled Buying Food. But occasionally we'll stumble across one like Geography of Your Community and think to ourselves, "Well done Coronet Films. Geography is an important thing for young minds to learn, and what better way to teach it to them than by making it relate to them using their own community as a learning tool.

Then we saw the short. Geography of Your Community contains about as much Geography as the Transformers movies contained taste, wit and coherence. And by "Your Community" the makers meant aspecific community with specific features, such as an ice cream factory that many students will be unlikely to identify with, and much more likely confused and scared by.

The creators don't stop there! Throughout the short, they pose questions to the viewer without answering them, with a vague promise that they will address the answers to them down the road, when instead there are only more questions. A Warning: This short may hit too close to home for fans of a certain TV show which just ended its six season run on ABC.

Yes, Geography of Your Community is another short which falls spectacularly short of its admittedly modest goals. But educational failure is humor's gain, and Mike, Kevin and Bill are on hand to speculate along with the viewer why there is an ice cream factory in this town? Why the factory was built along the river? And who the hell named their child "Farmland"?

Parts. We all have them. Some of them are public, like elbows and unibrows. Some of them are private, like thigh pimples or the complete set of Bob Seger CDs that you pray your new girlfriend doesn't stumble across. But did you know that people aren't the only things with parts? Since we can't hear your answer, we'll assume you said, "No, that's surprising, please proceed with the comedic description." You got it, friends!

It turns out the English language* is made up of several components, all laid out in The Parts of Speech. Some of them might be familiar, but if you've always struggled to define exactly why an adverb can modify not only verbs, but also adjectives and other adverbs...well, this short will be of no use to you. But it will dazzle you with its majestic beach scenes, featuring a boy far too old to be wearing that diaper, playful near-drownings, and the contemptuous monster of a narrator, Dr. Dwight L. Burton! Also, a beach towel is subjected to extreme homophobia.

Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as they head to the ocean, the most logical location for confusing grammar lessons courtesy of The Parts of Speech!

Consider: a young boy, growing up in an urban setting with seemingly absentee parents, purchases a special plant from a quirky man who has assumed the moniker "Papa Nikolai". The boy goes on to guard his new greenery from others with a fervor that borders on the paranoid, lashing out at those who question his behavior. It may sound like a new PSA regarding a certain California legalization initiative, but in fact it's just our newest short, Watch Out For My Plant!

If there's one thing little boys love, it's... baseball, or comic books, or hurting animals, or really ANYTHING but plants. But this kid is different. He's willing to spend hours hovering over a sprout that probably requires nothing more than a weekly watering and some sunlight, and we get to go along for the ride! We don't want to give away more than that, because frankly there's nothing more to give away.

Mike, Kevin and Bill will do their very best to Watch Out For My Pl-- oh they crushed it. Really stomped all over it. Kevin, there's no need to set it on fire... well, great. Just great

One of the great questions ethicists have pondered over time has been "what is the right thing to do?"

Meet Mr. Carson, who has never answered this question correctly. He's the man who puts the "wretch" in "eking out a paranoid, wretched existence living in filth off of disability." Mr. Carson hobbles through his neighborhood, finding items in various stages of disrepair that the honest, hardworking citizens have rightfully chosen to discard. Mr. Carson takes up these items that, while neglected by his fellow man, a subhuman shell like Mr. Carson can surely find some sort of use for. In the right hands, even something like a flat wagon wheel could be recycled into something useful, or at the very least, transformed into unappealing art. But Mr. Carson, trembling and unshowered, can't even be bothered to use the items he scavenges. He just throws them in a pile in his yard, and plasters up another "Keep Out" sign, though the idea of even slowing your gait while strolling past Mr. Carson's grim property, let alone trespassing on the blighted premises, is a prospect no rational man would entertain.

There is one group that finds Mr. Carson endlessly fascinating: eight year old boys! And peering in through his brittle, dusty venetian blinds, the spectacle of Mr. Carson eating store brand beef stew directly out of the can proves to be the perfect summer day activity for one particular group of scamps. Everything changes, though, when the boys decide to intrude on Mr. Carson's solitude, and a deadly accident occurs. And by changes, we of course mean, "Gets a whole lot funnier."

You know what? Strike that earlier sentence. There are two groups that find Mr. Carson fascinating: Eight year old boys, and Mike, Kevin and Bill, who riff with rapt attention, and the vague, unspoken unease that they are looking into their own near future.

Do you ever stop to reflect on what an ungrateful, useless little puke you were as a child? Like when your father came home after his 60 hour work week with the new lunchbox he thought you wanted, and you threw a red-faced tantrum because it was Go-Bots, not Transformers? Or the time your mother served the stuffed turkey she spent the whole day perfecting, and you flipped it on the floor, shrieking that you wanted McNuggets and didn't love her anymore?

Yes, children are terrible. And Family Teamwork gleefully drives that point home, with help from a brain-drilling theme wonderfully reminiscent of the music from Nintendo's Bubble Bobble. One boy turns sour when he learns his family's newfound poverty means they can't afford the trailer-tent he had his heart set on. Selfishly, he never thinks to ask how his family feels, or what the hell a trailer-tent might be. In this, and other scenarios, Family Teamwork serves up a heaping helping of shame, teaching kids important lessons about the joys of responding to passive-aggressive guilt. For the team!

Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Family Teamwork...as soon as they get off those dang skateboards...wait, they STILL haven't washed the car? Of all the no-good...great, there goes my ulcer

Join the middle-aged drummer as this thrilling documentary follows his exploits during Rush’s 2009 Asian tour. Leaving in his wake several bottles of FiberCon, completely unnecessary drum kit pieces, and pulp 1950s Sci-Fi novels with highlighted passages marked “use for lyrics”, the man....what’s that? Oh, this isn’t Neil Peart of the Orient? My mistake.

The makers of Pearl of the Orient set out to make a positive, uplifting piece about life in the heavily-bombed Philippine islands during the aftermath of World War II. And, if you consider third world poverty, rat-smashing, and utterly joyless wedding ceremonies “uplifting”, the filmmakers succeeded admirably! The tourism dollars surely flowed like a debris-tainted waterfall into the island nation after the world saw delightful images of villagers breaking their backs all day to harvest a half-cup of rice. Think about that next time you feel the urge to post on facebook “Stupid supermarket out of whole wheat linguini so had to settle for regular. FML!!!” Yes, it’s a nice reminder of how much we suck.

There’s also a cockfight. You should buy this.

Tag along with Mike, Kevin, Bill, and their newly-acquired Filipino wives for a trip to the Pearl of the Orient!

Meet Roy, elementary school student. Some children learn with more ease than others. Every child learns with more ease than Roy. He wants nothing from life except to be left alone: shy, silent, whittling off pieces of his desk in hopes that he’ll eventually find one that tastes good.

But his ill-tempered, hatchet-faced teacher (we’ll call her “Howard”) will have none of that. She goes out of her way to make an example of his dimness in front of the class, in order to teach valuable lessons to the other kids. These lessons primarily consist of new and exciting ways to make fun of Roy. She especially likes comparing him to his golden-boy older brother, George. Oh, you know George? Yeah, he is great, isn’t he! Just so smart, and strong, but still humble and decent...sorry, got lost in a “George” moment. It’s hard not to when he’s so much better than Roy. Roy really is the turd in the punchbowl of that family. You have to wonder what happened in the gene pool there...I mean, uh, being different is cool!

Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they ponder the horrors of Individual Differences! And don’t forget a bag of rotten fruit to throw at Roy’s piano recital!

For years, The Weather has been the go-to topic for nervously discussing with your co-workers whenever you end up sharing an elevator with them after you fail to see them pull into the parking lot at the same time as you, leaving you unable to adjust your route on the fly. "Some weather we're having" you'll say, and they will grunt their assent. A few seconds later you'll notice that neither of you have pressed the floor button, and you'll lunge for it at the same time, then retract your fingers cautiously, before finally poking it with a vigor that instantly seems inappropriately emphatic. It would probably be less socially awkward for you to just kill and eat the co-worker right there, but instead, you chat about the weather. God forbid they end up leaving at the same time as you that afternoon.

Yes, The Weather has been discussed to death. And yet somehow, Whatever the Weather manages to bring a fresh new angle to the topic. Of course, in order to find a fresh, new angle, they just made up some crazy analogy regarding weather and hats. You're not really even sure it was intentional until they hamfistedly try to tie it together in the final seconds. M. Night Shyamalan movies operate under the same principal.

If you're a fan of weather, you probably don't get invited to too many parties, seeing as how that's an extremely boring thing to be a fan of. So while you're sitting at home, not partying, why not cue up the latest RiffTrax short, Whatever the Weather, with Mike, Kevin and Bill playing armchair meteorologist next to you? Forecasts call for a 60 percent chance of infectious laughter. Hang on, I'm being issued a correction. That should read 60% chance of severe thunderstorms. Take cover immediately

The bartender says "I was talking to the duck!" And, so it was finished, before it had even begun. She was a dark and stormy dame. Really, that's a badger? "Over there, behind the fake tree," she said. The record scratched at midnight, as it always does. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a terrible paragraph. If only it were possible to build a better one! But surely, a topic as pedantic and uninteresting as Building Better Paragraphs has never been covered by the dynamos at Coronet Films, has it?

It has! 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. Can they build it into a better paragraph? Let's hope so, the bar was set awfully low. Can they shape it into an interesting paragraph? We're going to be honest, we have our doubts. Is one of the children in this short one of the strangest looking kids we've ever seen? We answer that with a hearty "Gahhhh!"

Mike, Kevin and Bill have each built a better paragraph only to later find out the assigned topic was The Teapot Dome Scandal, not bacon

Teaching kids about the evils of racism in a clear, culturally-sensitive manner is a difficult task. Fortunately for us, it’s something the makers of educational shorts from decades past were woefully inept at! Are People All the Same? takes an interesting approach. In order to illustrate that people are all fundamentally the same, they go to great lengths to help you differentiate people based on race. This includes side-by-side comparisons of Japanese and Chinese children (no, really!) presumably so that kids can sort people out, and be sure to only use “pee pee in your Coke” based insults at the appropriate time.

It’s a methodology that noted sensitivity expert Mel Gibson would support, saying “It’s [expletive deleted]-filled [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted], oh hey there sweetheart.” After building its argument, the film comes to a logical conclusion: a bunch of kids gather for a scream-filled, parent-free birthday party in an abandoned hovel. Proving that, ultimately, it doesn’t matter if people are all the same, because life is a chaos-filled nightmare with no one in charge.

Are People All the Same? Mike, Kevin, and Bill sure hope not, because that would mean that we are all roughly equivalent to Kevin Federline.

You may think you know your Mealtime Manners, but much like the recent Kevorkian biopic that, despite starring Al Pacino, was sadly neither unintentionally hilarious nor full of rapid fluctuations in vocal volume, You Don't Know Jack!

Mealtime Manners & Health posits the radical notion that your observing proper manners while eating can have a positive effect on your health. Wait, that's not really so radical...Oh, that's right, the radicalnotion it puts forth is not that good Mealtime Manners can make you happier and healthier, but rather that Mealtime Manners can occur at any given part of the day. Playing a little league game? Better have good Mealtime Manners! Parked outside a tardy coworker's house, waiting for them to join the carpool Don't forget your Mealtime Manners! Just finished dinner and won't be eating another meal for roughly twelve hours? Mealtime manners, dammit!!!

Yes, Mealtime Manners apply to virtually any social context. This may sound like a clumsy, even baffling point to you. We concede that this is most definitely the case. When they're on, the good people at Coronet Films could make a short that most people would generously describe as "dull yet coherent." When struggling to spend the last two hundred dollars of their state derived funds before a fiscal quarter deadline however, madness tended to be the prevailing theme. This short is joyously one of the latter.

Mike, Kevin and Bill enjoy practicing Mealtime Manners in any number of situations, "while riffing a short" being right near the top of their list.

In honor of our new short, Things Are Different Now, we’d like to list some things that are different now. In 2004, Mel Gibson was featured in Time’s “Man of the Year” issue for the success and spiritual impact of his film The Passion of the Christ. Things are different now. In March 2010, you could take a swim in the Gulf of Mexico and emerge without looking like a cast member of The Jersey Shore. Things are different now. Prior to the release of The Last Airbender, critics and anyone else who was paying attention had written M. Night Shyamalan off as an overhyped egomaniac whose best work was well behind him. Things are...well, some things haven’t changed.

The point here is, any kid who’s seen an after-school special or two knows that when an adult says “Things are different now,” what they really mean is “Things are now significantly worse.” Young Joey, the hero of our short, could attest to that. His voice has begun to crack, and his father has taken the Daniel Plainview approach to parenting - that is, to abandon one’s BO-OOOOY, to abandon one’s CHII-IIIIILD. Joey’s only source of comfort is his best friend, who is a creepy fat schmuck. Will Joey weather the storm and come out happy and well-balanced? Will the short bring these complicated, emotional issues to a satisfying and helpful resolution? If you’ve seen any of the educational shorts we present, you know the answer to that last question already.

In the spirit of things being different now, Mike, Kevin and Bill will riff this short completely sober.

It's every parent's nightmare: You're woken up at 3AM by a knock at your front door. When you open it, there's a somber looking policeman standing there, his hat in his hands. He avoids eye contact with you, and his voice quivers as he begins to speak. Before he even gets a word out, you know what he's going to say. "Sir," he quivers. "Your son...wants a doll."

The producers of William's Doll want you to believe that a boy with a doll is perfectly normal. For some reason, they made a film that convinces everyone of the exact opposite. We here at RiffTrax are as open-minded as they come regarding childhood toys. Some of us even grew up playing with a toy called Stinkor: The Evil Master of Odors, and we turned out alright.* But by the time the train wreck of William's Doll comes to its unspeakable conclusion, you'll be taking to the streets with your fellow Doll Party members, seizing and burning every doll you find just so they never end up in the hands of a boy.**

The twisted minds behind William's Doll made their defense of boys playing with dolls by combining two of the most loathsome things our planet has ever known: warbly 60's folk music and senior citizens. The guy who sings the William's Doll Theme sounds like Donovan singing Hurdy Gurdy Man after several months of gender reversal hormone treatment and a kick from a mule in what remains of his nads. But even that pales in comparison to William's grandfather, who walks in the door looking like the sun-dried corpse of Larry David and immediately begins his fiendish doll-enabling.

Bright spots include William's Dad, a grown, presumably employed man who wears a red mesh hat with a Goofy patch, who would rather let his son play with a Super Soaker Oozinator*** than a doll. If you can find one of these hats, please let Mike, Kevin and Bill know. They'll trade you an Oozinator for it.

As any dorm poster covered in photographs of shots that no adult would actually order at a bar could tell you, “Life is full of difficult decisions.” Tommy, the hero of Decisions, Decisions, would surely agree. His life has recently been rocked, as he was forced to move to a decrepit farm in the middle of nowhere for the sake of his remarkably effeminate father’s “good job”. Tommy will get little support from his mother, a dazed, gin-soaked woman who would probably tell a stranger at the library about her favorite handkerchief for 30 minutes before nodding off between some plants (you know the type). One gets the feeling this is a family hiding from a dark and shameful past.

Given this background, Tommy is ill-equipped to handle even the most basic decision. In this case, the decision is whether or not to hang out with Joey, the most horrible boy on the planet. Whiny, irritable, ugly, unpopular, and obsessed with painting his grandmother’s chicken coop, Joey is the kind of kid who wouldn’t even be welcome in a World of Warcraft community. Joey, with his offer of apples in exchange for friendship and coop-labor, distracts Tommy from the more important decision he should be making: to run far, far away.

Mike, Kevin, and Bill decide, decide, to riff, riff, this short, short.

School's out, and this summer, there's only one place to find elementary school children. No, not the basketball courts. No, not the movie theater. No, not the swimming hole, they cut down the rope swing after Tommy broke his leg. No, not the mall. No, not skateboarding in the parking lot. No, not knocking over a casino. No, not freeing giant killer whales from captivity. No, not protesting in advance the 2016 Sochi Winter Olympics. No, not recreating Jersey Shore episodes shot by shot with Playmobil figures. No, not...

TIME PASSES

No, not poaching rare California Condor eggs. No, not participating in college health department cold studies. No, not picking up Kanye West's dry cleaning. No, not the swimming hole, LOOK, WE ALREADY TOLD YOU THEY WEREN'T AT THE SWIMMING HOLE! THEY CUT THE DAMN TIRE SWING DOWN AFTER TOMMY BROKE HIS LEG. THEY ARE AT THE LIBRARY, OK? THE DAMN LIBRARY!!!!

Yes, the library, or liberry, if you're an idiot, is the hot spot in town for fancy book learnin' (replacing Luigi's PizzaMat, which held the title from 2004-2009). Library World tells the story of two children who are on the verge of making this discovery: A little boy who's skeptical of how much fun you can have at the library and his friend, a more enthusiastic boy or girl who is well versed in the library-going experience. With the help of a hot rod stealing 70's tool, who breaks new ground in the field of "having nothing better to do", they'll learn that the library isn't just a place you can check out books from. It's also a place where homeless people can escape nasty weather because the librarians are too meek and defenseless to kindly ask them to leave because they're frightening other patrons.

Mike, Kevin and Bill head on down to Library World, where they tried to find out where they keep the old stacks of National Geographics, but were too embarrassed to ask the librarian.

In preparation for working on Fad Diet Circus, we here at RiffTrax decided to try out a few of the more popular fad diets. We started with the “Macho Man Randy Savage Diet”, which allows only foods that you can “Snap into!” Then there was the “Soup-Made-From-the-Cheez-It-Crumbs-At-The-Bottom-Of-The-Box Diet” (use your own tears for broth). And of course the “Villain from the Muppet Movie Diet”, which consists entirely of Kermit the Frog’s legs (this one is known to true dietary insiders as the “Doc Hopper”). Finally we came to the “Penelope Cruz Diet”, permitting only food items you find while going through Penelope Cruz’s garbage. Thanks to this rigorous regimen, RiffTrax HQ has been temporarily relocated to the hospital, with one of us working remotely from prison (FORGIVE ME PENELOPE!!!!)

You might expect a film called Fad Diet Circus to cover several different diets, or at least something, you know, “circus-y”. You silly fool! The filmmakers instead focus on the low-carb Atkins Diet. And by “focus on” we mean “aggressively attack”: one gets the feeling this hit piece was commissioned by Betty Crocker and the “time to make the donuts” guy. They even wrote an anti-Atkins torch song (really, we’re not kidding) and dressed the kindly old doctor up in a heinous plaid coat (there’s no way that coat was a voluntary choice) just to discredit him.

Mike, Kevin, and Bill are willing to try any diet plan as long as the words “pork fat smoothie” are involved

When the 1920's ended, America was left with a shortage of crazy fads. Goldfish went un-swallowed. Flagpoles went un-sat upon. Charleston's went un-charlestoned. Dozens of dead bodies were pried out of a single phone booth. By and large people stopped messing around and got back to work. It was horrible.

But amidst the ceasing of Roaring, one major trend still managed to sweep the nation: washing your clothes with gasoline! Every housewife on Main St. could be found hitting up the local filling station, returning home with a reeking, volatile jug of gasoline, and submerging her delicates in it to get out those pesky grass stains.

Haven't heard of this trend? That's because it never actually existed. But that didn't stop...

In honor of Alone at Home, we did a little research on a similarly-titled film only to discover that Macaulay Culkin recently turned 30. That’s right, the kid from Home Alone is 30 years old. How ‘bout that for a dose of reality? A reminder of time’s cruel, relentless march? Did you just clear your throat, or was that an early taste of your own death rattle Can you really know? This cheerful reminder of mortality brought to you by RiffTrax.com!

While Mr. Culkin’s defining film (pipe down, Pagemaster fanfic authors) and Alone at Home share the same basic theme, there are key differences. Little Kevin McAllister is left unsupervised accidentally. The parents in Alone at Home, however, make the same choice quite intentionally. Where have they gone? No answer is given. Why have they gone? A few minutes with the awkward, goony children they’ve left behind is all the explanation you’ll need. Seriously, there’s a kid so odd and skinny you’ll be up at night wondering where his bones and organs fit, yielding nightmares you won’t soon escape. If Home Alone’s notorious Wet Bandits had shown up at his house, they would have turned away in sadness, and perhaps launched a food drive.

Mike, Kevin, and Bill have not been Alone at Home for years, because their wives know they’d just eat sticks of butter and wind up sticking their fingers in the electrical outlets again.

What would you do if you visited an elderly aunt only to find her injured on the floor? Would you regret that you had not been there when she fell from the stepladder, because if you had you could have captured the hilarious moment on video? Uploaded the video to YouTube, to see it become an instant sensation? Then awaited the inevitable dance remix, complete with her auto-tuned screams? And then finally felt a sense of culminated pride when a friend sent you a link to that same remix being played at someone’s wedding? Which you sneakily watched on your Smartphone while visiting your injured aunt in the hospital?

Well, naturally, all of that would be the correct answer in today’s world. But Telephone For Help comes from a simpler time, a time when phones were shackled to walls via so-called “wires” and could only be used for boring, mundane things like calling for help (or as a platform for the work of important artists like The Jerky Boys). Thrill at the injuries! Shudder in suspense as the dim-witted children decide whether or not to use the phone! Sweat your face off as you watch an emergency response team so slow they surely inspired the Public Enemy classic “9-1-1 Is A Joke”!

Mike, Kevin, and Bill were gonna Telephone For Help but they accidentally spent three hours looking for the highest-quality “Bed Intruder remix” ringtone instead.

Some questions are as old as time. “Why are we here?” “Can love really last?” “Who let the dogs out?” “Is corn grass?” But there’s one ancient question that’s sure to chill you to the bone, when asked creepily by your five-year-old after a long pregnant pause: What If We Had A Fire? It’s a simple query that can draw a lot of attention: just ask a certain Floridian minister who was recently in the news.

But while the question of “who didn’t start the fire?” was well and thoroughly answered by the esteemed Mr. Joel, this matter has gone woefully unaddressed. No longer! The young star of our film goes after the issue head-on, inspired by the scorched home of one of his classmates. Undistracted by the question of “Should We Try To Help The Recently Displaced Family of My Classmate?” our boy says, hey, what about ME? His parents promptly send him off to seek answers at the fire station, so they can work on the new insurance scam their son’s question has inspired. “Honey, what if we had a fire? Maybe then I could get that Camaro I’ve always wanted!”

Pretty much every party Mike, Kevin and Bill have ever attended has ended with the question What If We Had A Fire?

When police inspector Launchpad McQuack receives a phone call that Huey, Dewey and Louie have gone missing, his initial inclination was to suspect the Beagle Boys - a suspicion that his neighbor Donald Duck was only too happy to go along with. But Donald seemed a little too concerned about keeping Launchpad away from his newly planted garden bed, instead plying the straight-laced cop with a dish he called "Diablo Pato." And that's when the first severed head turned up in a box on Launchpad's doorstep, pulling him down into a twisted web of intrigue, with the case growing more depraved and fiendish with each passing hour.
Sorry about that, that would be the plot of Se7en Little Ducks. Seven Little Ducks on the other hand is a good-natured short about a brace of ducks. You might assume that there would be seven ducks, but you would be a moron for expecting the good people at Coronet Films to do something as logical as naming their educational short in accordance with how many ducks are actually in said short.
The ducks are owned by Carol, who is played by a Gamorrean Guard. Carol has mastered basic duck-care skills such as feeding them gravel and strangling them. The ducks detest their cruel owner, and led by the hideous Father Duck, whose skin condition makes Two Face look like a Noxzema model, plan a coup. I'm sorry, I'm also being informed that that should be "Coop", and is not a bloody takeover, but rather the enclosure within which the ducks reside.
Obviously we can't get our details right about the content of the short, so just tune in to Seven Little Ducks along with Mike, Kevin and Bill and see for yourself. Quack.

When we're deciding what shorts to screen here at RiffTrax, there's a 27 step, bullet-pointed criteria we use. Then we just pick the ones with the funniest title. More often than not, this leads to disappointment. It turns out that Why Do We Still Have Mountains* was far duller than its title would indicate and Could a Goldfish Become Mayor of Tallahassee is in fact a short that we just made up.

One short that fortunately bucked the trend is the hilariously titled Cops: Who Needs Them? It tells the story of a nihilistic band of youths, who despite their apparent middle class upbringing and lack of any real responsibility or hardship in their lives, have developed a healthy distrust of cops. The characters, whose viewpoint about cops is evidently modeled entirely around the West Side Story number "Officer Krupke", also happen to be just about the ugliest bunch of kids you've ever seen. Seriously, we think that Moosebaby makes a cameo appearance as Frank.

The very cops whose need is questioned in the title are none too pleased about the sassmouth the teens are giving them and decide to take their leader along with them on a ridealong, mortally endangering his life and no doubt violating dozens of laws and protocols. Don't worry though, someone who may or may not be his dad and who also may or may not be furious at his son for having his car stolen gave them some sort of vague, verbal confirmation over the phone that it was OK. I don't think it qualifies as a spoiler to inform you that on the ridealong, somebody does in fact get shot.**

Experience Cops: Who Needs Them? yourself along with Mike, Kevin and Bill who all think they smell bacon. Yep, definitely bacon. (It has nothing to do with the short about cops, someone just happens to be making bacon. As usual.)

*Not a joke, this was a real short we screened
**Also not a joke, someone really gets shot

Listen up, pizza-faced creeps! Until now, you’ve suffered shameful, wretched existences. Cowering in dark cellars. Adopting beekeeping as a hobby, just for the veil. Wearing a drug store Ninja Turtle Halloween mask all year long, playing it off as an ironic affectation. Even converting to new religions that require face coverings when in public. But no longer! The title of our new short makes a clear and simple promise: You Can Do Something About Acne! And, since this is a RiffTrax short, you can rest assured that promise will go completely unfulfilled!

Yes, get used to your zits and the politely repulsed reactions of the opposite sex, because this film has no real advice for you. Maybe eat less junk food, maybe don’t, it’s hard to say. Maybe stop smearing your face with a stick of butter every morning, maybe smear more butter, there’s no good way to know. One thing’s for sure, though, your face is full of horrible stuff you didn’t know about, including a sticky substance named “sebum”. That’s right, sebum. You’re oozing with sebum. Deal with that.

Excess pus and permanent scarring are NOT* symptoms of joining Mike, Kevin, and Bill for You Can Do Something About Acne!

*Probably. Really, we can’t be sure.

Safe Living at School pulls no punches with its straightforward title: This is a short which attempts to tell you how to make it through the school day unscathed. Your elementary school is a virtual house of horrors, where an act as innocuous as opening a locker can result in a vicious badger mauling! A playful swing on the monkey bars can be interrupted by an atom bomb explosion! Eating the cafeteria pizza can slightly burn the roof of your mouth, not enough to cause you to stop eating it but enough to make you take a slightly longer pause in between your first and second bites!

But the short, and dare we say humanity, fails to address the one safety issue that haunted us throughout our primary school years: Mrs. Pinkett, the bus driver who would sit on children when they misbehaved. Why this was tolerated by the school board, we have no idea, but it definitely happened, because an older kid who rode her bus one year totally knew a guy who saw her do it once. You'd sit facing straight ahead, not misbehaving except for the 98% of time you were on the bus that the wheels were moving, terrified that the slightest infraction, such as dropping a watermelon out the back window into the path of an ambulance, might trigger the wrath of Mrs. Pinkett, and then: SQUASH!!!

Perhaps you find this example unrelatable. Trust me, if you were there, you would never forget it. Regardless, if it were covered in Safe Living at School, the short would not doubt put forth that it could be handled in one way: by freeze-framing the action and playing a hilarious timpani drum sound every time an accident occurred. This takes place approximately 730 times during this brief short. The timpani drum is to this short what jokes about how white people dance are to an 80s Def Comedy Jam standup routine: consisting of the majority of the act and each one more hilarious than the last.

Mike, Kevin and Bill have safely lived at a school for over two years now, living in the janitor'

You can't underestimate the importance of a good title. What would "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" be if it were called "Some Stuff That Good People Do Good"? Or if "Who Moved my Cheese" had been called "How is this bottle of EZ Cheez empty already? I just bought it yesterday!" Or if "Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould" had been called "G. Gould: Sexecutioner"?

Actually, we probably would have gone to see that last one...Anyways, the point is, titling your work of art is in itself an important art form. Or, shall we say, it was, because with our latest RiffTrax short, the perfect title has been achieved. We present to you: Behavior of Domestic-Pigs in a semi-natural Pig-Park. It has everything: unnecessary capitalization! Unnecessary hyphenation!...um...pigs!

Yes, pigs, everyone's favorite raw material for bacon, finally are the subject of their own short. But these are not the lovable pigs you're used to. These are rough and tumble semi-natural pigs that make Hogzilla look like Babe, and make Babe look like some sort of high voiced, sheep-befriending wuss! You'll never look at your breakfast ham steak the same way again after you watch two boars butt heads in a vicious dispute over some semi-natural turf. And you'll abandon your ham steak altogether as you excuse yourself to go vomit in the bathroom once you witness the horrors of a pig process known as Parturition. Fortunately, a bewildering Scottish narrator is on hand to confuse the issue even further.

Mike, Kevin and Bill riff this one from the confines of their own semi-natural Pig-Park, which they have entitle Xanapig.

In working on Monkey See, Monkey Do: Verbs, we came across a rare find: a behind-the-scenes audio recording from the making of the film! Before submitting the material to a museum, where it belongs, we’ve transcribed the conversation: Producer Norman Bean and Director of Photography, Carl, working at the height of their craft. Enjoy!

Norman Bean: Carl, I’d like to talk to you about the footage you shot for our new educational short on verbs. I asked you to film, let’s see...a playground, a beach, a softball game, and the Fourth of July parade.

Carl: Ah, yep. I didn’t do any of that.

Norman Bean: I see that, Carl. It seems you just went to the zoo and filmed some monkeys.

Carl: Yep, sure did. They got some pretty good monkeys, down there at the zoo.

Norman Bean: In fact you only filmed them for about three minutes, and then looped that footage three times.

Carl: Did I? Heh, heh. Well, I was pretty stoned.

Norman Bean: This doesn’t teach anything. In fact it might make children dumber.

Carl: Norm, I got an 8-year old. He spent an hour yesterday playing with some tin foil he found in the bottom of his backpack. Kids are morons. They’ll watch anything. Let’s slap a crappy song on it and head to the strip club. “Strip” - now there’s a verb!

Norman Bean: Good Lord, I...okay. Okay, fine. This is not our proudest day.

Carl: Look at them monkeys scratch!
After serious consideration of the material, Mike, Kevin, and Bill implore you to - HOLY COW TAKE A LOOK AT THESE MONKEYS! THEY ARE FREAKING HILARIOUS

Life in Australia can be extremely hazardous. There's Tasmanian devil attacks, lethal doses of vegemite and large, bearded, drunken men. And that's just in the Parliament building!*
Once you head out into the bush - just allow that to sink in for a second - the dangers of a vest wearing man disparaging the size of your knife become that much more pronounced. Thus, if you plan on camping in Australia, Don't Be A Bloody Idiot: watch Don't Be A Bloody Idiot.
Mike, Kevin and Bill, (all of them Stickybeaks), pool their last Brass Razoo, try not to act like a bunch of Ockers and google "Australian slang" to find out what the hell we're talking about as they riff one of the finest 1970s Australian camping safety films they've ever seen: Don't Be A Bloody Idiot.
*We know they have a parliament because the Australian guy Bart prank calls goes to his local member of parliament to try to sort out the issue before turning to the prime minister.

When we first received Magical Disappearing Money we assumed it was an M.C. Hammer biopic. Fortunately, it turned out to be something even more pathetic and strange!
It’s the tale of a supermarket haunted by a witch, but not your standard-issue Hollywood witch. She’s more the “found her clothes in an oil puddle behind the Fashion Bug” kind of witch. The kind of witch who shows up at KFC five minutes before close, looking for free stale biscuits. You can bet she didn’t attend Hogwarts, but maybe its discount online equivalent, Pigzits.
Join the Grocery Witch as she takes Mike, Kevin, and Bill on a spooky* journey into the dark realm of insignificant savings! After Magical Disappearing Money, you’ll never waste money on extravagances like “fancy seasoned rice” again!**
*creepy
**you absolutely will, and are right to do so

Values: Understanding Ourselves is the tale of three small boys who find a rusty hubcap in an abandoned lot and take turns rubbing it and wishing for it to turn them into a fellow classmate. "Stop right there", you are no doubt saying. "If Hollywood decides to revisit that played out, 'three boys find a hubcap and rub it' plot one more time, I will just freak out man!!!"

Yes, by now it's a bit of a cliche. But we think you will find that this particular "Three boys and a hubcap" story brings something new to the table: complete and utter incoherence. The message, is ostensibly, "values". And it's quite likely that back in the fifties, the term "values" had an entirely different meaning, as did "gay" or "internet".* But we've been unable to discern that meaning. Our best guess so far is that it meant "nougat".
Join Mike, Kevin and Bill in the abandoned lot of your imagination, for Nougat: Understanding Ourselves.

*It meant "gay", oddly enough.

The Calendar. Whether you choose a Far Side page-a-day, an Anne Geddes year-of-horror or Twelve Months of Lifeguards that May Be Used as Flotation Devices, one thing is certain: none of us know how to use the damn things.
Fortunately, five minutes before recording The Calendar: How to Use It, the producers told a PA to pick up a guitar that he didn't know how to play and write some songs explaining the intricacies of the calendar. The result is quite possibly the most tuneless piece of garbage since The Beatles "Wild Honey Pie", except instead of the charming introductory act of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da", The Calendar: How to Use It has two spandex clad adults who intrude in a young girl's bedroom in a fashion that Antoine Dodson would disapprove of. Suffice to say, you will be far more confused about the calendar by the time the thing is done.
Mike, Kevin and Bill team up not only to riff this short, but also to open an eBay store selling vintage 1994 calendars, which are due to fully mature in value in 2017.

Our latest short takes its name from a famous quote from The Gospel of Matthew. Or maybe it was from the episode of Eek The Cat, "Eek vs the Flying Saucers." What's important is that even though our newest short derives its title from one of these two important works, its subject matter, the Attwater's Prairie Chicken, does not appear in either work (we're certain about the Eek the Cat episode, less up to speed on our book of Matthew.)
Yes, at the time the short was made, the Attwater's Prairie Chicken appeared to be Booming it's way towards extinction. The chickens' famed Booming grounds, where they once Boomed by the hundreds of thousands, had been paved over for a Showbiz Pizza, leaving them Boom-less. (After repeated viewings of the short, we think Booming refers to some sort of dice game.)
The short details the efforts of a few concerned citizens, with nothing, literally nothing better to do than to save some chickens who it appears were public enemy one of Natural Selection. Hastily taped cardboard boxes, helicopters mounted with huge Wile E. Coyote inspired nets and, yes, Booming, all figure prominently.
Mike, Kevin and Bill take a break from Booming to riff Unto the Least of These.

When you ponder ideal Christmas entertainment for children, do you think of a centuries-old tradition of violent puppetry, complete with domestic abuse and offensive minstrel-themed puppets thrashing each other? Well, you’d better--what’s that? That IS what you think of? Exactly that? Yes, well I realize I asked, but it was intended as a rhetorical question, really a set-up for a joke--what’s that? Oh, well I suppose that is a rather hackneyed structure for making a point, but...you know what, why don’t you just get the hell out of here!
For EVERYONE ELSE, Santa Claus’ Punch and Judy will serve as a disturbing, yet delightful, foray into puppet-based hate comedy that predates Jeff Dunham by hundreds of years! It’s a special treat, as avid Punch and Judy enthusiasts, known as “Punch men” (these people actually exist) have named this particular performance “the best to have come from the States” (this is an actual quote).
Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Santa Claus’ Punch and Judy: hilarious puppet mayhem that will have the kids laughing, and then sobbing in confusion, for years to come!

Do you like Courtesy? How about Egg Puns? After a few drinks, have you been known to expound at length about how Sheldon, the egg with legs, was truly the unsung hero of the US Acres segments of the late 80's animated show "Garfield and Friends"? Yes? You have? Then kindly stay away from us, as that is just a comedically specific quirk that we made up thinking that nobody could ever really have and it is really creepy that you actually do that.

Instead of drinking and lecturing us, why not tune into the latest RiffTrax short, Courtesy: A Good Eggsample. Forgoing human actors, as Tommy Wiseau did in "The Room", and instead replacing them with eggs, Courtesy: A Good Eggsample breaks bold new ground in the field of courtesy education. Mainly it does this through a relentless combination of groaning egg puns and horrible synth music, stopping briefly at the end to inform us that we've learned an important lesson about courtesy.

The stop-motion animation nature of the film leads us to believe that substantially more time was invested in this short than many of the ones we've done before, which makes it even more impressive that it fails to deliver a moral with even a shred of coherence. On the other hand, they resisted the urge to name the lead characters something as obvious as "Eggbert" and "Benedict."

This just in, I'm being informed that, no, they in fact did not resist that urge.

Mike, Kevin and Bill team up for eggseptional riffing on Courtesy: A Good Eggsample