RiffTrax: One of God's high quality gifts

For anyone out there who loved Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Rexmous posted about RiffTrax earlier this month. The premise is -- well, there is no premise. Mike Nelson, head writer and eventual host of MST3K, has recorded MP3 files to go with movies. You play the files in synch with the movies, and proceed to laugh, if you have any kind of sense of humor whatsoever.

I put "Star Wars: Episode 1" at the top of my NetFlix queue, and had my first experience with it last night. Good stuff. The file consisted of Nelson and the guy who played servo the robot, basically doing the same thing they've always done and being funny about it.

In some ways, it's better than MST3K:

• Since they no longer have to buy royalties for movies, they can do whatever they want.
• The format gives them more freedom than they had with the old show, where they had to keep up the premise of Mike stranded in space with his robots, and shoe everthing into the same time format.

It's not perfect either. You can tell the guys don't have the same kind of support they used to have. 87 jokes about Jar Jar sucking your will to live is a bit much -- especially considering we all knew the character was a somewhat lacking, a somewhat racist, a somewhat huge sign of George Lucas refusing to care anymore, back in the last millenium.

And you can imagine that keeping a movie and accompanying MP3 file synchronized can be annoying. The MP3 kept getting ahead of the movie soundtrack, so I'd have to pause it every now and then to let the movie catch up.

They do have audio cues on the track to help you keep things in synch. There's also a program you can download if you watch the movie on the computer. No idea if it works, but I'll probably give it a try.

And it wasn't that much of a problem anyway. The comedy was good enough that I didn't care about the minor technical difficulties.

Obviously, this stuff costs money, between $3 and $2. Yeah, that'll be a huge to burden to all y'all, but do your best to cope.

I don't really have a "thumbs up" kind of slogan to sign off with here. So ... it's good. hooray.