Officially Cool: Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic

Posted by Brian C. Gibson (brian@filmschoolrejects.com) on September 18, 2008

A long, long time ago…(last week I think) I mentioned a twentieth anniversary set for Mystery Science Theater 3000. I am a huge fan of the series, and I did like the Film Crew spin-off. So when I was instructed by an FSR reader to check out some more stuff from the MST3K gang, I was floored. I am totally out of the loop here.

Rifftrax are awesome, it is kind of like a do it yourself MST3K. The artists, comprised of original MST3K cast plus guest riffers, basically record an audio track that you can download. You then burn the audio to CD and sync it up with your DVD movie. They have other options for people who can’t understand the concept, but it is awesome. Each track is about $2.99-3.99, which is totally affordable for the kind of comedy you are getting. This reminds me of the Harry Potter stuff from Brad Neely, look it up if you have no idea what I’m talking about.

Cinematic Titanic is basically the second coming of MST3K, they actually call it “movie riffing 2.0.” The Cinematic Titanic crew is comprised of Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein, Mary Jo Pehl and Frank Conniff. The concept is just the same, the site holds to a familiar strategy…”Cinematic Titanic’s focus is to riff on the movies we love, which are ‘the unfathomable’, ‘the horribly great’, and the just plain ‘cheesy’ movies from the past.”

I feel like I am totally out of touch here. I am really happy though that these were brought to my attention, I now have several things to keep me busy for a while.

If you have any suggestions for our Officially Cool feature, please send an email over to Brian@filmschoolrejects.com.

| | Read more articles by Brian C. Gibson