‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ Cast Wants Your Help To Riff On Hollywood
The cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000, or MST3K, wants your help in riffing on Hollywood.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a team of actors who appear as a silhouette in a makeshift movie theater and poke fun at bad films. However, since the copyright laws became more strict, they have had to switch tactics and turn to internet sound files via RiffTrax that you play as you watch the film. Various talents have also lent their voices to the project, including Doug Walker, the man behind thatguywiththeglasses.com and some of its more popular video series including The Nostalgia Critic and Bum Reviews.
For the moment, however, the MST3K crew can only afford to poke fun at movies in the public domain or with cheap rights. They want to take on the big-budget films like Twilight and The Hunger Games, but the costs of doing so are just too high. Hollywood doesn’t want its films made fun of, and the rights to such films come with a steep price.
On the most part, if you have competent DVD burning software you can buy and download a file off RiffTrax and burn it to a DVD, or you can watch it on your laptop or iPad or whatever, but licensing costs are too prohibitive for more recent blockbusters.
In order to afford the licensing rights to the major films, the MST3K crew has been raising funds through Kickstarter to make their dream of riffing on films like Twilight a reality. They want to be able to do more than just sound files for all of the big films.
Mike Nelson of MST3K and RiffTrax has said that the aim is to riff only on films that are unintentionally bad, like Tommy Wisseau’s The Room, or bad movies that take themselves too seriously. Films that try to be funny but fail are just too hard to riff on, so don’t be expecting a RiffTrax file on Disaster Movie any time soon.
In the meantime, the people behind RiffTrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000 want to help everybody else out with their own take as well, so don’t hesitate to give them a chance to make you one of the voices behind RiffTrax.
What do you think of the goal behind MST3K‘s RiffTrax?
