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Former Host and Writer of MST3K Launches RiffTrax

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thu Jul 20, 2006 07:14 PM
from the invention-exchange dept.
Media Movies It's funny. Laugh. Sci-Fi
dougman writes "Today James Lileks mentioned his 'friend and all-around comic genius/good egg Michael J. Nelson' called, to tell him about his brilliant new project, RiffTrax. Here's the pitch: '...free-lance commentary tracks. Bottom line: Mystery Science Theater 3000-style commentary for big famous beloved movies like Titanic or The Matrix. The hitch: you have to provide the movie. It's genius: no worries about copyright. You buy the commentary tracks for $1.99, rent the movie or get it out of your collection, load the commentary on your iPod or burn it to a disk, then watch them together in true you-got-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate bliss. ... The first movie is Roadhouse." Cool! I voted for The Matrix as the next one to be riffed." While I (and many others I know) preferred Joel, Mike was not without his share of funny moments too. Without Crow and Servo it just might not be the same, though.
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Former Host and Writer of MST3K Launches RiffTrax 50 Comments More /

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  • Stay frosty, boys, we've got a flame war coming! Joel vs. Mike seen on radar, heading straight for us! Batten down the hatches, prepare all escape pods, brace for impact!

  • Not an original concept (Score:3, Informative)

    by EvanED (569694) <<evaned> <at> <gmail.com>> on Thursday July 20 2006, @07:22PM (#15753791)
    Might be better than your typical fan-made one of these, but there are other examples. One of which, I think the one I went looking for, was called DVD Tracks, but it seems to have went away... Here's a /. article about this though. [slashdot.org]

  • The dream of an MST3K reunion (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Flounder (42112) on Thursday July 20 2006, @07:27PM (#15753814)
    The site mentions the possibility of having other people join Mike on the commentaries. As far as we know, Mike has kept in touch with Trace Beaulieu (Crow S1-7), Bill Corbett (Crow S8-10) and Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo S2-10) and is still on good terms with them, so it's not impossible.
    • A reunion is not out of the question, but it would take a lot to bring it together. Many of the old props were sold off when Best Brains closed down its production facility and went to a licensing/merchandise business model.

      I'd really like to see more of the side projects, namely another book from Kevin Murphy. A Year at the Movies [amazon.com] blew me away.
      • A reunion is not out of the question, but it would take a lot to bring it together. Many of the old props were sold off when Best Brains closed down its production facility and went to a licensing/merchandise business model.

        Since this is audio only, wouldn't having the props be kind of pointless?
        But Mike and the bots have made appearances since the auctions (namely ESPN's Cheap Seats), so I'm assuming they put Crow and Tom Servo in cryogenic storage for such a day.

  • Sometimes silhouettes were funny (Score:5, Informative)

    by lawpoop (604919) on Thursday July 20 2006, @07:33PM (#15753839) Homepage Journal
    I think this is really great, but sometimes my favorite parts of MST3K were jokes they played with the silhouettes on the screen. In one of the Godzilla movies, there was a bird's-eye-view scene of some Japanese soldiers with round, white bubble-helmets on. Joel stood up, knocked on one of the helmets, and the soldier looked straight up into the camera! :D Classic.

  • This reminds me... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ephraimX (556000) on Thursday July 20 2006, @07:41PM (#15753864) Homepage
    ...of Wizard People, Dear Reader [illegal-art.org], a similar one-off project by Brad Neely; it's an audiobook-style replacement narrative for the first Harry Potter movie that, when synched up with the DVD (or DivX or whatever) makes for a freaking awesome movie.
  • Well, damn it. Buy them. Fast and all!

    Maybe some money will drag Joel in from whatever strange mountain cabin he's retreated to....

  • And for the multiple-tracked among us... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    it could get a trifle complicated if they put out a commentary to go with "The Wizard of Oz"...you know, playing the movie, the commentary AND "Dark Side of the Moon".
  • This should make all those movies on Oxygen channel easier to watch...
  • We had something like that here in the Denver area in the Seventies, in the form of a program called High Street that ran weekly on a small FM rock station. The performers were four students at the U of Denver (located on High Street, and yes, the double entendre was apt). It ran in the same time slot as the late-evening movie on a non-network TV station, and the idea was to turn the TV sound down and let the High Street guys provide the audio.

    They typically floundered for a few minutes until they'd settl

  • Share Crow with ShareCrow? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Robotech_Master (14247) on Thursday July 20 2006, @07:56PM (#15753922) Homepage Journal
    Don't forget you can use ShareCrow [sharecrow.net] to sync these commentaries easily if you have a Windows machine that uses compatible DVD player software.

    (And check Commentary Central [commentarycentral.co.uk] for a bunch of freebie alternate commentary tracks, including my own for Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro [terrania.us]...)

    • This raises a good question.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wowbagger (69688) on Thursday July 20 2006, @08:27PM (#15754028) Homepage Journal
      This raises a good question: what if the MST3K folk were to release their commentary as a file that, when combined with the correct DVD player, would place their overlayed silhouettes over the movie. BAM! All the advantages of MST3K, no copyright worries over the movie.

      Imagine the fun the bots could have with some of the real stinkers that have been released too recently to be available to them: MST3K of Waterworld, or of, well, any Adam Sandler movie.
      • [This raises a good question: what if the MST3K folk were to release their commentary as a file that, when combined with the correct DVD player, would place their overlayed silhouettes over the movie. BAM! All the advantages of MST3K, no copyright worries over the movie.]

        If only, but from comments and discussions re the "cleaned up movie" ruling the other day, this still may be a copyright violation. Go figure.

        all the best,

        drew
        (da idea man)
  • I love MST3K, see my screen name, but MST3K is dead. They should stop trying to re-package it into something less than the original. I'd be ecstatic if the full cast and crew got back together for more MST3K, but this feels desperate.

  • MST3K was great, but the hillariously bad movies were half the fun.

  • Two Dollars? (Score:3, Funny)

    by pete-classic (75983) <hutnick@gmail.com> on Thursday July 20 2006, @08:08PM (#15753954) Homepage Journal
    He should do "Beter Off Dead" next, since he wants his two dollars.

    -Peter

    PS: Remeber kids, there is no "-1: I don't get it." moderation option.
  • It appears that Mike Nelson must be a fan of Slashdot too.... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/30/145824 8 [slashdot.org].

    There are fans who do MST3K-style riffing, something like "commentaries". It would be cool to download some formatted overlays.

  • I'm very very interested in this..

    I think they should do the harry potter series..

    I don't consider my improv particularly good, but I kept my friends in stitches riffing on that schlocky piece of crap.

    Anyway.. .. the best way to get the commentary in would be something like imovie and its linux equivalents... for that you can't have DRM.

    so plz.. NO DRM okaaay?

    • No DRM (Score:5, Informative)

      by springbox (853816) on Friday July 21 2006, @01:15AM (#15754867)
      Anyway.. .. the best way to get the commentary in would be something like imovie and its linux equivalents... for that you can't have DRM.

      I just downloaded Road House from the site and it's in MP3 format. I doubt you have to worry about any DRM getting in the way.

  • No worries about copyright? In today's environment?

    If a "cut-list" for a DVD is considered possible copyright infringement as a "derivative work", you can sure as hell bet that a voice-over commentary intended for a DVD can be considered possible copyright infringement by today's overzealous copyright holders.

    Dlugar

    • Parody and Criticism exceptions to the code. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by plasmacutter (901737) on Thursday July 20 2006, @08:37PM (#15754065) Journal
      Without actually embedding them in video feed youre not reproducing the work

      There are also numerous examples and case courses resolved against copyright holders in cases of parody and criticism.

      Nelson has a mountain of case law on his side, but youre right, i wouldnt put it past these people.
    • In your comment about the "cut list" I think you must be referring to the 'cleaned DVDs' topic of a few days ago, and I think you're misunderstanding that ruling.

      What was prohibited in that case was the reproduction that Clean Flicks was doing in order to produce the edited versions. They were taking a movie, editing it, and then selling the edited version -- yes, they were selling each edited version packaged along with an unedited version, but they were reproducing the film just the same. That's where they ran into copyright problems.

      Other companies who took a different tactic towards the problem, and avoided the reproduction step (by delivering to the customer an EDL that would cause the player to fast forward through various 'offensive' parts) were allowed under the ruling [newsblaze.com].

      There's a pretty good analysis of the verdict on FindLaw [findlaw.com], which isn't too long and is worth reading. In particular: "The defendants also argued that they were protected by the so-called "first sale" doctrine ... [they] failed to win on this affirmative defense, because they were not just dealing in the hard copy, but rather making copies of it." (Emphasis mine.)

      If you're willing to spend some more time reading things actually written by folks who have law degrees, I recommend this substantial article from the Georgetown Law Journal [findarticles.com], which was written in 2004 and examines the viability under copyright law of several video-censoring technologies, including old-school razorblade tape splicing, CleanFlicks-type digital editing, and EDL-based 'skip over' systems.

      Although CleanFlicks no longer offers the edited copies of DVDs, another company, ClearPlay, still offers an EDL-based product [clearplay.com] (which IMO is a much more elegant solution to the problem anyway, since it lets you pick what types of smut you personally dislike), as can be seen on their website.

      This type of on-the-fly editing is legal, and was clarifed as such by President Bush's passing of the "Family Movie Act of 2005," which specifically allows you to make changes to an authorized copy of a motion picture, as long as you don't create a fixed copy of the edited version. The best part of the law? It's not limited purely to obscenity edits; according to one Forbes article [forbes.com], it could be used just as easily to protect a fan's removal of the more obnoxious parts of Star Wars Episode 1 as it could the removal of Kate Winslet's nudity from Titanic. (Sadly, apparently the technology can't replace Jar Jar Binks with a naked Kate Winslet. Yet.)

      So the next time you think that G.W. hasn't done anything for you, it seems that he may have let some good slip through after all.

  • Speaking of which... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by identity0 (77976) on Thursday July 20 2006, @08:31PM (#15754048) Journal
    Hey, speaking of amusing but uninformative MP3s (just kidding, guys... :-) ), when are you guys at Slashdot going to restart Geeks In Space, or at least restore the archives? In case you haven't noticed, many of the old MP3s are missing from thesync.com. It's wierd, some of the MP3 files seem to have been replaced with a tribute page for a deceased person sometime in 2004.

    Can you please host the whole archive of shows again?

    And new shows would be good, too. I'd love to hear Cliff rant on about the name Wii, or Taco get cranky over Vista.

    And to not be totally offtopic... I can't be the only one who thinks it won't be the same without the shadows in the corner. Especially not without the robots. What I would love to see, though, is a group of totally insane people like the cast of SeaLab 2021 commenting on the movies.

  • Lame (Score:2, Informative)

    by Lane.exe (672783)
    As anyone good Austinite knows, The Sinus Show [sinusshow.com] guys have been doing this for a while now, and while they aren't MST3K (for copyright reasons), I've never left a Sinus Show without a stomach ache from laughing so much.

  • Joel vs Mike... Sigh... (Score:5, Informative)

    by John Fulmer (5840) on Thursday July 20 2006, @09:33PM (#15754284)
    CowboyNeal *DOES* know that Mike was a writer on the show from season 1 on, and the head writer starting season 2, right.

    That's one thing that I've never understood about the Joel vs Mike thing.... The writing staff was pretty much the same for both (with the huge exception of Frank Conniff leaving. Things were never quite as.... surreal afterward).

    jf

    • Re:Good idea but... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by icebike (68054) on Thursday July 20 2006, @07:44PM (#15753876)
      Maybe a MythTV plugin would be in order.

      Record the show and wait an hour or 5 before playback and you could have Henry Kissinger pitching snide remarks to Gretta Van Susteran while watching War of the Worlds.

      Wait a month and you could have some really cool total-replacement sound tracks of Bush calling a world cup game.

      • Maybe a MythTV plugin would be in order.

        Record the show and wait an hour or 5 before playback and you could have Henry Kissinger pitching snide remarks to Gretta Van Susteran while watching War of the Worlds.

        Wait a month and you could have some really cool total-replacement sound tracks of Bush calling a world cup game.

        Maybe even better would be a plugin or player that also allowed the overlay of video from another source (e.g. the silouhettes, as an mpg file) in addition to just sound.

        • Actually it's pretty trivial to do this with a recorded audio and video file in Quicktime Player. (Yes, yes...I know, the Slashdot hivemind hates QT Player.) I don't know whether you have to buy -- *cough*typeinserialnumber*cough* -- it in order to do this or not, but you just open your audio track in one player window, hit Cmd-A, Cmd-C to select and copy it, then go back to the video and paste it in. It's been a while since I've done this, but I think you can even do this so that it pastes the audio into a

    • Re:No worries? (Score:4, Informative)

      by kidgenius (704962) on Thursday July 20 2006, @07:51PM (#15753905)
      All this is, is an additional commentary act. The original sounds of the movie are coming off the dvd that you provide. There is nothing that should stop me from sitting in a room, making a recording on my comments of the movie, and then releasing it. Granted, entities such as Major League Baseball are currently trying to prevent people from providing their own sportscasts of baseball games. Not sure all the details there, but this maybe, eventually, could be prohibited. Let's hope not.
    • IANAL. Don't diffs contain some of the original source? That is why it would violate the GPL. If you could somehow diff the GPL source without having any of the original source in the diff, i bet it would be compatible with the GPL. Similarly, as long as you don't include any of hte original movie soundrack in your riff, I can't see why it would violate copyright.

      -matthew
    • It wouldn't be legal for somebody to release diffs (or say an ed script such that it contains none of the unmodified code) for the linux kernel under a GPL-incompatible license

      Is that so? I think it would be legal. A derivative work isn't just something that couldn't have been made without the original, it has to incorporate some part of the original.
    • This isn't analogous to releasing diffs or modified code. If you want to use your linux code analogy, it would be similar to someone writing a lot of non-technical comments and opinions about the code and releasing the comments, but not any actual code. Because the person wrote all of the comments himself and did not include any of the code (modified or unmodified), I don't think he isn't breaking any licensing agreements.

    • Re:No worries? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ClamIAm (926466) on Thursday July 20 2006, @08:50PM (#15754115)
      IANAL. However, my completely IANAL-ish opinion is that these are not copyright infringement, and fall in the realm of fair use. I say this because I believe this type of work is nearly the same thing as writing a review of a movie, or posting some facts about a movie.

      Most movie reviews are very similar to an additional audio track, save for the fact that one is designed to be synced up to the movie, and the other is written on paper. Reviews often comment on aspects of the film, such as a specific scene or a recurring theme or something. The only real difference an audio track has is, once again, the fact that it is designed to be played along with the film.

      Posting facts about a movie is also considered fair use. You can say "this movie is two hours long", or "the lens looks messed up in these scene", and this is not infringement. An audio track seems to be very similar to this.

      Other types of media also follow these rules. It is not infringement to say "this painting is ten feet tall", or "Mark Knopfler used a Gibson Les Paul when he recorded 'Money for Nothing'". It is also not infringement to say "Charles Dickens sucks".

      There's even prior art: Dark Side of the Moon [wikipedia.org].

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