For years, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett, and Michael J. Nelson have riffed on newer movies, often huge theatrical hits, in their work at RiffTrax. But now, the trio are returning to Mystery Science Theater 3000 for four new episodes, dubbed “The RiffTrax Experiments.” But how did they go about picking these movies, and how come they’ve only announced three of the four?
We spoke to Murphy (Tom Servo) and Corbett (Crow T. Robot) about this very thing ahead of the first of these episodes, Sting of Death, debuting in select cinemas through Fathom Entertainment on September 9 and 13.
NERDIST: I’ve talked to you a few times about RiffTrax, but now going back to Mystery Science Theater 3000, how hard is it to find the movies? Obviously, you can’t do a ton of new movies, because that’s more of a RiffTrax thing. How hard at this point was it to find a movie you guys hadn’t done already? And were there a billion that were backlogs from when you were making the old show?
KEVIN MURPHY: I’d say surprisingly easy. I mean, we picked through a lot of things and we got very picky because we didn’t want to do it unless we absolutely loved the film. And we had some disappointments along the way, things that we thought we might be able to do that we couldn’t.
But I mean, the first one, Sting of Death, is exemplary. It’s like a classic MST movie. You’ve got a rubber monster, you’ve got teens dancing to rock and roll.
BILL CORBETT: The rock and roll of Neil Sedaka.
KM: And goofy costumes and goofy characters and corny as hell and taking itself very seriously. So it was the perfect straight person for us. And they all just ended up lining up and it’s a great set of movies. They’re all sort of different genres or sub-genres, which is nice. So we got a little of everything there.
BC: We definitely took more care choosing the movies for this because there are things we do for riff tracks occasionally, even when we cut out the naughty bits that just don’t feel right for the vibe of MST3K. Maybe a little too violent, a little too soft core porny, just unpleasant. And I’d say also, correct me if I’m wrong, Kevin, we wanted to make sure that these movies looked good. We occasionally do stuff that’s technically subpar. And we do have at least two shorts accompanying the movies that challenge that a little because they’re older. But for the full feature, we wanted to have stuff that wasn’t hard to look at for a long time, especially on the big screen.
KM: Another distinction from the old days is now everyone has soundbars are 5.1. And for the premier episode for Fathom, we’re doing this in Dolby Atmos in 4K video. So it seems a little crazy. So the movie has to sound good to begin with. And technically we wanted them up to a certain degree of spec and we got that.
NERDIST: The movie you’re debuting in cinemas is William Grefé‘s Sting of Death, which I frankly have never even heard of, so that’s exciting to me.
BC: Yesssss. Have you heard of the other ones we’ve announced?
NERDIST: I have. I went through a weird Roger Corman phase a while back so I’ve seen both Deathsport and Space Raiders. But one of the four episodes still hasn’t been announced. Why is that?
BC: We held one in reserve. And honestly, I’m saying people have been asking me, ‘you probably have a really big title to announce. It’s going to be something that everybody knows.’ No, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s like nobody will know this movie. Really what we wanted to do is just have a little bit of mystery to it. Kind of because that’s how we used to do it. We used to get into the show every week and the movie would be announced in the show itself, unless you maybe had a TV Guide that got ahead of it. I don’t know.
But there’s a little squeamish part of me about announcing the titles in advance. Like, oh, everybody’s going to watch them now? They’re going to think the jokes out and write down the ones they expect. I mean, that’s a little paranoid, but it is part of the reveal of a show is like, “Here, we’re introducing you to this very weird movie.”
And you can watch the first of these very weird movies beginning September 9 in select cinemas, with encore screenings September 13.
The post How MST3K: THE RIFFTRAX EXPERIMENTS Selected Its Movies appeared first on Nerdist.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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