Back from the Satellite of Love

I was a huge fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 during the '90s.

For some reason there are few things more entertaining to me that (half)witty repartee between a human and three robots during especially bad movies.

That's why I was so excited to read in the Star today (yes, dammit, I still read the Star) that MST3K's head writer/host Mike Nelson is reviving the concept in downloadable MP3 format.

The project/website is called RiffTrax. The idea is that you buy an audio track of Nelson's smarmy comments about, say, Road House, and then play the track in sync with the DVD playing on you home TV.

Check out the sample on RiffTrax, which has chestnuts like "Ah, ya have to irritate an old guy at least once a day, otherwise what's life good for?"

The timing couldn't be better for Nelson to launch this project. Thanks to iTunes and podcasting, audio downloads have become de rigueur. And thanks to the nature of the Internet, Nelson will be able to take advantage of low overhead to capture a long tail market that can't be served by traditional distribution.

And let's face it, there's lots of bad movies to draw material from these days. I mean, how did the black community let the Wayans brothers release Little Man?

Anyway, sign me up for RiffTrax. I have a feeling Nelson is going to clean up with this, especially when he discovers how to sell subscriptions to the service over iTunes so that we get automatic downloads of the latest riffs.

tagged: video, MST3K, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Mike Nelson, podcast, audio, pop culture, RiffTrax, Road House, Little Man