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Former Host and Writer of MST3K Launches RiffTrax
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.
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.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
...of Wizard People, Dear Reader, 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.
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
They used to have a radio show that did voice-overs for Star Trek in the LA area.
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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.
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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.
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.
I was appalled when I saw how MST3K was made, that they have a group of writers sitting around brainstorming moment by moment what comment to make off the wall, then put it all in sequence to a script, and then rerecord the whole things with the shadow puppets and styrofoam. I was like, you got to be joking...
I do this peanut gallery shit in realtime, the first time, every time, and more often than not my warped sense of snide and slapstick humor makes the MST3K stuff seem lame like a spagetti noodle (sometimes they have their moments now and then and I bust the crap out laughing). I'm sure there are plenty of college students out there that can best or even top me... some really warped redhead girls...
I stopped watch MST3K because its soooo long and boring for the most part. You want to watch good comedy that moves at a pace thats not glacial, go for the AdultSwim mix stuff... Sealab, Drawn Together, Aqua Teen, etc...
MST3K had a good idea, get really corny movies and add a peanut gallery, but frequently the movies just aren't corny enough, or the main problem, they show the WHOLE THING start to finish. Some serious editing needs to be done to cut out a lot of the deadzones and keep the laughter going...
For example, Prince of Space. Prince of Space started out hillarious as hell. But then it just went on and on, like a David Letterman joke, and after a while you were like oh stop already... god this sucks...
einstein
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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 new layer rather than mixing it with the existing audio, so that you can turn it off and on at will.
You can also do the opposite and add the video to the audio, which is advantageous if you want to use the "paste and scale" option: Quicktime can paste in a video track and alter its timing so that it ends up being the same length as the track it's being pasted into, which is very helpful if you have two tracks that are supposed to be the same length and in sync, but they've gotten desynced during processing somehow. (This used to happen a lot in the bad pre-HandBrake days of DVD ripping on the Mac, when you had to process the audio and video tracks separately.)
The only problem with this method is that the resulting file is a Quicktime MOV (not an MP4) regardless of the format of the original video, which is sure to lead to bitching from PC users if you send it to them.
You can also do fun things like paste music overtop of video to see if it matches up (I recommend 2001: A Space Odyssey and Pink Floyd's Meddle, personally).
I don't know of any way to do this with incoming streams, save just playing one in the background in your streaming audio player application, while watching the video in front with its audio turned down.
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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.
... [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.)
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.
There's a pretty good analysis of the verdict on FindLaw, 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
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, 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 (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, 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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."