This is totally more Keri bait (dude, do you even read emails?)…but here’s proving that I can judge a book by its cover:
RiffTrax vs. Cinematic Titanic…Mike vs. Joel…
RiffTrax
Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett
Audio tracks to be played while viewing DVDs
Advantage: New and dying-to-be-mocked films, Fred Willard, a library of over 50 flicks (including the Star Wars Christmas Special) and the completely necessary battle of the state quarters.
Cinematic Titanic
Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein , Mary Jo Pehl and Frank Conniff
MST3K-style DVD of bad Movie
Advantage: J. Elvis frickin’ Weinstein, visual gags
Winner (without actually sampling product): RiffTrax is strong, with 50 shows for easy download. However, if Cinematic Titanic can produce more than one video, they are the hands-down winners.
Since our home DVD player is also our home CD player, I cannot listen to any of the RiffTrax without expending effort (that’s haaard…waaah…and don’t get me started about watching on my computer). Then again, if Cinematic Titanic doesn’t appear on Netflix, there’s little chance I’ll see it anytime soon.
Take Home Message: Why can’t Mike and Joel just get along?
Note to Nelson: Write another novel. I loved Death Rat.
Rifftrax are pretty great, once you get the track synched to the movie, which can be a bother. I download the file into I-tunes, then just hook the computer speakers up and play the riff from the Mac whilst running the DVD. Top Gun is all sorts of awesome.
I would add Neal Patrick Harris as an advantage to the Rifftrax side.
Also, have you Netflixed The Film Crew? (can you even make a verb out of Netflix? oh heck, everything else gets verbed)
Nelson/Corbett/Murphy provide commentary for MST-grade movies. I suppose this was their answer to Cinematic Titanic. So far we’ve seen Giant of Marathon and Killers from Space. Pretty funny stuff, though not having the silhouettes in the lower right is all sorts of wrong, especially when the voices are the same.
They do some set pieces, too. I loved Bill Corbett’s re-enactment of the battle of Marathon with lunch meat and grapes.
Ah, thank you for pointing out the big gaping hole in my analysis…I was merely keeping in the spirit of uniformed criticism.
I’ve heard of The Film Crew, but didn’t see much mention of it at the RiffTrax site…they apparently have their own, separate site: http://www.filmcrewonline.com/
Still doesn’t have the apparent production values of CT. I’ll have to Netflixify it.