Just in time for the holidays, RiffTrax presents our take on A Visit to Santa, a Christmas short of unknown origin that most probably was the result of Santa's short-lived collaboration with the producing team of Screwtape and Wormwood. Rather than being a right jolly old elf, Santa here is depicted as the Dark Prince of a vast slave empire made up entirely of children under 10 - it's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with less dignified clothing. Or put another way it's Manos: The Hands of Fate without the elephantiasis.

Young Jim is caught in a shocking act of pencil-based vandalism, leading him to look deeply into the core of his soul and come to the inexorable conclusion that he is kind of a weenie. A classic of the late '40's, "authority figure shames a student" genre,

Act Your Age is a window into the soul... of Jim. And it makes a great RiffTrax!

Meet Phil. Like all children from the fifties, he enjoys playing ball, building soapbox racers, and taunting his non blond-haired, blue-eyed classmates. Things are going great for Phil until a puppet shows up in his class. The Puppet, Ichabod Dorian Bungle III, or "Mister" to his friends, delivers a powerful lesson about lunch room safety, that no matter how much Phil tries, he is unable to forget. Soon our hero is haunted by the omnipresent demons of Mister Bungle, and begins a descent into madness that has him endlessly washing his hands, and nerdily saving his dessert for last.

Mike, Kevin and Bill team up to riff "Beginning Responsibility: Lunchroom Manners" and hopefully stop the classroom menace that is Mister Bungle, once and for all!

Heroin, it turns out, is bad. The Terrible Truth lays waste to the all-too-common myth that regular heroin use is a healthy part of a balanced diet. Professional scowler Judge William B. McKesson guides us through a case study of Phyllis Howard (no relation to Curly) who tries marijuana and quickly begins vacuuming up Charlie Parker-levels of Mexican black tar heroin.

Kevin, Mike and Bill ride this pony for all it's worth

At long last, the question of the ages is met head on. No facet of the issue is left unexplored. The philosophical, eschatological, teleological, epistemological, and cosmological aspects are all given a thorough exegetical going over. Just one viewing of this ground breaking short will see you fully prepared to engage the weighty issues and answer confidently and with authority when someone asks, Why Doesn't Cathy Eat Breakfast? To further expand your mind, RiffTrax is proud to offer you the weirdest thing ever - weirder than a million Crispin Glovers starring in a million remakes of The Wicker Man - a short subject called Petaluma Chicken. If you have any interest in omelet making history, you owe it to yourself to see this.

Mike, Kevin, and Bill will be your guides through this hugely important double feature

The youth of today, no longer content to roll a hoop with a stick, play endless hours of mumbly peg, or work a lathe at a factory 14 hours a day for just pennies, need something to occupy them. Crime sprees are not the whole answer. No, they need a place where they can rap, just let it all hang out, encounter one another, preferably over terrible boiled coffee. The short Coffeehouse Rendezvous makes a strong case that what these kids need is a coffeehouse rendezvous.

Mike, Kevin and Bill remain unconvinced.

Your home is crawling with hazards! You are not safe! EVERYTHING WILL KILL YOU! In fact, never mind, because you're already dead; killed by your stupid house. That, at least, is the heartwarming message of the short Safety: Harm Hides at Home. "But RiffTrax," you say, "many shorts have already exposed the obvious truth that my home is a deadly, sinister trap, ready to spring at any moment. What's so great about this one?" Aha! Do other shorts feature the groovy safety dominatrix Guardiana? Well, one other one does, but then so does this one!

So buy it and laugh* along with Mike, Kevin and Bill.

*A thin, strangled laugh designed to cover up your growing panic as you realize your house is trying to murder you.

It's time to face the question head on, to stop pretending that the crowds of people following you, jeering, throwing rocks and half-eaten burritos are there because of your charm and animal charisma. You've suspected it for some time, from the moment you were rejected by CompuServe because you just weren't cool enough.

The short Are You Popular? will help you solve the question once and finally: the question, "Are you popular?" There are no easy answers, friends (that is, the answer is "no", of course, which is not always easy to hear) but Mike, Kevin and Bill are more than happy to be your guides.

Cruel self-assessment is given a new twist as vulnerable grade-schoolers are forced to look into the deep blackness of their own souls only to reach the inevitable conclusion that they are unloved and they will spin out their meaningless years on this drifting rock before dying alone and afraid.

And there's clowns!

The affable John is our tour guide through this carnival mirror nightmare, and at the end, as we babble on cold and terrified like Nietsche's madman ("Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker?") we're just glad that Mike, Kevin and Bill were there to mop up the despair!

Do you find that you're sleeping a little too well as of late? That your dreams are of the innocuous stripe, i.e., old friends turning into llamas and eating your baseball hat, rather than full out, scream-yourself-awake nightmares followed by 15 minutes of sweating and shallow breathing interrupted by occasional anxiety-induced "whale flips" that rip the covers off your significant other?

Well, then we've got a short for you! One Got Fat is the real deal - a concentrated dose of lab-purified nightmare fuel. To give away too much would be to blunt the surprise of your upcoming trauma... but here's a hint: A teeming sea of pre-adolescent ur-monkeys are murdered one by one, all to the whimsical narration of the lubricious Edward Everett Horton! Yay!

Mike, Bill and Kevin are there with you, shivering in terror in the dark.

There are so many things to which drugs can be compared that to even attempt to catalog them would be an act of incomprehensible madness. Yet in this pastel colored, 1970's nightmare, two hard-of-hearing, loggorrheic pre-teens are up to the task! Have you always wondered, Are drugs like pumpkins? Like small willow saplings? Like those bags of cotton candy you can buy in gift shops? Find out as Mike, Kevin and Bill go once more unto the breach!

If you like your safety shorts served with a heavy dose of groovy, then this is for you! Down and Out lays out a litany of dangers inherent in your every move from one location to the other, no matter how small. Bone-shattering death awaits around every corner. Every surface, every object, every molecule conspires with all others on earth to kill you dead! See your own tragic fate played out again and again, all backed up by a smooth drum-based soundtrack. You WILL die in an accident, but Down and Out will make the few moments until you do all the more pleasant. Mike, Kevin and Bill share the pain.

When you hear the word "patriotism" what's the first name that pops into your head? Wrong! The answer is Bob Crane. And not "Hogan's Heroes" Bob Crane, but rather creepy, post-"Hogan's Heroes" Bob Crane, home video, um, "pioneer". There is no one - NO ONE - better equipped to imbue America's youth with a sense of pride in their magnificent country - you know, once you get past the overwhelming, suffocating creepiness. Fear not, feelings of discomfort soon turn to laughter thanks to true patriots Mike, Kevin and Bill.

Snoopy, Lassie, Cerberus, Rin-Tin-Tin: lovable canine companions are a dime a dozen. Which makes Skipper: The Racist Dog such a breath of fresh air! Tired of "PC" dogs who "like" children and "accept" other mutts without passing judgment? Well then, Skipper is the dog for you! He humps the leg of intolerance and takes a good long sniff at bigotry's...er, tail! Will Skipper's titular lesson be learned in time to redeem him in the eyes of his fellow dogs? Or will he be condemned to sit alone on his porch, muttering about the way things used to be? Find out, in Mike, Kevin and Bill's hilarious riff of Skipper Learns a Lesson.

Buying food - how hard can it be? You go to a store pick out a few items, and start mashing them into the side of your head, right? WRONG! That's a common misconception, but as Buying Food clearly demonstrates, buying food is a very, very dangerous and complicated affair, fraught with hazard, the path to success Byzantine and arduous. To even attempt it without instruction is to court heartbreak and, most likely, violent death. Lucky for all of us there is Buying Food. Kevin, Mike, and Bill take it very seriously.

Right or Wrong tells the gritty story of Harry, a boy who doesn't vandalize a warehouse and suffers the consequences for it. Harry, who resembles a younger, less handsome French Stewart, undertakes a philosophical journey, where every character he meets routinely pauses mid-conversation in order to deliver a 30 second internal monologue about Right and Wrong. (This was normal in his community, they eventually traced the problem back to the nearby Play-Doh factory offloading into their water supply.)

Parents be warned: This being an educational film about vandalism, some minor breaking of windows may occur.

Mike, Kevin and Bill riffing this short: Right or Wrong? (Answer: Wrong, but fun, therefore Right)

Women - what the hell, man? I mean, what's your problem? Thankfully, for all of us non-women, some very smart people have put their best be-crew-cutted minds into coming up with a solution to the trouble with women (to avoid a conflict of interests, no women contributed, thank goodness). The Trouble with Women doesn't give us the definitive answer, but it does give us some very useful tools for dealing with... them. Mike, Kevin, and Bill (themselves NOT women) are your guides through this indispensable short.

Bill Duncan had it all until the day when he discovered that his garbage cans had been deemed unfit for use by the city sanitation committee. The deep shame of this incident drove him into a spiral of despair and nearly claimed his life until he realized the great truth of suburban America: His problems were the fault of his neighbor. The rats in the lumber pile, the pestilence breeding in standing water pools in the backyard, his sure thing horse breaking its leg coming out of the gate, resulting in the pawning of his sons bicycle: They weren't his fault! It must be the neighbors!

Take a journey of neighborly blame with three of the finger-pointingist, buck-passingist neighbors you know—Mike, Kevin and Bill!

“Each Child Is Different” goes the saying, and no truer words have ever been spoken. Take Miss Smith's fifth grade class for instance. While Elizabeth is withdrawn and silent because of parental neglect, Ruth is withdrawn and silent because her mother died soon after the birth of her brother. Yes, just like Wes Anderson's latest, each character has a delightful quirk! Go in depth with five unique misfits, in a wonderful comedic stew of bullying, dyslexia, fire starting and bean-feeding. Our own three unique misfits are on hand for riffing.

Years in the spotlight had left Kitty with fame, riches, and a drug habit to rival all but the Busey-ist of addicts. Hooked on catnip, Kitty quickly found herself alone on the street, fishing quarters out of the gutter in hopes of landing her daily fix of The 'Nip. It seemed as if she had hit rock bottom when she shot a delivery man in cold blood, only to find out that he was unloading crates of oregano, not catnip. Kitty knew she needed to get Cleaned Up, and she enrolled into the finest 12 step program in the country, hoping to patch her life back together.

Kitty Cleans Up...is not that story. It's about some creepy kid with the voice of a forty year old who decides that good hygiene practices are best learned by imitating a cat. Mike, Kevin and Bill have of course known this for years, and help get the message out in one of the oddest RiffTrax shorts to date

Why Vandalism? It's the one question that kept parents in the fifties up at night. Why would my boy turn to vandalism for thrills when they could be listening to Burl Ives 45s or campaigning for Adlai Stevenson? While they were pondering this, their boys were out vandalizing things. This short follows three boys—Jeff, Ron & Burger—who spend all their time hanging out together, complaining that none of them have any friends. Their positive attitude, combined with Burger's poverty, Ron's overbearing parents, and Jeff's bone-crushing stupidity, ensure that their descent into a vortex of vandalism will be a rapid one.

If you've ever asked yourself "Why Vandalism?" or even just "Why?", you owe it to yourself to watch this short and get the answers you deserve! Mike, Kevin & Bill are on hand to riff this classic short from the wrong side of the tracks

If you were told you were about to see a film that contained turtles bigger than men, cliff-diving Mexicans and a family that eats Thanksgiving dinner underwater, you'd probably complain "But I don't like David Lynch!" Wrong you would be! You'd actually be all set to watch the 100 percent Lynch-free Aqua Frolics, a short from the 1950's whose message is clear: here is a partial list of things you can do that involve a proximity to and/or immersion in water.

No doubt a response to the Land Council's propaganda film "Dryness: Stay On Land to Achieve It", Aqua Frolics will have you itching to strap on a life preserver and tuck into a drumstick in your neighbors swimming pool. Known frolickers Mike, Kevin and Bill are on hand for their dampest riffing session yet.

Washing your hands after using the restroom - most of us only do so because a fellow co-worker is in the bathroom with us, and we wonder if he'll tell other people if we don't. But evidently, we should be doing this even when a co-worker isn't there.

For many of us, Good Eating Habits boil down to a simple rule: avoid any food whose name ends in "-ator" or "-o-rama". But fifty years ago, in an era food historians refer to as "Pre GoGurt", what constituted a Good Eating Habit wasn't as widely known. Was cleaning your plate always necessary? When was the proper time for snacks? And did Johnny Miller really see the lunch lady’s glass eye fall into the casserole when he went to the bathroom during Social Studies?

These questions and more are answered in classic "Do the Opposite of This Guy" mode by Bill, a young child whose eating habits were the inspiration for the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character. Mike, Kevin and Bill are on-hand to riff the appetizing, food-like loaf of a short that is Good Eating Habits!

You think you don't have syphilis, but how do really know? Has anyone you trust told you you don't have it? Have you been in contact with anyone from a big city in, say, the last year? Then you almost certainly have it! Talk to your doctor immediately, or at the very least, a silver-haired white guy with an authoritative voice. He will put your shame under a microscope and make you look at it and if that doesn't change your ways, than I don't know what!

Or you can just watch RiffTrax latest hilarious short subject Know For Sure.

Can't anyone tell me what Christmas is all about!? an exasperated Charlie Brown once asked. Well, pace Linus van Pelt, the true meaning of Christmas—according to Christmas Toyshop—is a criminally incompetent father, a drug-dispensing demon of the night, and a bored and detached Santa who spins magic mushroom induced fables to two captive children. Other beloved Christmas themes include war, a killing spree, and an attempted murder suicide by an arachnid—in easy-to-view cartoon form!

Shyness—for years it has prevented boys from becoming men and girls from landing men. How can shyness be conquered? By imitating those who are better than you: the popular children. This is the advice that the New Kid in School receives from his father: alter who you are to make people who don't know you like you more. It must be good advice; after all, the man is wearing a suit. Watch TV’s Dick York—the first Darrin from Bewitched—try to overcome his shyness by putting on a sweater in Shy Guy, riffed by Mike, Kevin and Bill. (Dick Sargents need not apply.)

Do you find yourself in a constant state of niggling self criticism, e.g., "I bet everyone is laughing at me just because I have a waffle stuck to my back", or "I know it's the right thing to do, but will people look down on me because I jar, meticulously label and store my urine in the root cellar?" If so, may I call you "Self-Conscious Guy" or would that make you feel self-conscious, you ugly, over-sensitive little self-conscious guy?! (Don't cry, it's part of your therapy.) Learn to deal with your freakishly abhorrent personality disorder by watching, along with your life coaches Mike, Kevin and Bill, Self-Conscious Guy.

Fear: Most of us rejected it in the mid-90s by wearing trendy t-shirts emblazoned with slogans such as "Second Place is the First Loser." This national "No Fear" campaign almost single-handedly eradicated Fear from our streets. Unfortunately, one day America woke up and realized just how gut-wrenchingly lame those t-shirts were. The shame quickly gave way to a much more powerful emotion: Fear.

Yes, Fear has returned to our society, which makes the message of the 1950 educational short Overcoming Fear all the more important. It teaches us that your Fears are irrational, and are best confronted head-on. It features the greatest locker room confrontation scene since a be-toweled Iceman called out Maverick, nerds standing up for what they believe in, and a dog so terrifying, it makes Cujo look like the Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

What better way for Mike, Kevin and Bill to Overcome their Fear of Overcoming Fear than by riffing the short Overcoming Fear!

"You would like to play with Donny and Duncan." So the narrator for Playing Together confidently tells us, and we have no reason to doubt him. But as the minutes pass it becomes clear that he may have been overselling Donny and Duncan just a bit.

Donny, as it turns out, has trouble navigating life, from the smallest things (he's confused and frightened by the rules posted at a public pool) to larger problems, including the question of evil (his favorable reaction to aquatic clowns makes it clear that his moral compass is broken and he may even be a dangerous psychopath.)

Duncan tries, he really does, to curb Donny's dangerous habit of clinging to every stick he finds like a lab monkey clings to his wire mother, but Donny is too far gone, and Duncan's helplessness and rage is beginning to show.

But what makes it all work is the constant, tuneless piano noodling. Because of it, the narrator wins in the end: Kevin, Mike and Bill would like to play with Donny and Duncan.

It's a question we ponder every time we tip the pizza guy: How much affection? Is it necessary to set the box down before embracing him? How long do you hold him, knowing that he has other deliveries to make? Can lower tips be compensated for with more affection? How Much Affection? sadly touches on none of these issues; its Pizza Guy advice comes from the "30 Minutes or Free" era and is therefore quite out of date. What you will find in this short are dates that end in tears, sandwich making and a stern reminder of the potential Gerber-eating consequences of Too Much Affection.

Riffers Mike, Kevin and Bill differ wildly in their estimates of How Much Affection, but mostly because Bill insists on measuring affection using the metric system.

What happens when a public television studio realizes that it has to spend $2,000 of government grant money before Wednesday in order to qualify for full funding for the next fiscal year? You get Your Chance to Live: Technological Failures! Obviously thrown together in a matter of hours, Your Chance to Live rails against modern man's dependence on technology with the vibrant coherency of a raving street corner derelict. This may have something to do with the fact that the producers hired an actual street corner derelict to do the raving, or as they refer to it, the "narration." Among the pearls of wisdom he imparts along the way? "Without electricity, there could be no electrical fires." The point is emphasized by showing stock footage of "Pioneers" baling hay.

Surely, the producers of this film were on a higher plane of consciousness, or maybe just really wanted to get off work in time to catch the tail end of happy hour. The whole thing makes for an experience that is as surreal as it is hilarious. Mike, Kevin and Bill seize Their Chance to Riff!

Pop quiz hotshot: Your father tells you that your grandmother has fallen and badly hurt herself. What do you do?

Like most of us here at RiffTrax, you probably answered "Call an attorney to jump start the inheritance process." Well, this self-centered attitude is what separates regular guys like us from Understanding Your Ideals star Jeffrey Moore. When Jeffrey hears this tragic news, his first thoughts are not of himself, but instead of others. Specifically, of the girl that he was supposed to take to the dance that night. He had hoped to pick her up in the family car, which is instead speeding towards Grandma's prone, frail person. How disappointed this young girl will be when she learns she has to take the bus!

OK, it actually turns out that Jeffrey is just as bad, if not worse, than most of us. Why? He is lacking "ideals", which if we understood the short correctly, are like headlights on your car, in that if you accidentally leave them on while you're at work, you have to get a jump from the last guy to leave the building, usually the creepy guy from IT who breathes really loudly in the elevator.

After watching this short, Mike, Kevin and Bill are no closer to Understanding Their Ideals. They do, however, Understand Your Ideals, and frankly, are very disappointed with how you've turned out.

Ah, beer. Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast! (We think that's what the Swan of Avon was referring to...) Beer provides everything the human body needs—if anything, what little it lacks can be made up with regular doses of loaded potato skins, an occasional pickled egg, or several handfuls of pub mix (if you can get it before the loud guy with Pat Riley hair picks out all the peanuts.) Yes, beer is perfect and holy, but lately it has been maligned by dark forces. Envious, beady-eyed, sober little creatures who resent that the rest of us have a way to actually have fun playing softball, or going bowling. That we have a beverage that makes encounters with our family almost bearable, enhances our powers of seduction and gives us the courage to jump over a too-high park bench when goaded on by our fun-loving friend. (The fact that we didn't make it and shattered four of our teeth in the process is immaterial to the argument.)

Thank goodness As We Like It puts these horrible little busybodies in their place using sound reasoning, gentle persuasion and a few tall frosty ones. Mike, Kevin and Bill belly up and tap into As We Like It.

It's the most important decision you'll ever make: should I eat the rest of this BK Stacker, or just trust my vague feeling of nausea and quit while I'm ahead? But put that aside now and let's talk about the third most important decision you'll ever make*: should I go steady? The answer, of course, is no. But the short Going Steady doesn't settle for such easy answers. Instead it probes the question through the tortured angst of Marie, an insecure girl with "offbeat" good looks who can't shake her Jeff habit. Jeff, for his part, is a flannel-clad Lothario, prowling the high school hallways and leaving nothing but the shattered husks of broken-hearted bobby-soxers as his terrible toll. Otherwise, very polite young man. In the powerful third act, Marie confronts Jeff, and the reaction is as explosive as anything Judson T. Landis has ever done!

Mike, Kevin and Bill learned everything they know about life, about love...and about laughter....from Going Steady.

*The 2nd is "should I take advantage of the zero percent financing on the hedge trimmer I want to buy?"

Carnivorous Plants! Like Wii Boxing, they're one of those things that instantly becomes 1000X less cool the moment you bring it home and try it out. Rather than quickly earning their keep and chomping down on your neighbors annoying labradoodle, your carnivorous plant instead sits on your window sill, vowing that he'll get to work tomorrow. You show off their opening and closing ability to disinterested friends who suddenly realize that Wii Boxing wasn't that bad after all, while your housefly population triples in size and begins to plot a coup. Soon after, the plant dies when you go to visit your grandmother in Sarasota.

Yes, Carnivorous Plants are a big let down. Which is why it's a good thing that the short Carnivorous Plants deals mainly with stock footage of transportation and discussions about mousetraps. We believe the plants do not make an appearance until the short has actually ended. The whole thing is tied together by a narrator who babbles his way towards an irrefutable conclusion: Carnivorous Plants are way cooler in the movies.

Mike, Kevin and Bill declare this their finest Carnivorous Plant-related riffing not containing a character named Seymour Krelborn.

You and Your Family. Much like gunpowder and an open flame, combining the two is not recommended (especially if mom's been drinking.) But every now and then a scenario arises where you must remove your iPod’s ear buds, emit a contemptuous, full-bodied sigh and actually interact with your family.* You and Your Family is the must-have guide to how to handle these situations with a minimum involvement of municipal services.

Each scenario in You and Your Family plays out in several different ways, and you the viewer are left to decide which would be the most effective course of action. It's like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, except that instead of reading about The Lost Jewels of Nabooti**, you decide whether to help mom with the dishes. Imagine Rashomon with slightly more Room-Storming-Off-To, and you've got You and Your Family.

Riffers Mike, Kevin and Bill each assume the "You" in You and Your Family is referring to one of the other two guys.

*These situations include holidays, birthdays and everybody pretending that you're taking grandpa to the Baseball Hall of Fame when you're really dropping him off at a home.

The follow-up to the smash hit "Primary Safety: In the Three Mile Island Cooling Tower", Primary Safety: In The School Building starts with a catchy name and builds from there. Personal injury lurks everywhere in our nation’s schools, and while any hipster with an ironic "Runs With Scissors" t-shirt can identify the most famous way to hurt yourself, fewer can pinpoint the dozens and dozens of more obscure ways that you can lose an eye in music class alone.

Primary Safety: In The School Building has an answer. A cumbersome, ineffective answer. It involves giant "stop" and "go" signs, a dimwitted child, and lots of trial and error. It is the same system that now powers our nations DMVs. Head dimwit Bill mans the signs, a responsibility he earned by amassing the most experience, having repeated kindergarten for a third time. After a morning with Bill, you may be no closer to surviving a school day in one piece, but you'll probably have eaten enough paste that you just won't care.

Mike, Kevin and Bill kept their fingers crossed throughout this entire short hoping for a Mr. Bungle cameo.

Surprisingly, not a biography of Björk, Damaged Goods is a cautionary tale about a couple of young men who go on a harmless adventure in search of beer and girls and end up finding exactly that! Unfortunately they are lured off that wholesome path by the seductive siren song of something called a "Coolie Cup". Inspired, apparently, by the jockstrap of an Asian worker, this evil rum drink causes our hero, Hercules-like (Kevin Sorbo Hercules, just to be clear), to be led astray. The result, a stern lecture by a silver-haired doctor—oh, and some horrible communicable disease affecting the genitals. We weren't really paying attention, as someone had just whipped up a pitcher of Coolie Cups.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin: damaged goods and your guides through Damaged Goods.

Mario Batali. Emeril Lagasse. Thomas Keller. What do they all have in common? Besides having seen Julia Child naked? That's right, they are all masters of Cooking Terms! Cooking Terms are the first step toward becoming a master chef. Because how can one properly prepare Duck Foie Gras with a Confiture of Meiwa Kumquats and a Balsamic Glaze if you don't know what "boiling" means.

Cooking Terms And What They Mean follows a newlywed named Margie through her first day of housewifery. Margie evidently spent her childhood in a vegetative coma, because she somehow made it to her wedding day without knowing what "bake" means. We observe Margie as she learns the terms she will need to prepare the Culinary Institute of America's four basic dishes: Meat, Cake, Jelly and Scalloped Cauliflower. Will she successfully cook her husband a delicious meal? Or will her spiral of failure expand so rapidly that it consumes our entire known universe?

Mike, Kevin and Bill now understand the difference between braising and blanching, and as a result their Hungry Man frozen dinners have never tasted better.

It can happen to any of us: we fall in with some free-spirited youths, get a few lime phosphates in our system, and before you know it we're rolling up our blue dungarees to impertinent heights, styling our hair into an ill-mannered pompadour and beating up our own fathers and rolling 'em for spare change. Such rash acts can lead almost directly to juvenile delinquency. What About Juvenile Delinquency is not afraid to ask the tough questions, none of which, surprisingly, is, "What about juvenile delinquency?" Rather it takes on the abstruse but no less important questions such as, "How close can we can get to an acne-scarred teen's face before it's too close?"

Mike, Kevin and Bill answer the question What About Juvenile Delinquency with a hearty, "Sounds good!"

The 50's are back with a simple message for you—Snap Out of It! "But," you protest, "I only—" Hey, the 50's are gonna stop you right there. Don't say another word. Doesn't matter what mealy-mouthed, limp- wristed, it's-somebody-else's-fault bull crap excuse you were about to offer, the 50's are gonna say the same thing: Snap the hell out of it!

And in Snap Out Of It, when laconic high schooler Howard starts in with some garbage about how he should have got a better grade on blah-blah whatever whatever, the answer was the same. Hey, H-man! Snap out of it! And Howard knew to slick back that hair, hitch up the dungarees and get down to the business of snapping out of it.

Mike, Bill and Kevin snap out of their own funk, and into a Slim Jim, to take on Snap Out Of It.

Featuring the beautiful but volatile Sally, a girl who loves Hank with all her heart one moment, and the next wants to cut him into thin slabs with her fencing épée and feed him to her dog. Along the path to maturation, Sally must learn to control her emotions, and, in one terrifying scene, put down a violent riot of her fellow students, the likes of which makes a Pistons/Pacers game seem like a Friends' Meeting.

Mike, Bill and Kevin move toward—toward, mind you, not near, or close to, or anywhere within several hundred miles of—but Toward Emotional Maturity.

When a short entitled Alcohol Trigger Films turned up at RiffTrax HQ, we jumped at the chance to riff it. After all, everyone who works here is a big fan of the subject matter: trigger films. Alcohol we can give or take. But a chance to watch even one Trigger Film, let alone a collection of three Trigger Films, back to back to back…We were so excited we pulled the bottle of Wild Turkey out of our desk drawer for a little early-afternoon celebration (we lied, we're actually pretty fond of alcohol, too.)

Alcohol Trigger Films explore three different booze-related scenarios. The general theme seems to be that alcohol is the only way to explain the horrible 70s fashion choices that each character is sporting. Amazingly, for a film about the consequences of drinking, the issue of vulgar, slurred wedding toasts never arises. Instead, we witness a series of mundane alcohol-related events, where nothing really all that bad happens. In fact, the one party that the seventh graders throw looked like a pretty sweet time.

Yes, it's that's time again—time to go back to school. And when it's time to choose with whom you'd like to go, the options are nearly limitless: your uncle Barney, Richard Simmons, that guy who sits in front of you at church and occasionally cleans his ears with his keys, Pruane2, Jewel, or possibly one of the Baldwins. Well, the idea that you should return to school accompanied by Joan Miller is given a fair and compelling hearing in the colorful short Back to School with Joan Miller. Yes, Joan Miller, designer extraordinaire, creator of dresses and suits that span an extraordinary range from conservative, plaid two-piece suits, to conservative plaid two-piece suits complemented by a hat. And BtSwJM offers not just two or three examples of her work, but rather a seemingly endless march of them, by the hundreds they come, one after another, modeled by strange-eyed shapeless women, driven relentlessly on by the sting of Joan Miller's whip.

Take notes, because there will be a test as Mike, Kevin and Bill go Back to School with Joan Miller.

Sometime between the invention of pyromania and the discovery of Beatlemania, the country suffered a frightening outbreak of Highway Mania. Accounts of the disorder are sketchy, but if the film Highway Mania is to be believed, it involved shaving your head, scarring your face with a good, strong liter or two of muriatic acid, and then climbing in your car and driving like Lizzy Grubman while—and this is very important, critical, even— cackling like a community theater actress in a bad production of Hansel and Gretel. While you did this a team of three different narrators described in purple prose the horrors you were visiting upon the land. You, however, remain singularly focused on your cackling. (Don't be too hard on yourself; highway mania is a disease, just like alcoholism or embezzling.) Somehow hurricanes and cruise ship sinkings are also involved and probably your fault.

Join Mike, Bill and Kevin as the catch the fever that is Highway Mania.

It seems that forty years ago, one out of every three instructional films was about The Bill of Rights (the rest were about either syphilis and/or Mr. Bungle.) So it was only natural that we'd finally get around to riffing a short focused on the Bill of Rights, and we had just the one in mind! Unfortunately, that episode of Schoolhouse Rock where the bill becomes a law proved far too expensive to acquire, and we had to go with Plan B.

Plan B turned out to be The Bill of Rights in Action. It proved far more exciting than The Bill of Rights Takes it Easy and is a veritable thrill ride compared to The Bill of Rights is Feeling Kind of Hungover, So Could You Put On the 'Saved By The Bell' Marathon and Pick Him Up a Gatorade and a Breakfast Burrito. And even though we wish it would focus more on our favorite amendment (#9, Protection of rights not specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights, booyah), it makes the admittedly more populist choice and focuses on the granddaddy of all rights, Freedom of Speech. It's a delightful romp where a pale Nazi goon rants outside of a synagogue and gets his ass handed to him by an enraged mob. So all things considered, it is far less creepy and disturbing than the episode of Schoolhouse Rock would have been.

Mike, Kevin and Bill exercised their freedom of speech by getting tattoos of the "Conjunction Junction" conductor. They're not telling where.

The world of Safety Instructional Films breaks down into two distinct categories: Shake Hands with Danger, and everything else. If you like your hair feathered, your glasses huge and your moustaches grown at an eighth grade level, this is the short for you.

Narrated by a guy who was rejected from the Dukes of Hazard narrator job for sounding too much like a cotton-pickin' bumpkin, Shake Hands with Danger explores the terrifying world of construction work. Sponsored by the Caterpillar heavy machinery company, it chronicles the myriad of ways you can hurt, dismember, maim or kill yourself using Caterpillar brand heavy machinery. No action is free from potentially life-ending consequences! Even if you stay home and lock yourself indoors, the bulldozer will just barrel your house over before seeking out the rest of your family!! Nobody is safe!!! Nobody!!!!

Yes, riff fans of all ages will enjoy this lighthearted timecapsule of the 1970s, set to one of the catchiest Industrial Safety-based jingles we've ever heard.

Mike, Kevin and Bill have never shaken hands with Danger, but they did give Danger that "fist bump then explosion" thing, and then Danger called them all "Bro-seph."

When we think back on the list of the great entertainers of the past century, a few names universally come to mind: Sinatra. Carson. Lohan. And Jimmy. No, not Jimmy Walker. And not Jimmy Stewart, (Really? You guessed Jimmy Walker before Jimmy Stewart?) We're of course talking about Jimmy the Raven, sparkplug of the glorious ensemble cast of Wing, Claw and Fang.

Yes, despite sounding like a sleazy Nevada law firm, or perhaps items from a LARPer's daily checklist, Wing, Claw and Fang is actually a cavalcade of Hollywood's animal stars. Jimmy leads the way, with his hilarious signature bit of stealing freshly laid eggs and devouring them in front of the distraught hens. But there's also a heapin' helpin' of tricks form Pete the Penguin, who wows as he "Goes Down the Stairs" and Jesse the Lion, who "Appears to Maul his Trainer Quite Severely." Yes, Wing, Claw and Fang proves once again that there's no better way to entertain humans than humiliating animals for our amusement.

Mike, Kevin and Bill gave up on stealing their eggs straight from the hen house after Farmer Dan installed a particularly effective scarecrow.

Ladies and gentlemen: Moose Baby. Think of Howard Carter as first he gazed upon the freshly unsealed chamber of the tomb of Tutankhamen; that should give you some sense of the awe and wonder we felt as we sat in a nondescript screening room poring over a series of colorless and uninteresting shorts only to discover the rare and precious gift that is Moose Baby. To try to describe it would be to rob it of some of its magic. He is Moose Baby. "But what is it about?" you quite reasonably ask. It is not about anything. It is Moose Baby. "Who made it? Where did it come from?" No one knows. There are no credits, no markings of any kind. It is untraceable. It is a beautiful mystery. It is Moose Baby. He is Moose Baby. Drink it in, and you will be one with Moose Baby.

Flying Stewardess takes us for an airborne jaunt through the wild blue yonder. Hop on board a spacious plane, where you'll be treated like a king. Enjoy a delicious steak dinner, served to you by a smiling stewardess. After that, treat yourself to a complimentary cocktail before retiring to your own bed in the sleeping cabin. You'll arrive at your destination refreshed and relaxed. Yes, Flying Stewardess is one of the most chilling science fiction shorts we've ever seen. Set in the bizarro realm known as "The 1940s", it is not—as you may have guessed—a tale of a Stewardess who gains the power of flight after a freak tray-table accident. It is actually a biting satire of the airline industry as a whole. (WARNING: Satirizing the airline industry may not be a wise idea. A sharp uptick in sitting next to shrieking babies, Bluetooth headset guys and people requiring multiple seat belt extenders may occur as a result.) Mike, Kevin and Bill were all chastised repeatedly by their stewardess for pointing out that their seats did not properly recline during the recording of this short.

Where should one turn when looking for beauty advice? To the fashion magazines that litter our grocery store checkout aisles, with their fresh-faced starlets with perky bods and millions of dollars? Hardly! Instead, refer to the comforting, matronly advice of Constance Bennett, an actress you've never heard of from the 1930s.

Yes, despite being dead for well over half a century, Constance Bennett's Daily Beauty Rituals remain as relevant as ever, for girls of any age. Husbands, boyfriends and homecoming dates everywhere will issue a contented sigh as they see you descend a staircase, having followed Constance Bennett's advice and applied a coat of makeup thick enough to bury a small cat in. Then they will hastily remember that they left something on the driver’s seat of their car and excuse themselves.

Completing the "Rituals Trilogy" that also includes Constance Bennett's Daily Voodoo Rituals, and Constance Bennett's 45 Minute Long Hand-Washing Ritual, Constance Bennett's Daily Beauty Rituals will leave you wondering how you were ever beautiful without it!

Someone has to be on trial. It may as well be teenagers. And they deserve it, too, what with their shenanigans, the hell-raking, their common thuggery, rough manners and unkempt flat-top haircuts. I don't think it would be overstating things to say that teenagers are the largest threat facing this great nation, causing more destruction than the boll weevil and potato weevils combined! Teenagers on Trial does not shrink from showing us the hard truth, which is that your average teenager would knock you off your bike and take it just as soon as look at you. (That is, if he wasn't currently at his Model United Nations meeting.) Thankfully they get what's coming to them, and that's a darn good trial!

Kevin, Mike, and Bill, two of them former teenagers, give the teenagers a stern, but sympathetic hearing-out in the thrilling new short Teenagers on Trial!

If there's one thing that a small niche of people like, it's car racing! It's all there: the drama, the passion, the guy who for some reason shouts "Boogity Boogity Boogity." But we understand that for some people, sitting for hours and watching cars do five hundred laps around a track can be a bit too much excitement to handle. For them, Cork – Crashes & Curiosities provides a thrilling glimpse into a time in racing when the stakes were much lower, and cars were not capable of going nearly as fast.

And when you think of the great hotbeds of car racing, such as the American South and Further Down In the American South, no doubt third on your list would be Ireland. Yes, the land where they grow Lucky Charms cereal is the setting for this short, and a babbling Irishman provides a narrative that at times can actually be considered moderately coherent.

May the road rise to meet you as you take a manic jaunt in your jalopy through Cork – Crashes & Curiosities!

In 2009, if you ask someone What It Means To Be An American you'll get a simple response: a willingness to deep-fry anything and everything. But back in the fifties, before anyone had invented deep-fried cigarettes, it wasn't as clearly defined. School children, construction workers, zoo keepers, cosmonauts-in-training, gaffers, carnies, unemployed janitors, First Lady Eisenhower, TV Clowns, drifters, tight ends, falconry enthusiasts; none of them had any idea What It Means To Be An American.

Nowhere was this more clear than with the producers of the short, What It Means To Be An American. Clearly the recipients of a Brewster's Millions-esque financial windfall that they were forced to spend within a certain amount of time or else lose it, they created the most incoherent and rambling testament to American-ness since the inaugural address where Grover Cleveland asserted that leprechauns were controlling the world's supply of tea.

Falconry enthusiasts Mike, Kevin and Bill team up to riff Part One of What It Means To Be An American, despite its appalling lack of falcons.

This extraordinary film dares to do something no other safety short has ever dreamed of: killing its 9-year-old title character and sending him to hell; a hell run by two doughy, charisma-free demons wearing sensible jackets. Yes, Tommy Tucker, our protagonist, is a whiny, friendless little twerp who devotes himself to the petty hectoring of his fellow citizen. His dream of transforming his local institutions into an all powerful nanny state is cut short, however, when one fed-up individual decides to polish his bumper on Tommy's midsection. And so Tommy goes to hell (which would have been a fine and fitting end to the matter, but alas, it's not to be), and instead of reacting with horror and regret at his eternal separation from God, Tommy sizes the place up and finds it not half bad, but all things considered, he'd rather be home bothering folks.

Kevin, Bill and Mike try their best to find a reason, just one reason, that Tommy shouldn't, in fact, spend a nice long eternity in hell.

Several of us were left frustrated when What It Means to Be An American: Part 1 ended without answering the titular question. In fact, many of you noticed that it did not in fact appear to address the question, or even show the faintest hint that it was aware that it would later be titled What It Means to Be An American. But lest you grow so disgusted with the WIMTBAA series that you decide not to show up to find out how the saga ends (See: The Matrix Reloaded), rest assured that What It Means to Be An American: Part 2 provides adequate* closure** to the series, answering*** all of your questions.****

Mike, Kevin and Bill stand at attention to riff Part 2 of What It Means to Be An American, truly the Godfather***** 2****** of Shorts Sequels.

When last we left Tommy Tucker he had died and was just beginning an eternal stint on Safety Island, a particularly dull outpost in the vast Hell empire. The demon in charge of enslaving his soul (a big-chinned guy, as most evil people are) had been extolling the virtues of the dead Tommy Tucker, while Tommy himself was making noises that, all things considered, he’d rather be home pestering his fellow students and occasionally snacking from the paste jar.

Women in Blue tells the tale of one of baseball's most storied franchises, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Actually, that's not true. We just have an Oakland A's fan on our staff who remains incredibly bitter about the 1988 World Series. In retrospect, it was a poor decision to let him write this description's opening sentence.

No, Women in Blue does not tell the tale of Kirk Gibson, Orel Hershiser and the rest of the Dodgers squad that shocked the nation and cost our mailroom guy thousands of dollars in "sure thing" bets. It is instead a peek behind the scenes at the "WAVES", an all female division of the Navy during World War II. Take a look around the exciting life of a WAVE which involves marching, calisthenics... trips to the dining hall... bed making... zzzzzz. Wait! They also shoot guns! And not just pistols, we're talking GUN guns. Guns that make the Guns of the Navarone look like super-soakers! Then several more hours of classroom studies, but, hey! Guns!

Mike, Kevin and Bill attempted to dress as women and enlist in the WAVES but were denied admittance for violating rule 106-F, "No 80s comedy movie clichés shall be allowed."

Contrary to what many of you are thinking, A Circus Wakes Up is NOT a wrenching adaptation of a short story by Philip Roth that recounts the heartbreaking tale of Bernard Circus, a Classics professor at Columbia, who is forced to confront his shattered marriage, his failure as a father, and a decidedly lackluster academic career. No, it is in fact a rather bizarre little behind-the-scenes short that very quickly confirms what we’ve always suspected: the dizzying revulsion we all feel when confronted by a circus is entirely—ENTIRELY—justified. The inhuman stunts, the macabre animal acts are, in fact, performed by exactly the type of twisted outcasts you cross the street to avoid (of course your choice gets tough when that guy from Radio Shack is on the other side…) And if you think you can get through this without being very, very disturbed by a clown, then you need to seriously reset your expectations vis-à-vis being very, very disturbed by a clown.

Mike, Kevin and Bill don their shiniest top hats, their most resplendent red cutaway jackets, and their tightest bun-hugging jodhpurs and say, “Oh, we’re riffing A Circus Wakes Up today? What an amazing coincidence.”

American Thrift is a touching tribute to the “Woman American”, brought to you by Chevrolet. Just who is the Woman American you ask? Why, she is the one that those who sell and manufacture what is sold know is the one who decides what we come to buy of what is sold and manufactured. From budgeting the purchase of puppy dogs, packs of pens, and canned eel at the local Food Giant, to planning trips to Nassau, the Woman American is the solid rock on which the home is built.

Unfortunately, one power the Woman American does not seem to have is the ability to prevent the Man American from driving around endlessly until he runs out of gas looking for parking meters with time still on them. In fairness, she did try, but he clobbered her with a tirade of saliva-spewing expletives that the laws of decorum do not allow us to reproduce here. Of course, that was in the Martin Scorsese director’s cut which is unavailable for riffing. We assure you this version is safe viewing for the entire family—except maybe for a disturbing scene in which a room-full of young Ron Howards get naked and exchange their pants.

Mike, Kevin and Bill are joined by the definitive example of the Woman American herself — Veronica Belmont — co-host of Revision3’s tech-centric show Tekzilla, and Qore on the PlayStation Network.

Fortunately, Call It Free brings all your grease monkey fantasies to life. A Dizzy Dame, whose husband affectionately nicknames her Hank (due to her resemblance to the legendary country musician, Waylon Jennings), has car trouble. How will the local gas station manager treat her? With respect and helpful advice? Or will he nickel and dime her for repairs she doesn't need on parts her car doesn't even have? If you have to ask these questions, it's quite obvious that you are a visitor from a foreign planet. You might have luck finding employment at a nearby gas station.

George Bailey running down the streets of Bedford Falls. Linus explaining to a hushed audience what Christmas is really about. A desperate Arnold suiting up as Turbo Man for the Christmas parade. In no specific order, these were our top Christmas movie moments. But we think that after watching Christmas Rhapsody, you will agree with us that the scene where the The Forester's family sings an off-key version of "Silent Night" to their Christmas Tree has to belong in our top three. So goodbye George Bailey! Happy new year to you—in jail!!! Or just not on our list, whatever.

Yes, Christmas Rhapsody, the latest entry in the Rhapsody series, comes fresh on the heels of Thanksgiving Rhapsody and Cyber Monday Rhapsody. And though Webster's defines Rhapsody as "A highly emotional utterance or literary work", most of us know that the true meaning of Rhapsody is a depressed sentient Christmas tree, bemoaning its own "No Account" status in the world. If Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree and Eeyore the Donkey had a baby whom they denied the prozac it so desperately needed, it would still be more fun to talk to than the tree in Christmas Rhapsody.

Yes, we just created a donkey/tree hybrid baby who is evidently able to talk and has been prescribed Prozac by a medical professional. We need help. You, on the other hand, just need a dose of Christmas Rhapsody!

Santa Claus, famous fat Saint, is best known for his advances in forced deer flight and his work as a firm-but-fair elf foreman. But the man is even more gifted than his great big sack (*cough*), as we learn in the supernatural thriller Christmas Dream! Call him Professor X-mas, as his telepathic powers will awe and terrify you. (Did you call him Professor X-mas yet? No? Fine, whatever.)

One Christmas Eve, a foolhardy young girl discards a toy she is no longer interested in upon seeing her new, less-horrible toys. Never mind that the forgotten toy was little more than a hot dog with hair, this is a transgression that the patron saint of creepiness cannot forgive! While the girl slumbers peacefully, like the total selfish jerk that she is, St. Nick enters her dreams to give the monstrous doll life. It proceeds to torment her with its special brand of high-pitched Christmas horror. Will she learn her lesson and accept that change is always bad, or crack under the pressure and find herself in an asylum for children, gnawing on her own hair? Either way, this doll is gonna break a lot of her stuff!

Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they dance the mad carnival dance our dark lord Santa demands in Christmas Dream!

The story of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer has been told and retold countless times, in film, TV and song. All of those other versions are better than this one. Even the cold war-era East German version "Rudolf van der Schlittenfahrt", which features far more marching and distant machine gun fire than a Christmas special ever should.

The short begins with the bold step of having a song which relates the entire story of Rudolph to the audience, rendering itself redundant. It then takes the even bolder step of completely disregarding the well-established Rudolph canon to tell its own twisted version of the tale. A version that involves ice skating reindeer and provocatively-dressed reindeer moms. A version where Santa and the reindeer deliver presents to other reindeer and rabbits. Where are the human children? What kind of vengeful god created this world? Why is Rudolph's luminous nose referred to as being "twice as bright as a beet" multiple times? Why? WHY!?

These questions are best pondered over a warm mug of eggnog, with the assistance of Mike, Kevin and Bill. (Please refrain from adding your own "Like George Washington!" at any point in time during the short.)

It’s the sunniest Night Before Christmas yet. Not a creature is stirring, not even the stuffed, mummified mouse that’s lovingly stapled to the floor. Sugarplums dance in the heads of children, causing the children to wonder, what’s a sugarplum, and why would it dance so suggestively? At the heart of it all is a man with one simple goal—a long winter’s nap, uninterrupted by any sort of clatter. Boy is he in for a surprise!

Hold on to your stocking cap (or, as we know them today, sleeping hat) and prepare for a holiday home invasion the likes of which you’ve never seen. Unwantable toys will be given, boys will wear dresses, and the reindeer will test all limits of tiny-ness! It’s a story as fresh and timeless as that 4th of July egg salad you’ve been meaning to take out of the trunk. So check out The Night Before Christmas now, before Disney adapts this half-page poem into a 4-hour epic next year.

Have you ever been on the Disneyland ride, "It's a Small World After All"? Wait, where are you going! Come back! This short isn't about that ride. It contains no references to that ride. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have brought it up so abruptly. Here, breathe into this paper bag. Stop muttering to yourself, it'll be alright. But seriously, the song from "It's a Small World After All" is going through your head now, isn't it? Well Three Magic Words features a song that is twice as catchy! What keeps it from making you want to rip the Hammer, Anvil and/or Stirrup out of your ears using needlenose pliers? It's about Pork! Yes, Pork, the delicious substance we've been known to indulge in every now and then here at RiffTrax. And since we buy it using the titular Three Magic Words, we'll always know we've got the best pork. What are the Three Magic Words? Quality, freshness and flavor! How do we remember these? Because they are repeated approximately 837 times during this ten minute short! Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as they are serenaded about the joys of quality, fresh, flavorful pork. Over...and over...and over again.

Aquatic Champions. For years their achievements went largely unnoticed, mainly due to the fact that everyone can quickly come up with a list of dozens of things they would rather do than watch someone swim competitively. Five just sprang to your mind while reading this sentence alone. But in 1948, on a warm summer day in Beverly Hills, the world stood up and took notice for the first annual Parade of Aquatic Champions. The world then quickly realized why they had never thrown one before or ever would again.

Abandoning many of the traditional parade conceits on the grounds that in water, floats tend to sink quickly and cause mass death, the Parade of Aquatic Champions instead focused mainly on introductions. One by one, the breathless narrator introduced the chlorine-bleached heroes, whose names spring readily to mind even over sixty years later: Norman Spear Jr. Stubby Kruger. Anita Lowez. To call them mere cultural icons would be to spit in their faces. Instead, the participants in the Parade of Aquatic Champions transcend greatness itself. Especially when they're demonstrating something called the "Trudgeon Stroke".

Take a belly flop with Mike, Kevin and Bill into the sea of tedium, bacteria and greatness that is the Parade of Aquatic Champions.

For the past four months, there has been a gaping hole in Thrift-related RiffTrax content. After the release of American Thrift Part I, Thrift lovers everywhere were high and dry, left to wonder, much like Lost fans, whether or not the show's creators had an ending in mind the whole time, or whether they were making it up as they went along, a panicked narrator struggling to piece together the seemingly random footage whizzing by in front of him, first a woman trying on shoes, then a parade of red-headed children and now...a lighthouse?! Seriously, a lighthouse? You just spring a lighthouse that can see into the past out of nowhere?! There's only like a dozen episodes left, you had better make some progress towards a resolution quickly or els...

Sorry about that! The previous copy writer has been assigned to full time duty on the 4815162342.com forum. Meanwhile, we're happy to report that American Thrift Part II easily joins Three Ninjas Kick Back and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses II on the short list of the greatest sequels of all time. Everything you loved about the first one is back. Yep, that's back! That too! I know, it's great, isn't it?!

OK, we admit it. We have no idea what American Thrift is actually about, and we doubt anyone involved with its production did as well. But it's the special kind of enthusiastic incoherence that makes it a joyous short to riff. And as far as "Tributes to the Woman American" go, it sure as hell beats "My Humps" and "Cougartown."

Mike, Kevin and Bill did their part and drastically reduced their lottery ticket spending, just to be able to bring you part II of American Thrift.

There are some conversational topics that most men will avoid at all costs. Guessing a woman's age, Barbra Streisand's Yentl, and the appeal of Justin Bieber rank high among them. But there is one subject that rises above even these, one issue guaranteed to turn even the proudest male into a red-faced, mumbling fool. And that particular health concern is...well, you know. With the discomfort, and the products...come on, don't make me. Lunar cycles, and that thing you hear about girls living in the same dorm--oh YOU KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!! Go to your room.

Molly Grows Up is the story of a girl asking the tough questions. Like most children, she can't wait to become an adult, despite all evidence that it's really not all it's cracked up to be. When will it be her turn? When will she finally get to be encumbered by a cruel monthly beast hell-bent on her misery and embarrassment? There are plenty of women in her life ready to provide ambiguous information that hardly qualifies as "advice". There's the school nurse, who is far too interested in Molly and probably smells like cats. Then, Molly's mother, who seems to be sedated with those "nerve pills" they used to give unsatisfied housewives. And of course, Molly's sister, the middle-aged teen. Will Molly learn the horrible truth? Will her father successfully avoid the conversation altogether?

Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as they try desperately to be excused from Health Class before the showing of Molly Grows Up.

Call It Free Part 2 continues the madcap service station antics that viewers of Call It Free Part 1 demanded More, More, More* of! All of your favorite characters are back. Herb (not a woman). Jerry (not a woman). Hank, (astute viewers will recall that Hank is a woman.) But the second half of Call It Free also introduces a new character: Captain Jinx.

Captain Jinx is, (and we are not trying to oversell him by any stretch of the imagination), the greatest cartoon character the world has ever seen! Morbidly obese, bright red and nude, he lives in the engine of your car, and has a big bag of rust that he spreads around if the engine if not properly maintained. This is how former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda spends the offseason. This spreading of "Rust", combined with the complete absence of any substance known as "Jinx", makes one wonder why his name is not simply Captain Rust. Seems like that would make a great deal of sense. But when you're dealing with a woman named "Hank", you sort of let the suspension of disbelief carry you where it will. Captain Jinx is wreaking havoc on Hank's engine, and Hank's beloved husband speeds off to the mechanic to see what can be done about it. Will punches be thrown? Will Jinx junk Jerry's jalopy? And for all that is holy, what, who or when will be called free?! Find out these answers and more, when you join Mike, Kevin and Bill for the exciting conclusion to Call It Free!

*The shrugged shoulders and confused expressions of Call It Free Part 1 viewers has been interpreted as them "demanding More, More, More"

Lindsay Lohan's meteoric rise to fame, and subsequent collapse in the glare of its harsh spotlight, is just a recent iteration of a tale as old as time. Many are quick to judge her, but in a world where the lines between tabloid news and honest journalism are increasingly blurry -- excuse me? Say what now? Who? Oh, my mistake. Yes, I see.

The Story of a Teenage Drug Addict is the story of a teenager with plenty of reasons to become a drug addict. Everyone insists on calling him a teenager and making him attend high school, despite his obvious age of 40. He lives in a shoebox of a tenement apartment with his corpse-like mother, trading stories about why dad left in their constantly-shifting New York-ish accents. And, perhaps most damning of all, he has a unibrow that would make Captain Caveman blush. Unga bunga, indeed.

With circumstances like these, what chance does our protagonist have against the temptations of dope, H, uppers, downers, sidewinders, lefties, righties, Betty Boopers, flim-flam-dongs and other fake drugs of the past? Will he turn back from the brink in time, or be consumed by a life of late night jazz parties with unfortunate-looking teens? Where on Earth are his tweezers?

Learn the answers to these questions and try to achieve a contact high with Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they turn the grim pages of The Story of a Teenage Drug Addict!

Kids love to play games. It is an indisputable fact, much like the existence of former Yankee outfielder Oscar Gamble. But for a while, the only two games kids had to play were "Push a Hoop with a Stick" and "Hide Benjamin Franklin's whiskey." For obvious reasons, (in order: "This game blows" and "Getting sat on by a furious Benjamin Franklin"), kids eventually needed new games to play.

Enter Hungry, Hungry Hippos. For centuries, it was rightly regarded as the pinnacle of game-dom and children the world over entered the "Race" (and/or "Chase") to "hurry up and feed their face." However, recent revisionist history has begun to shift this perception, and a challenger to the throne is now regarded by some academics to be the greatest game of all time: The Following Instructions Game.

"How do you play," you ask? Simple..you do what adults tell you. "But wait," you say, "that doesn't sound like a game at all. It sounds like a thinly veiled scheme to get our stupider children to shut up and do what we want." And you would be right. But that didn't stop the makers of The Following Instructions Game from spending their substantial budget on a short film to convince children that Following Instructions could be just as fun as actually having fun. And oh what fun it is, as our hero, a dimwitted lad who is prone to coming into contact with wet paint, takes a clock to a repair shop before buying a loaf of bread! And there's an odd old man who speaks in rhyme! (Note: It is not Slick Rick, though that would have been awesome.)

For years the skunk has been the butt* of many a joke in pop culture. Due to our society's inherent anti-skunk bias, roles for these malodorous mustelids have been hard to come by. Pepe Le Pew is the go-to guy if you need a skunk in your picture. This is in spite of the fact that he is A) a shockingly offensive stereotype and B) a touch rapey. And for a while in the 80s, Stinkor: The Evil Master of Odors was getting a lot of buzz, before his secret Febreze addiction was discovered.

But before either of these skunks ever skittered down a red carpet, one pioneering stinker broke the stench barrier, paving the way for all future Hollywood skunks and/or cats who accidentally got a white stripe painted down their back. That skunk was Gregory, the star of Little Lose Scent. Gregory comes from a time when men were men, women were broads and our president was bald. Feisty and fetid, he's a putrid pugilist who won't back down from a showdown, be it with man, beast or heavy industrial machinery that at one point in time really looks like it comes about three inches from killing him. Dogs? Gregory lays the smack down, Old Yeller style. Cats? Forget Cheezburgers, Gregory can has their asses. Two grizzly bears? Yes, Gregory fights two grizzly bears at once. You have to watch this short!

Aquarium. Translated literally from the original Latin, it means "boredom box". Every day, thousands of aquariums are completely ignored by passersby in our nation's dentist offices and Chinese restaurants. They are also popular suicide destinations for little plastic scuba men. Aquariums are mainly known for making homes smell funny and, sooner or later, winding up empty out in the garage.

An Aquarium In Action seeks to change all that. A rallying point for aquarium owners, or aquarists*, the film demonstrates just how exciting these bacteria farms can be. It does so by simulating the experience of staring at an impressively ordinary grade school aquarium for an extended period of time. Shiver at the intense action as the children struggle to save baby guppies from certain death in the maws of their own parents. Then watch the children wonder why they bothered saving these ugly little things in the first place, when seeing them devoured would have been much more awesome.

Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as they see who can lick the most scum off the sides of An Aquarium In Action!

Without knowing who Mr. Moto* is, you're probably slightly confused about why you would want to watch him take a walk. "I can watch Mr. Jensen, the bald guy four doors down, take a walk anytime I feel like it," you say. Yes, we all know Mr. Jensen. He carries a miniature baseball bat and the neighborhood kids (mostly Bobby) started a rumor that he uses it to hit dogs with.

While the holes in Bobby's story are numerous (Why a miniature bat Bobby?), there is one thing that is indisputable. Watching Mr. Moto take a walk is far more entertaining than Mr. Jensen. For starters, Mr. Moto takes a walk through the zoo. So right off the bat, you're seeing some crazy stuff. Second, a somewhat attractive lady accompanies Mr. Moto on his walk. Those of you who have seen Mrs. Jensen are now strongly in the Moto camp. But finally, sealing the deal firmly in favor of Mr. Moto is this: Mr. Moto is a monkey. On his walk, Mr. Moto (who is a monkey) undertakes the demented quest of traversing the entire alphabet, from A to Z, seeing one animal for each letter. Why he has chosen to spend his day this way is a mystery, especially seeing as he is a monkey. But it's an action packed journey full of mischief and exotic animals. And did we mention that he is a monkey?

Do you hate stuff that's designed to save your life? Does the inconvenience of having to flip the safety off your handgun before you use it to open a beer bottle drive you INSANE? Do you snicker and point at children wearing bicycle helmets, contemptuous of their willingness to believe "The Man"? Do you wiggle your way out of roller coaster restraints so you can raise both middle fingers boldly in the air?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you're going to absolutely hate Seat Belts: The Life-Saving Habit. This plea for reason provides a snapshot of some anti-seatbelt sentiments from the early 1980s. For example, "I've never worn one, but they look uncomfortable," "Hey, I'm a busy guy, I don't have time for this," and "Children are invincible." The film confidently (or, more often, passive-aggressively) debunks these powerful straw-man arguments in a noble attempt to save lives and subliminally advertise the safe, luxurious Audi sedan. One assumes the filmmakers went on to champion other controversial stances, such as "you probably shouldn't let your kids swallow broken glass."

Climb into the back of a pick-up truck with Mike, Kevin, and Bill and ride down a bumpy road to a destination called Seat Belts: The Life-Saving Habit!

Can genius be taught? It is one of the great philosophical questions. With enough time, patience, and dedication, can the next Van Gogh be created? Or is the mastery of an artistic discipline something that only a few people are born with the inherent capacity for? The producers of the series Drawing for Beginners believe that a great artist lurks inside all of us, and with the proper attention and guidance, it may one day emerge like a beautiful butterfly, to bestow artistic gifts unto humanity the likes of which the world has never seen.

Step one? Rectangles! Four lines, four right angles. Sounds easy right? WRONG! Improperly drawn rectangles are the second most common mistake witnessed by elementary school art teachers, right behind birds in the shape of lower case m's which most biologists agree make no evolutionary sense. It turns out rectangles are the foundation of all art. Don't believe us? What do the Mona Lisa, American Gothic and The Scream all have in common? Innovations in painted light, aerial perspective and irony? WRONG! The answer is rectangular frames! The next time you're in the Sistine Chapel, why don't you look up at the ceiling and tell us what shapes you see up there. Hint: not rhombuses. Still don't believe us? Pull a DVD off your shelf. Yeah, that one will do. Wait, is that...you own What About Bob? on DVD? No, no, I'm not saying it's bad, it just doesn't seem like the kind of movie you'd really want to watch repeatedly. Well, saying it's a gift doesn't exactly explain it, the person who gave it to you would still have to assume that you would want to - LOOK, the point is, what shape is the box? A rectangle! Art! Rectangles! They just go together! It therefore goes without saying that if you want to create art, you better damn well learn to draw your rectangles. And Drawing For Beginners: The Rectangle is as good a jumping off point as any...for weeding out the dullards who actually need instruction about drawing rectangles and who clearly have no business ever picking up an artistic implement of any type, lest they injure themselves or others. Maybe they'd be happier watching the Number Munchers demo screen.

Mike, Kevin and Bill take pen in hand and do some old fashioned rectanglin' in Drawing For Beginners: The Rectangle!

Cats have a come a long way lately. They "hung in there", indeed, on the wall posters of America's cubicles. And now they are widely acknowledged as the foundation of the entire internet, and thus all modern culture. Remove the cats, and you're left with nothing. If not for the existence of confused-cat-dressed-like-Napoleon videos, people would have to send each other links to articles about inconsequential matters like foreign politics, science, or even discuss and examine their own feelings. In a word: ew.

But little is known about where cats come from. Are they advanced alien beings, here to exploit our obvious delight at seeing them barf on our stuff? In exchange for pointedly ignoring us, they are given food, shelter, and an open-air toilet right in our living rooms. Cats form emotional bonds with humans so strong that they will wait 5, maybe even 10 minutes, before nibbling on the ear of a beloved owner after she has choked to death on a heart-shaped box of chocolates she bought for herself. What is the origin of these marvelous, sophisticated creatures?

Kittens: Birth & Growth answers this important question, and teaches kids valuable lessons about getting excited for, and then immediately neglecting, adorable new pets. Watch and learn now, because you can rest assured the cats are watching and learning everything about us.

Mike, Kevin, & Bill can has kitten short nowz?

Reading. Like it or not, (and as a people, we've cast a resounding vote for 'not'), it's something most of us have to do every day. Whether it's selectively combing news stories for the portions of them you agree with, figuring out what your $1.14 in change can buy you from the Wendy's drive-thru window, or trying to decipher the unspeakable, misspelled profanity left on the youtube video of your infant son laughing, reading is a part of our daily lives. But more and more often, people are starting to ask themselves Reading: Who Needs It? Granted, most of these people are biased against reading having just finished reading a Dan Brown novel, but it's still a question worth debating.

Reading: Who Needs It? The Short attempts to address Reading: Who Needs It? The Question. We witness the daily lives of three illiterate High School students. The short intends to cast these kids in a negative light, but truly the achievement of progressing into your junior year of High School while all the while A) being illiterate and B) somehow keeping that a secret from everyone is quite remarkable in itself. We are told that these students are just three of "hundreds" of illiterate students in this high school. It is clear that this high school must be located in [insert part of the country you do not think highly of.]

Will the illiterate actress learn to read in time to snag a role in the big school musical? Will the mechanic put down the socket wrench and pick up the books? Will the burgeoning basketball star continue doing things exactly as he was before, while still making more money for one game than most families earn in a year? Tune in to Reading: Who Needs It? with Mike, Kevin and Bill to find out!

The Families series of shorts is a beloved franchise with many proud, vital installments. Some other favorites: Families: Food and Failure, Families: Lies & Videotape, and perhaps most popular of all, Families: Dead and Loving It. But true connoisseurs, those with the complete Criterion Collection set and no friends to speak of, know that Families: Food and Eating was the creative pinnacle; if you ask them about it at a party they will not leave you alone until you agree. Then they'll awkwardly inquire if your younger sister is single and you'll leave the party so quickly you forget your jacket.

The film presents, in vivid detail, what a "Family" might do with some "Food" (no spoilers here). Shockingly, it seems there was a time when family eating consisted of more than choosing individual Hungry Man dinners to devour in front of separate bedroom televisions. We've come so far! Further, people in faraway countries like Japan, Mexico and "San Francisco" eat dinner in very different ways. Do you feel guilty about the ease with which you procure fine foods at your local supermarket? No? Well you should. Try to remember that next time you spend five minutes crafting a Facebook post about how irritating it is when Facebook doesn't load your Farmville statistics immediately, won't you?

Mike, Kevin and Bill will take away that stupid PlayStation if you don't come down here RIGHT NOW for some Families: Food and Eating!

We all have a certain summer memory. One that we find ourselves fondly reminiscing over as the days get longer and hotter. A memory of a different time, when we still retained our childlike innocence, but possessed a desire to stretch our wings and explore the world around us. These days, even though we are very different people, we still watch the sun go down, and our thoughts drift, however briefly, towards that moment when the world was so much simpler, and yet boundless with possibility.

Ours is the time when we got a Bubble O' Bill pop from the ice cream man, then threw a tantrum when our mom wouldn't buy us a second one, then opened the second Bubble O' Bill pop our mortified mother eventually bought for us as tears continued to stream down our face and people stared, then throwing it on the ground in disgust because the bubble gum nose was kind of smooshed and proclaiming that we wished we had never been born. Yes, the summer of 2007 was a heady time.

The point is,Summer Is An Adventure. And whether your summer involves speedboats, hiking, or mostly just ice cream related petulance, you can certainly agree. The two young protagonists of Summer Is An Adventure are slightly better behaved than we were, (despite the bathing outfits they are forced to wear.) They even tolerate a narrator who occasionally lapses into speedboat-based poetry! But we know that deep down inside, the forced nature walks and firefly collecting of Summer Is An Adventure will eventually unleash a sweaty, sandy, sunburned hellbeast of a child, one that even the sweet, sweet allure of Bubble O' Bill's candy nose cannot tame!

But they might be willing to listen for a Choco Taco...

Mike, Kevin and Bill are always willing to riff for a Choco Taco

Every now and then you meet a child who forever changes your perception of how stupid a child can be. There's your second cousin's boy, Leon, who spends summer afternoons black-widow-huntin' in the woodpile. Or little cross-eyed Margie, with her affinity for drinking liters of pond water. And of course Stephen, the kid who insists Notes from Underground is Dostoevsky's finest literary accomplishment when it's clearly one of his mid-level works. I mean, honestly, Stephen, grow up.

But all of these little morons are blown away by the force of Reggie, star of Beginning Responsibility: Taking Care of Your Own Things. Reggie sleepwalks through life. He's perpetually confused and overwhelmed by his bedroom full of toys, which are all in such sorry shape Goodwill employees would spit in your face if you attempted to donate them. Since his parents have given up on Reggie long ago, it's up to this deranged menagerie of busted junk to come to life and teach him threatening lessons. Yes, it's Toy Story on acid! But not the fun kind of acid, more like battery acid that spills out of an old remote control dog toy you haven't picked up in twelve years.

Mike, Kevin and Bill try to keep little Reggie from swallowing their keys while they watch Beginning Responsibility: Taking Care of Your Own Things!

Reading: for now, it is the only way to experience the approximately four remaining books that have not been made into movies (three, after this summer's CGI heavy adaptation of Frog & Toad are Friends. Sam Worthington will play both title roles.)

So you'd better be sure that your Basic Reading Skills are not lacking! How can you be sure? We've prepared a simple test. Just identify the subject of the following sentence: "Totally grape ape, should our snorkel rubadub the two step, moon for sure." Ready? The answer was: Chester A. Arthur.

First of all, if you got that wrong, SHAME ON YOU. But there is hope (amidst the SHAME!) The hope comes in the form of Reading Growth: Basic Skills which provides several helpful strategies for mastering reading, most of which make about as much sense as our example. Also, there is a frog, but it's not played by Sam Worthington. He is, however, much more successful at masking his Australian accent.

Mike, Kevin and Bill identify the subject of this sentence as hilarity! And then feel deep SHAME because it turns out it was actually Chester A. Arthur again...

Many times we find ourselves mocking the content of the educational shorts we feature here at RiffTrax. Most of the time it is quite deserved; if you will recall, not too long ago we did a short entitled Buying Food. But occasionally we'll stumble across one like Geography of Your Community and think to ourselves, "Well done Coronet Films. Geography is an important thing for young minds to learn, and what better way to teach it to them than by making it relate to them using their own community as a learning tool.

Then we saw the short. Geography of Your Community contains about as much Geography as the Transformers movies contained taste, wit and coherence. And by "Your Community" the makers meant aspecific community with specific features, such as an ice cream factory that many students will be unlikely to identify with, and much more likely confused and scared by.

The creators don't stop there! Throughout the short, they pose questions to the viewer without answering them, with a vague promise that they will address the answers to them down the road, when instead there are only more questions. A Warning: This short may hit too close to home for fans of a certain TV show which just ended its six season run on ABC.

Yes, Geography of Your Community is another short which falls spectacularly short of its admittedly modest goals. But educational failure is humor's gain, and Mike, Kevin and Bill are on hand to speculate along with the viewer why there is an ice cream factory in this town? Why the factory was built along the river? And who the hell named their child "Farmland"?

Parts. We all have them. Some of them are public, like elbows and unibrows. Some of them are private, like thigh pimples or the complete set of Bob Seger CDs that you pray your new girlfriend doesn't stumble across. But did you know that people aren't the only things with parts? Since we can't hear your answer, we'll assume you said, "No, that's surprising, please proceed with the comedic description." You got it, friends!

It turns out the English language* is made up of several components, all laid out in The Parts of Speech. Some of them might be familiar, but if you've always struggled to define exactly why an adverb can modify not only verbs, but also adjectives and other adverbs...well, this short will be of no use to you. But it will dazzle you with its majestic beach scenes, featuring a boy far too old to be wearing that diaper, playful near-drownings, and the contemptuous monster of a narrator, Dr. Dwight L. Burton! Also, a beach towel is subjected to extreme homophobia.

Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as they head to the ocean, the most logical location for confusing grammar lessons courtesy of The Parts of Speech!

Consider: a young boy, growing up in an urban setting with seemingly absentee parents, purchases a special plant from a quirky man who has assumed the moniker "Papa Nikolai". The boy goes on to guard his new greenery from others with a fervor that borders on the paranoid, lashing out at those who question his behavior. It may sound like a new PSA regarding a certain California legalization initiative, but in fact it's just our newest short, Watch Out For My Plant!

If there's one thing little boys love, it's... baseball, or comic books, or hurting animals, or really ANYTHING but plants. But this kid is different. He's willing to spend hours hovering over a sprout that probably requires nothing more than a weekly watering and some sunlight, and we get to go along for the ride! We don't want to give away more than that, because frankly there's nothing more to give away.

Mike, Kevin and Bill will do their very best to Watch Out For My Pl-- oh they crushed it. Really stomped all over it. Kevin, there's no need to set it on fire... well, great. Just great

One of the great questions ethicists have pondered over time has been "what is the right thing to do?"

Meet Mr. Carson, who has never answered this question correctly. He's the man who puts the "wretch" in "eking out a paranoid, wretched existence living in filth off of disability." Mr. Carson hobbles through his neighborhood, finding items in various stages of disrepair that the honest, hardworking citizens have rightfully chosen to discard. Mr. Carson takes up these items that, while neglected by his fellow man, a subhuman shell like Mr. Carson can surely find some sort of use for. In the right hands, even something like a flat wagon wheel could be recycled into something useful, or at the very least, transformed into unappealing art. But Mr. Carson, trembling and unshowered, can't even be bothered to use the items he scavenges. He just throws them in a pile in his yard, and plasters up another "Keep Out" sign, though the idea of even slowing your gait while strolling past Mr. Carson's grim property, let alone trespassing on the blighted premises, is a prospect no rational man would entertain.



There is one group that finds Mr. Carson endlessly fascinating: eight year old boys! And peering in through his brittle, dusty venetian blinds, the spectacle of Mr. Carson eating store brand beef stew directly out of the can proves to be the perfect summer day activity for one particular group of scamps. Everything changes, though, when the boys decide to intrude on Mr. Carson's solitude, and a deadly accident occurs. And by changes, we of course mean, "Gets a whole lot funnier."



You know what? Strike that earlier sentence. There are two groups that find Mr. Carson fascinating: Eight year old boys, and Mike, Kevin and Bill, who riff with rapt attention, and the vague, unspoken unease that they are looking into their own near future.

Do you ever stop to reflect on what an ungrateful, useless little puke you were as a child? Like when your father came home after his 60 hour work week with the new lunchbox he thought you wanted, and you threw a red-faced tantrum because it was Go-Bots, not Transformers? Or the time your mother served the stuffed turkey she spent the whole day perfecting, and you flipped it on the floor, shrieking that you wanted McNuggets and didn't love her anymore?

Yes, children are terrible. And Family Teamwork gleefully drives that point home, with help from a brain-drilling theme wonderfully reminiscent of the music from Nintendo's Bubble Bobble. One boy turns sour when he learns his family's newfound poverty means they can't afford the trailer-tent he had his heart set on. Selfishly, he never thinks to ask how his family feels, or what the hell a trailer-tent might be. In this, and other scenarios, Family Teamwork serves up a heaping helping of shame, teaching kids important lessons about the joys of responding to passive-aggressive guilt. For the team!

Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Family Teamwork...as soon as they get off those dang skateboards...wait, they STILL haven't washed the car? Of all the no-good...great, there goes my ulcer

Join the middle-aged drummer as this thrilling documentary follows his exploits during Rush’s 2009 Asian tour. Leaving in his wake several bottles of FiberCon, completely unnecessary drum kit pieces, and pulp 1950s Sci-Fi novels with highlighted passages marked “use for lyrics”, the man....what’s that? Oh, this isn’t Neil Peart of the Orient? My mistake.

The makers of Pearl of the Orient set out to make a positive, uplifting piece about life in the heavily-bombed Philippine islands during the aftermath of World War II. And, if you consider third world poverty, rat-smashing, and utterly joyless wedding ceremonies “uplifting”, the filmmakers succeeded admirably! The tourism dollars surely flowed like a debris-tainted waterfall into the island nation after the world saw delightful images of villagers breaking their backs all day to harvest a half-cup of rice. Think about that next time you feel the urge to post on facebook “Stupid supermarket out of whole wheat linguini so had to settle for regular. FML!!!” Yes, it’s a nice reminder of how much we suck.

There’s also a cockfight. You should buy this.

Tag along with Mike, Kevin, Bill, and their newly-acquired Filipino wives for a trip to the Pearl of the Orient!

Meet Roy, elementary school student. Some children learn with more ease than others. Every child learns with more ease than Roy. He wants nothing from life except to be left alone: shy, silent, whittling off pieces of his desk in hopes that he’ll eventually find one that tastes good.

But his ill-tempered, hatchet-faced teacher (we’ll call her “Howard”) will have none of that. She goes out of her way to make an example of his dimness in front of the class, in order to teach valuable lessons to the other kids. These lessons primarily consist of new and exciting ways to make fun of Roy. She especially likes comparing him to his golden-boy older brother, George. Oh, you know George? Yeah, he is great, isn’t he! Just so smart, and strong, but still humble and decent...sorry, got lost in a “George” moment. It’s hard not to when he’s so much better than Roy. Roy really is the turd in the punchbowl of that family. You have to wonder what happened in the gene pool there...I mean, uh, being different is cool!

Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they ponder the horrors of Individual Differences! And don’t forget a bag of rotten fruit to throw at Roy’s piano recital!

For years, The Weather has been the go-to topic for nervously discussing with your co-workers whenever you end up sharing an elevator with them after you fail to see them pull into the parking lot at the same time as you, leaving you unable to adjust your route on the fly. "Some weather we're having" you'll say, and they will grunt their assent. A few seconds later you'll notice that neither of you have pressed the floor button, and you'll lunge for it at the same time, then retract your fingers cautiously, before finally poking it with a vigor that instantly seems inappropriately emphatic. It would probably be less socially awkward for you to just kill and eat the co-worker right there, but instead, you chat about the weather. God forbid they end up leaving at the same time as you that afternoon.

Yes, The Weather has been discussed to death. And yet somehow, Whatever the Weather manages to bring a fresh new angle to the topic. Of course, in order to find a fresh, new angle, they just made up some crazy analogy regarding weather and hats. You're not really even sure it was intentional until they hamfistedly try to tie it together in the final seconds. M. Night Shyamalan movies operate under the same principal.

If you're a fan of weather, you probably don't get invited to too many parties, seeing as how that's an extremely boring thing to be a fan of. So while you're sitting at home, not partying, why not cue up the latest RiffTrax short, Whatever the Weather, with Mike, Kevin and Bill playing armchair meteorologist next to you? Forecasts call for a 60 percent chance of infectious laughter. Hang on, I'm being issued a correction. That should read 60% chance of severe thunderstorms. Take cover immediately

The bartender says "I was talking to the duck!" And, so it was finished, before it had even begun. She was a dark and stormy dame. Really, that's a badger? "Over there, behind the fake tree," she said. The record scratched at midnight, as it always does. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a terrible paragraph. If only it were possible to build a better one! But surely, a topic as pedantic and uninteresting as Building Better Paragraphs has never been covered by the dynamos at Coronet Films, has it?

It has! Fans of crappy paragraphs, run and hide because Building Better Paragraphs is here to pummel your putrid paragraphs into submission! Building Better Paragraphs tells the tale of Susan, whose dog Major wins a prize at a dog show. Actually, it tells the tale of three children telling the tale of Susan & Major. While the rest of the class presumably learns important life skills such as the capital of Delaware, these three toil away at the back table, shaping their initial failure of a paragraph into something vaguely coherent. Can they build it into a better paragraph? Let's hope so, the bar was set awfully low. Can they shape it into an interesting paragraph? We're going to be honest, we have our doubts. Is one of the children in this short one of the strangest looking kids we've ever seen? We answer that with a hearty "Gahhhh!"

Mike, Kevin and Bill have each built a better paragraph only to later find out the assigned topic was The Teapot Dome Scandal, not bacon

Teaching kids about the evils of racism in a clear, culturally-sensitive manner is a difficult task. Fortunately for us, it’s something the makers of educational shorts from decades past were woefully inept at! Are People All the Same? takes an interesting approach. In order to illustrate that people are all fundamentally the same, they go to great lengths to help you differentiate people based on race. This includes side-by-side comparisons of Japanese and Chinese children (no, really!) presumably so that kids can sort people out, and be sure to only use “pee pee in your Coke” based insults at the appropriate time.

It’s a methodology that noted sensitivity expert Mel Gibson would support, saying “It’s [expletive deleted]-filled [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted], oh hey there sweetheart.” After building its argument, the film comes to a logical conclusion: a bunch of kids gather for a scream-filled, parent-free birthday party in an abandoned hovel. Proving that, ultimately, it doesn’t matter if people are all the same, because life is a chaos-filled nightmare with no one in charge.

Are People All the Same? Mike, Kevin, and Bill sure hope not, because that would mean that we are all roughly equivalent to Kevin Federline.

You may think you know your Mealtime Manners, but much like the recent Kevorkian biopic that, despite starring Al Pacino, was sadly neither unintentionally hilarious nor full of rapid fluctuations in vocal volume, You Don't Know Jack!

Mealtime Manners & Health posits the radical notion that your observing proper manners while eating can have a positive effect on your health. Wait, that's not really so radical...Oh, that's right, the radicalnotion it puts forth is not that good Mealtime Manners can make you happier and healthier, but rather that Mealtime Manners can occur at any given part of the day. Playing a little league game? Better have good Mealtime Manners! Parked outside a tardy coworker's house, waiting for them to join the carpool Don't forget your Mealtime Manners! Just finished dinner and won't be eating another meal for roughly twelve hours? Mealtime manners, dammit!!!

Yes, Mealtime Manners apply to virtually any social context. This may sound like a clumsy, even baffling point to you. We concede that this is most definitely the case. When they're on, the good people at Coronet Films could make a short that most people would generously describe as "dull yet coherent." When struggling to spend the last two hundred dollars of their state derived funds before a fiscal quarter deadline however, madness tended to be the prevailing theme. This short is joyously one of the latter.

Mike, Kevin and Bill enjoy practicing Mealtime Manners in any number of situations, "while riffing a short" being right near the top of their list.

In honor of our new short, Things Are Different Now, we’d like to list some things that are different now. In 2004, Mel Gibson was featured in Time’s “Man of the Year” issue for the success and spiritual impact of his film The Passion of the Christ. Things are different now. In March 2010, you could take a swim in the Gulf of Mexico and emerge without looking like a cast member of The Jersey Shore. Things are different now. Prior to the release of The Last Airbender, critics and anyone else who was paying attention had written M. Night Shyamalan off as an overhyped egomaniac whose best work was well behind him. Things are...well, some things haven’t changed.

The point here is, any kid who’s seen an after-school special or two knows that when an adult says “Things are different now,” what they really mean is “Things are now significantly worse.” Young Joey, the hero of our short, could attest to that. His voice has begun to crack, and his father has taken the Daniel Plainview approach to parenting - that is, to abandon one’s BO-OOOOY, to abandon one’s CHII-IIIIILD. Joey’s only source of comfort is his best friend, who is a creepy fat schmuck. Will Joey weather the storm and come out happy and well-balanced? Will the short bring these complicated, emotional issues to a satisfying and helpful resolution? If you’ve seen any of the educational shorts we present, you know the answer to that last question already.

In the spirit of things being different now, Mike, Kevin and Bill will riff this short completely sober.

It's every parent's nightmare: You're woken up at 3AM by a knock at your front door. When you open it, there's a somber looking policeman standing there, his hat in his hands. He avoids eye contact with you, and his voice quivers as he begins to speak. Before he even gets a word out, you know what he's going to say. "Sir," he quivers. "Your son...wants a doll."

The producers of William's Doll want you to believe that a boy with a doll is perfectly normal. For some reason, they made a film that convinces everyone of the exact opposite. We here at RiffTrax are as open-minded as they come regarding childhood toys. Some of us even grew up playing with a toy called Stinkor: The Evil Master of Odors, and we turned out alright.* But by the time the train wreck of William's Doll comes to its unspeakable conclusion, you'll be taking to the streets with your fellow Doll Party members, seizing and burning every doll you find just so they never end up in the hands of a boy.**

The twisted minds behind William's Doll made their defense of boys playing with dolls by combining two of the most loathsome things our planet has ever known: warbly 60's folk music and senior citizens. The guy who sings the William's Doll Theme sounds like Donovan singing Hurdy Gurdy Man after several months of gender reversal hormone treatment and a kick from a mule in what remains of his nads. But even that pales in comparison to William's grandfather, who walks in the door looking like the sun-dried corpse of Larry David and immediately begins his fiendish doll-enabling.

Bright spots include William's Dad, a grown, presumably employed man who wears a red mesh hat with a Goofy patch, who would rather let his son play with a Super Soaker Oozinator*** than a doll. If you can find one of these hats, please let Mike, Kevin and Bill know. They'll trade you an Oozinator for it.

As any dorm poster covered in photographs of shots that no adult would actually order at a bar could tell you, “Life is full of difficult decisions.” Tommy, the hero of Decisions, Decisions, would surely agree. His life has recently been rocked, as he was forced to move to a decrepit farm in the middle of nowhere for the sake of his remarkably effeminate father’s “good job”. Tommy will get little support from his mother, a dazed, gin-soaked woman who would probably tell a stranger at the library about her favorite handkerchief for 30 minutes before nodding off between some plants (you know the type). One gets the feeling this is a family hiding from a dark and shameful past.

Given this background, Tommy is ill-equipped to handle even the most basic decision. In this case, the decision is whether or not to hang out with Joey, the most horrible boy on the planet. Whiny, irritable, ugly, unpopular, and obsessed with painting his grandmother’s chicken coop, Joey is the kind of kid who wouldn’t even be welcome in a World of Warcraft community. Joey, with his offer of apples in exchange for friendship and coop-labor, distracts Tommy from the more important decision he should be making: to run far, far away.

Mike, Kevin, and Bill decide, decide, to riff, riff, this short, short.

School's out, and this summer, there's only one place to find elementary school children. No, not the basketball courts. No, not the movie theater. No, not the swimming hole, they cut down the rope swing after Tommy broke his leg. No, not the mall. No, not skateboarding in the parking lot. No, not knocking over a casino. No, not freeing giant killer whales from captivity. No, not protesting in advance the 2016 Sochi Winter Olympics. No, not recreating Jersey Shore episodes shot by shot with Playmobil figures. No, not...

**TIME PASSES**

No, not poaching rare California Condor eggs. No, not participating in college health department cold studies. No, not picking up Kanye West's dry cleaning. No, not the swimming hole, LOOK, WE ALREADY TOLD YOU THEY WEREN'T AT THE SWIMMING HOLE! THEY CUT THE DAMN TIRE SWING DOWN AFTER TOMMY BROKE HIS LEG. THEY ARE AT THE LIBRARY, OK? THE DAMN LIBRARY!!!!

Yes, the library, or liberry, if you're an idiot, is the hot spot in town for fancy book learnin' (replacing Luigi's PizzaMat, which held the title from 2004-2009). Library World tells the story of two children who are on the verge of making this discovery: A little boy who's skeptical of how much fun you can have at the library and his friend, a more enthusiastic boy or girl who is well versed in the library-going experience. With the help of a hot rod stealing 70's tool, who breaks new ground in the field of "having nothing better to do", they'll learn that the library isn't just a place you can check out books from. It's also a place where homeless people can escape nasty weather because the librarians are too meek and defenseless to kindly ask them to leave because they're frightening other patrons.

Mike, Kevin and Bill head on down to Library World, where they tried to find out where they keep the old stacks of National Geographics, but were too embarrassed to ask the librarian.

In preparation for working on Fad Diet Circus, we here at RiffTrax decided to try out a few of the more popular fad diets. We started with the “Macho Man Randy Savage Diet”, which allows only foods that you can “Snap into!” Then there was the “Soup-Made-From-the-Cheez-It-Crumbs-At-The-Bottom-Of-The-Box Diet” (use your own tears for broth). And of course the “Villain from the Muppet Movie Diet”, which consists entirely of Kermit the Frog’s legs (this one is known to true dietary insiders as the “Doc Hopper”). Finally we came to the “Penelope Cruz Diet”, permitting only food items you find while going through Penelope Cruz’s garbage. Thanks to this rigorous regimen, RiffTrax HQ has been temporarily relocated to the hospital, with one of us working remotely from prison (FORGIVE ME PENELOPE!!!!)

You might expect a film called Fad Diet Circus to cover several different diets, or at least something, you know, “circus-y”. You silly fool! The filmmakers instead focus on the low-carb Atkins Diet. And by “focus on” we mean “aggressively attack”: one gets the feeling this hit piece was commissioned by Betty Crocker and the “time to make the donuts” guy. They even wrote an anti-Atkins torch song (really, we’re not kidding) and dressed the kindly old doctor up in a heinous plaid coat (there’s no way that coat was a voluntary choice) just to discredit him.

Mike, Kevin, and Bill are willing to try any diet plan as long as the words “pork fat smoothie” are involved

When the 1920's ended, America was left with a shortage of crazy fads. Goldfish went un-swallowed. Flagpoles went un-sat upon. Charleston's went un-charlestoned. Dozens of dead bodies were pried out of a single phone booth. By and large people stopped messing around and got back to work. It was horrible.

But amidst the ceasing of Roaring, one major trend still managed to sweep the nation: washing your clothes with gasoline! Every housewife on Main St. could be found hitting up the local filling station, returning home with a reeking, volatile jug of gasoline, and submerging her delicates in it to get out those pesky grass stains.

Haven't heard of this trend? That's because it never actually existed. But that didn't stop...

In honor of Alone at Home, we did a little research on a similarly-titled film only to discover that Macaulay Culkin recently turned 30. That’s right, the kid from Home Alone is 30 years old. How ‘bout that for a dose of reality? A reminder of time’s cruel, relentless march? Did you just clear your throat, or was that an early taste of your own death rattle Can you really know? This cheerful reminder of mortality brought to you by RiffTrax.com!

While Mr. Culkin’s defining film (pipe down, Pagemaster fanfic authors) and Alone at Home share the same basic theme, there are key differences. Little Kevin McAllister is left unsupervised accidentally. The parents in Alone at Home, however, make the same choice quite intentionally. Where have they gone? No answer is given. Why have they gone? A few minutes with the awkward, goony children they’ve left behind is all the explanation you’ll need. Seriously, there’s a kid so odd and skinny you’ll be up at night wondering where his bones and organs fit, yielding nightmares you won’t soon escape. If Home Alone’s notorious Wet Bandits had shown up at his house, they would have turned away in sadness, and perhaps launched a food drive.

Mike, Kevin, and Bill have not been Alone at Home for years, because their wives know they’d just eat sticks of butter and wind up sticking their fingers in the electrical outlets again.

What would you do if you visited an elderly aunt only to find her injured on the floor? Would you regret that you had not been there when she fell from the stepladder, because if you had you could have captured the hilarious moment on video? Uploaded the video to YouTube, to see it become an instant sensation? Then awaited the inevitable dance remix, complete with her auto-tuned screams? And then finally felt a sense of culminated pride when a friend sent you a link to that same remix being played at someone’s wedding? Which you sneakily watched on your Smartphone while visiting your injured aunt in the hospital?

Well, naturally, all of that would be the correct answer in today’s world. But Telephone For Help comes from a simpler time, a time when phones were shackled to walls via so-called “wires” and could only be used for boring, mundane things like calling for help (or as a platform for the work of important artists like The Jerky Boys). Thrill at the injuries! Shudder in suspense as the dim-witted children decide whether or not to use the phone! Sweat your face off as you watch an emergency response team so slow they surely inspired the Public Enemy classic “9-1-1 Is A Joke”!

Mike, Kevin, and Bill were gonna Telephone For Help but they accidentally spent three hours looking for the highest-quality “Bed Intruder remix” ringtone instead.

Some questions are as old as time. “Why are we here?” “Can love really last?” “Who let the dogs out?” “Is corn grass?” But there’s one ancient question that’s sure to chill you to the bone, when asked creepily by your five-year-old after a long pregnant pause: What If We Had A Fire? It’s a simple query that can draw a lot of attention: just ask a certain Floridian minister who was recently in the news.

But while the question of “who didn’t start the fire?” was well and thoroughly answered by the esteemed Mr. Joel, this matter has gone woefully unaddressed. No longer! The young star of our film goes after the issue head-on, inspired by the scorched home of one of his classmates. Undistracted by the question of “Should We Try To Help The Recently Displaced Family of My Classmate?” our boy says, hey, what about ME? His parents promptly send him off to seek answers at the fire station, so they can work on the new insurance scam their son’s question has inspired. “Honey, what if we had a fire? Maybe then I could get that Camaro I’ve always wanted!”

Pretty much every party Mike, Kevin and Bill have ever attended has ended with the question What If We Had A Fire?

When police inspector Launchpad McQuack receives a phone call that Huey, Dewey and Louie have gone missing, his initial inclination was to suspect the Beagle Boys - a suspicion that his neighbor Donald Duck was only too happy to go along with. But Donald seemed a little too concerned about keeping Launchpad away from his newly planted garden bed, instead plying the straight-laced cop with a dish he called "Diablo Pato." And that's when the first severed head turned up in a box on Launchpad's doorstep, pulling him down into a twisted web of intrigue, with the case growing more depraved and fiendish with each passing hour. Sorry about that, that would be the plot of Se7en Little Ducks. Seven Little Ducks on the other hand is a good-natured short about a brace of ducks. You might assume that there would be seven ducks, but you would be a moron for expecting the good people at Coronet Films to do something as logical as naming their educational short in accordance with how many ducks are actually in said short. The ducks are owned by Carol, who is played by a Gamorrean Guard. Carol has mastered basic duck-care skills such as feeding them gravel and strangling them. The ducks detest their cruel owner, and led by the hideous Father Duck, whose skin condition makes Two Face look like a Noxzema model, plan a coup. I'm sorry, I'm also being informed that that should be "Coop", and is not a bloody takeover, but rather the enclosure within which the ducks reside. Obviously we can't get our details right about the content of the short, so just tune in to Seven Little Ducks along with Mike, Kevin and Bill and see for yourself. Quack.

When we're deciding what shorts to screen here at RiffTrax, there's a 27 step, bullet-pointed criteria we use. Then we just pick the ones with the funniest title. More often than not, this leads to disappointment. It turns out that Why Do We Still Have Mountains* was far duller than its title would indicate and Could a Goldfish Become Mayor of Tallahassee is in fact a short that we just made up.

One short that fortunately bucked the trend is the hilariously titled Cops: Who Needs Them? It tells the story of a nihilistic band of youths, who despite their apparent middle class upbringing and lack of any real responsibility or hardship in their lives, have developed a healthy distrust of cops. The characters, whose viewpoint about cops is evidently modeled entirely around the West Side Story number "Officer Krupke", also happen to be just about the ugliest bunch of kids you've ever seen. Seriously, we think that Moosebaby makes a cameo appearance as Frank.

The very cops whose need is questioned in the title are none too pleased about the sassmouth the teens are giving them and decide to take their leader along with them on a ridealong, mortally endangering his life and no doubt violating dozens of laws and protocols. Don't worry though, someone who may or may not be his dad and who also may or may not be furious at his son for having his car stolen gave them some sort of vague, verbal confirmation over the phone that it was OK. I don't think it qualifies as a spoiler to inform you that on the ridealong, somebody does in fact get shot.**

Experience Cops: Who Needs Them? yourself along with Mike, Kevin and Bill who all think they smell bacon. Yep, definitely bacon. (It has nothing to do with the short about cops, someone just happens to be making bacon. As usual.)

*Not a joke, this was a real short we screened **Also not a joke, someone really gets shot

Listen up, pizza-faced creeps! Until now, you’ve suffered shameful, wretched existences. Cowering in dark cellars. Adopting beekeeping as a hobby, just for the veil. Wearing a drug store Ninja Turtle Halloween mask all year long, playing it off as an ironic affectation. Even converting to new religions that require face coverings when in public. But no longer! The title of our new short makes a clear and simple promise: You Can Do Something About Acne! And, since this is a RiffTrax short, you can rest assured that promise will go completely unfulfilled!

Yes, get used to your zits and the politely repulsed reactions of the opposite sex, because this film has no real advice for you. Maybe eat less junk food, maybe don’t, it’s hard to say. Maybe stop smearing your face with a stick of butter every morning, maybe smear more butter, there’s no good way to know. One thing’s for sure, though, your face is full of horrible stuff you didn’t know about, including a sticky substance named “sebum”. That’s right, sebum. You’re oozing with sebum. Deal with that.

Excess pus and permanent scarring are NOT* symptoms of joining Mike, Kevin, and Bill for You Can Do Something About Acne!

*Probably. Really, we can’t be sure.

Safe Living at School pulls no punches with its straightforward title: This is a short which attempts to tell you how to make it through the school day unscathed. Your elementary school is a virtual house of horrors, where an act as innocuous as opening a locker can result in a vicious badger mauling! A playful swing on the monkey bars can be interrupted by an atom bomb explosion! Eating the cafeteria pizza can slightly burn the roof of your mouth, not enough to cause you to stop eating it but enough to make you take a slightly longer pause in between your first and second bites!

But the short, and dare we say humanity, fails to address the one safety issue that haunted us throughout our primary school years: Mrs. Pinkett, the bus driver who would sit on children when they misbehaved. Why this was tolerated by the school board, we have no idea, but it definitely happened, because an older kid who rode her bus one year totally knew a guy who saw her do it once. You'd sit facing straight ahead, not misbehaving except for the 98% of time you were on the bus that the wheels were moving, terrified that the slightest infraction, such as dropping a watermelon out the back window into the path of an ambulance, might trigger the wrath of Mrs. Pinkett, and then: SQUASH!!!

Perhaps you find this example unrelatable. Trust me, if you were there, you would never forget it. Regardless, if it were covered in Safe Living at School, the short would not doubt put forth that it could be handled in one way: by freeze-framing the action and playing a hilarious timpani drum sound every time an accident occurred. This takes place approximately 730 times during this brief short. The timpani drum is to this short what jokes about how white people dance are to an 80s Def Comedy Jam standup routine: consisting of the majority of the act and each one more hilarious than the last.

Mike, Kevin and Bill have safely lived at a school for over two years now, living in the janitor's closet and subsisting off of saltines and apple juice The crusty old principal thinks they are just the third grade classroom's hamster that escaped when Joey left the cage open during recess.

You can't underestimate the importance of a good title. What would "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" be if it were called "Some Stuff That Good People Do Good"? Or if "Who Moved my Cheese" had been called "How is this bottle of EZ Cheez empty already? I just bought it yesterday!" Or if "Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould" had been called "G. Gould: Sexecutioner"?

Actually, we probably would have gone to see that last one...Anyways, the point is, titling your work of art is in itself an important art form. Or, shall we say, it was, because with our latest RiffTrax short, the perfect title has been achieved. We present to you: Behavior of Domestic-Pigs in a semi-natural Pig-Park. It has everything: unnecessary capitalization! Unnecessary hyphenation!...um...pigs!

Yes, pigs, everyone's favorite raw material for bacon, finally are the subject of their own short. But these are not the lovable pigs you're used to. These are rough and tumble semi-natural pigs that make Hogzilla look like Babe, and make Babe look like some sort of high voiced, sheep-befriending wuss! You'll never look at your breakfast ham steak the same way again after you watch two boars butt heads in a vicious dispute over some semi-natural turf. And you'll abandon your ham steak altogether as you excuse yourself to go vomit in the bathroom once you witness the horrors of a pig process known as Parturition. Fortunately, a bewildering Scottish narrator is on hand to confuse the issue even further.

Mike, Kevin and Bill riff this one from the confines of their own semi-natural Pig-Park, which they have entitle Xanapig.

In working on Monkey See, Monkey Do: Verbs, we came across a rare find: a behind-the-scenes audio recording from the making of the film! Before submitting the material to a museum, where it belongs, we’ve transcribed the conversation: Producer Norman Bean and Director of Photography, Carl, working at the height of their craft. Enjoy!

Norman Bean: Carl, I’d like to talk to you about the footage you shot for our new educational short on verbs. I asked you to film, let’s see...a playground, a beach, a softball game, and the Fourth of July parade.

Carl: Ah, yep. I didn’t do any of that.

Norman Bean: I see that, Carl. It seems you just went to the zoo and filmed some monkeys.

Carl: Yep, sure did. They got some pretty good monkeys, down there at the zoo.

Norman Bean: In fact you only filmed them for about three minutes, and then looped that footage three times.

Carl: Did I? Heh, heh. Well, I was pretty stoned.

Norman Bean: This doesn’t teach anything. In fact it might make children dumber.

Carl: Norm, I got an 8-year old. He spent an hour yesterday playing with some tin foil he found in the bottom of his backpack. Kids are morons. They’ll watch anything. Let’s slap a crappy song on it and head to the strip club. “Strip” - now there’s a verb!

Norman Bean: Good Lord, I...okay. Okay, fine. This is not our proudest day.

Carl: Look at them monkeys scratch! After serious consideration of the material, Mike, Kevin, and Bill implore you to - HOLY COW TAKE A LOOK AT THESE MONKEYS! THEY ARE FREAKING HILARIOUS

Life in Australia can be extremely hazardous. There's Tasmanian devil attacks, lethal doses of vegemite and large, bearded, drunken men. And that's just in the Parliament building!* Once you head out into the bush - just allow that to sink in for a second - the dangers of a vest wearing man disparaging the size of your knife become that much more pronounced. Thus, if you plan on camping in Australia, Don't Be A Bloody Idiot: watch Don't Be A Bloody Idiot. Mike, Kevin and Bill, (all of them Stickybeaks), pool their last Brass Razoo, try not to act like a bunch of Ockers and google "Australian slang" to find out what the hell we're talking about as they riff one of the finest 1970s Australian camping safety films they've ever seen: Don't Be A Bloody Idiot. *We know they have a parliament because the Australian guy Bart prank calls goes to his local member of parliament to try to sort out the issue before turning to the prime minister.

When we first received Magical Disappearing Money we assumed it was an M.C. Hammer biopic. Fortunately, it turned out to be something even more pathetic and strange! It’s the tale of a supermarket haunted by a witch, but not your standard-issue Hollywood witch. She’s more the “found her clothes in an oil puddle behind the Fashion Bug” kind of witch. The kind of witch who shows up at KFC five minutes before close, looking for free stale biscuits. You can bet she didn’t attend Hogwarts, but maybe its discount online equivalent, Pigzits. Join the Grocery Witch as she takes Mike, Kevin, and Bill on a spooky* journey into the dark realm of insignificant savings! After Magical Disappearing Money, you’ll never waste money on extravagances like “fancy seasoned rice” again!** *creepy **you absolutely will, and are right to do so

Values: Understanding Ourselves is the tale of three small boys who find a rusty hubcap in an abandoned lot and take turns rubbing it and wishing for it to turn them into a fellow classmate. "Stop right there", you are no doubt saying. "If Hollywood decides to revisit that played out, 'three boys find a hubcap and rub it' plot one more time, I will just freak out man!!!"

Yes, by now it's a bit of a cliche. But we think you will find that this particular "Three boys and a hubcap" story brings something new to the table: complete and utter incoherence. The message, is ostensibly, "values". And it's quite likely that back in the fifties, the term "values" had an entirely different meaning, as did "gay" or "internet".* But we've been unable to discern that meaning. Our best guess so far is that it meant "nougat". Join Mike, Kevin and Bill in the abandoned lot of your imagination, for Nougat: Understanding Ourselves.

*It meant "gay", oddly enough.

The Calendar. Whether you choose a Far Side page-a-day, an Anne Geddes year-of-horror or Twelve Months of Lifeguards that May Be Used as Flotation Devices, one thing is certain: none of us know how to use the damn things. Fortunately, five minutes before recording The Calendar: How to Use It, the producers told a PA to pick up a guitar that he didn't know how to play and write some songs explaining the intricacies of the calendar. The result is quite possibly the most tuneless piece of garbage since The Beatles "Wild Honey Pie", except instead of the charming introductory act of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da", The Calendar: How to Use It has two spandex clad adults who intrude in a young girl's bedroom in a fashion that Antoine Dodson would disapprove of. Suffice to say, you will be far more confused about the calendar by the time the thing is done. Mike, Kevin and Bill team up not only to riff this short, but also to open an eBay store selling vintage 1994 calendars, which are due to fully mature in value in 2017.

Our latest short takes its name from a famous quote from The Gospel of Matthew. Or maybe it was from the episode of Eek The Cat, "Eek vs the Flying Saucers." What's important is that even though our newest short derives its title from one of these two important works, its subject matter, the Attwater's Prairie Chicken, does not appear in either work (we're certain about the Eek the Cat episode, less up to speed on our book of Matthew.) Yes, at the time the short was made, the Attwater's Prairie Chicken appeared to be Booming it's way towards extinction. The chickens' famed Booming grounds, where they once Boomed by the hundreds of thousands, had been paved over for a Showbiz Pizza, leaving them Boom-less. (After repeated viewings of the short, we think Booming refers to some sort of dice game.) The short details the efforts of a few concerned citizens, with nothing, literally nothing better to do than to save some chickens who it appears were public enemy one of Natural Selection. Hastily taped cardboard boxes, helicopters mounted with huge Wile E. Coyote inspired nets and, yes, Booming, all figure prominently. Mike, Kevin and Bill take a break from Booming to riff Unto the Least of These.

When you ponder ideal Christmas entertainment for children, do you think of a centuries-old tradition of violent puppetry, complete with domestic abuse and offensive minstrel-themed puppets thrashing each other? Well, you’d better--what’s that? That IS what you think of? Exactly that? Yes, well I realize I asked, but it was intended as a rhetorical question, really a set-up for a joke--what’s that? Oh, well I suppose that is a rather hackneyed structure for making a point, but...you know what, why don’t you just get the hell out of here! For EVERYONE ELSE, Santa Claus’ Punch and Judy will serve as a disturbing, yet delightful, foray into puppet-based hate comedy that predates Jeff Dunham by hundreds of years! It’s a special treat, as avid Punch and Judy enthusiasts, known as “Punch men” (these people actually exist) have named this particular performance “the best to have come from the States” (this is an actual quote). Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Santa Claus’ Punch and Judy: hilarious puppet mayhem that will have the kids laughing, and then sobbing in confusion, for years to come!

Do you like Courtesy? How about Egg Puns? After a few drinks, have you been known to expound at length about how Sheldon, the egg with legs, was truly the unsung hero of the US Acres segments of the late 80's animated show "Garfield and Friends"? Yes? You have? Then kindly stay away from us, as that is just a comedically specific quirk that we made up thinking that nobody could ever really have and it is really creepy that you actually do that. Instead of drinking and lecturing us, why not tune into the latest RiffTrax short, Courtesy: A Good Eggsample. Forgoing human actors, as Tommy Wiseau did in "The Room", and instead replacing them with eggs, Courtesy: A Good Eggsample breaks bold new ground in the field of courtesy education. Mainly it does this through a relentless combination of groaning egg puns and horrible synth music, stopping briefly at the end to inform us that we've learned an important lesson about courtesy. The stop-motion animation nature of the film leads us to believe that substantially more time was invested in this short than many of the ones we've done before, which makes it even more impressive that it fails to deliver a moral with even a shred of coherence. On the other hand, they resisted the urge to name the lead characters something as obvious as "Eggbert" and "Benedict." This just in, I'm being informed that, no, they in fact did not resist that urge. Mike, Kevin and Bill team up for eggseptional riffing on Courtesy: A Good Eggsample

Alfred Higgins Productions famously struck gold with their "demand for obedience masked as fun" short The Following Instructions Game. Flush with confidence and literally tens of dollars in money, the AHP crew tried to replicate their success with a pair of new "game" shorts: The Doing Your Own Laundry Game, followed by The Turning All the Matchsticks in the Box So They Face the Same Direction Game. They even took a shot at board games with Chutes & Don’t Ask Daddy So Many Damned Questions When He's Watching the Aerobics Channel.

These projects were met with utter indifference from the public, and the company would have gone under if not for bankrolling from Alfred Higgins' infamous "pygmy milk bootlegging" fortune. But the light of success finally shone again with the release of The Being On Time Game! Fans were enraptured by the brilliant casting of a child who stunned with her Eleanor Roosevelt good looks. Even Mr. Mac was sprung from prison and convinced to resume his "creepy rhyming workshop freak" role. The critics raved, calling it "Definitely something that was filmed!"

Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for an unforgettable round of The Being On Time Game! Don't be late or you'll lose bonus points and harvest eleven counter-demerit units (it's a very complicated game).

If you have Daily Problems at your work, the humanitarians at Coronet Films are here to help you Handle them. And assuming that most of your problems center around how ugly your 1970s co-workers are, this is just the film for you! We'll meet a nurse living out a real life Grey's Anatomy, with the part of McDreamy being played by "Dan"*, someone who cannot have ever been taken seriously by anybody. Then step into the shoes of a successful restaurant manager, who packs in the customers every night of the week despite sounding like a creepier version of serial killer Jame Gumb. Finally, we'll Shake Hands with Cattiness at a construction site where terrible facial hair threatens to undermine all we hold dear as a nation of free people. Basic Job Skills - Handling Daily Problems won't teach you anything new about how to act at work, but it may make the woman in the cubicle next to yours who hums the theme song to "Denver The Last Dinosaur" and calls her cats on the phone three times a day seem a bit less irritating in comparison. *We're pretty sure Dan is Reggie from Beginning Responsibility: Taking Care of Your Own Things all grown up.

Some people would say that good old-fashioned common courtesy is dead in modern times. And we here at RiffTrax think those ugly jerks should keep their crusty mouths closed if they know what’s good for ‘em! Oh, we’re kidding of course, but if you think we’d hold the elevator for you as you approached rather than hurriedly push the “Close Door” button while avoiding eye contact, you’ve got another thing coming.

So maybe we’ve got some learning to do when it comes to courtesy (shocking, after the powerful breakfast-based examples of recent short Courtesy: A Good Eggsample) -- good thing we’ve got Courtesy Counts A Lot to set us straight! And what could be more instructive than animated vignettes about a young nerd getting his hot air balloon in a palm tree, only to be assaulted by a giraffe...or a ghostly clown crossing paths with an angry armadillo...Hm. Well, at least there’s a hideous 2-line song playing under the entire film, sung by a chorus of children who sound so nervous you have to wonder if they’ve recently spent time on a beach with Santa Claus and a certain dessert-based Bunny. Yes, Courtesy Counts A Lot -- and apparently causes schizophrenia!

After learning the lessons of Courtesy Counts A Lot, Mike, Kevin, and Bill were trapped in the room for 3 hours attempting to let each other be the first out the door. The final result: bloodshed.

Meet The Customer, three time finalist for the title of Most Disrespected Man in America. No matter where he goes: the bank, the supermarket, even his job, somebody is waiting to ignore him, inconvenience him, or throw confetti in his face while laughing uproariously.* How does The Customer respond to this disrespect? By showing the merest hint of backbone and asserting himself ever so slightly? Or by absorbing life’s blows with dead eyes and muttering to himself that one day, he’ll show them... He’ll show them all!!! (He honestly does B. Seriously, it’s pretty creepy.) Mike, Kevin and Bill team up to riff the consumer education short, Remember Me, which is approximately 60,000,000% less tasteless than the Robert Pattinson movie, Remember Me. *Usually this only happens when he goes to Rip Taylor’s house

Imagine you are a 1950s elementary school student, and you have just walked to school. Sure, you didn’t really want to go, but now you’re there and ready to learn. Maybe enjoy a vintage Cold War-era nuclear bomb drill, a great opportunity to crawl under your desk. As you settle in, resting your legs which you have just used to walk to school, the teacher puts an educational film into the projector. The subject...Walking to School?!?! What!? But, but, that’s what you just did! It’s the one thing you DEFINITELY don’t need to learn! Just by virtue of BEING at school, it should be clear that...no, no, you calm yourself. Teacher knows what she’s doing, quell your rage, this film must have value. WRONG AGAIN! As the minutes of your life tick by, you see the film is nothing but an excruciating real-time enactment of two kids walking to school! And these particular kids happen to live absurdly far from their school, traversing overpasses, underground tunnels, and even unexplored regions of the Yukon in their voyage. And, wait, they’re brother and sister, why won’t they stop holding hands?! You hold your tongue and prepare to take out your stifled aggression on anyone who looks at you funny at recess later in the day, because it’s the 1950s and that’s just what you do. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they hurl stale Twinkies at passing kids who are Walking to School. And once they’re done with that part of their everyday morning routine, they will watch the short Walking to School!

Oscar-nominated film The King’s Speech focuses on a world leader who struggles under the burden of a devastating speech impediment (or so we’ve been told, we were gonna see it but accidentally watched Birdemic 35 more times instead). If Improve Your Pronunciation had been around to help that troubled monarch, The King’s Speech would never have been made, providing an open slot in the Best Picture nominees list for another amazing film that has not received the award recognition it so richly deserves (....no, we’re not talking about Birdemic...okay, yes we are). Improve Your Pronunciation imagines speech instruction, not as a private lesson with a certified professional, but as a garish game show hosted by the one and only Ned Blandford! Yes, that’s actually his name, why would you ask? No, I don’t think you should look into his criminal record. Seriously, it won’t be good. Just watch as Ned takes the shame of these poor speakers, ”grunters”, and “smudgers”, and airs it out for the world to see! After learning the lessons of Improve Your Pronunciation, Mike, Kevin and Bill would like to say “Thbpppbt snorfk inamota Ryan Phillippe!”

Your Basic Job Skills, or more accurately, your lack thereof, are why you are no longer employed at Long John Silver's. Yes, we know you've been telling people it's because your manager, Navid, was a jerk. But really, how was he supposed to react when he caught you and Darrell in the walk-in trying to see how many hush puppies you could fit up your nose?*

In Basic Job Skills: Dealing with Customers, you'll learn how to handle the biggest thorn in any menial employee's side: the customer. Whining, complaining, yelling, bleeding all over the floor because the Cabbage Patch Doll you sold them came alive in the middle of the night and tried to eat their hair, customers are the worst. Unfortunately, a fact of business in the modern era is that you need customers to survive (although that Pole Dancing Fitness Class / Do It Yourself Dog Wash place by us has stayed open for like three years and we've never seen a single person in there.)

In this short, you'll examine three different jobs, and how they deal with customers. Mostly it's by passing the buck and acting like they are too busy to help out with an assigned task. If you're reading this at work, you are likely already familiar with these tactics. But it also touches on advanced methods, such as the dog trainer who didn't think she dealt with customers, until she realized that she does.**

Mike, Kevin and Bill pry the hush puppies out of their noses and team up to riff Basic Job Skills: Dealing With Customers.

*Five. You surprised even yourself that fateful day.

**Yep.

Jaywalking! It's convenient, exciting, good for a laugh or two. But is it wise? To find out, let's watch The ABC of Walking Wisely, which weighs in on J-walking as well as the rest of the walking alphabet.

Oh, you weren't aware there was an entire walking alphabet? You're not familiar with common phrases like O-walking and K-walking? Are you curious how to avoid these deadly pitfalls? Intrigued by the subtle differences between the A-Walker and the Y-Walker? Then this is the short for you!

Pop in The ABC of Walking Wisely and watch a delightful collection of dumb kids play in traffic. If you notice a reduced desire to be a Q-Walker afterwards, you can thank us then.

Mike, Kevin and Bill team up to riff The ABC of Walking Wisely, and more importantly, to walk around like the kid who thinks he's Sir Kay.

Few would argue that Visions in the Forest rarely end well, especially if they’re brought on by the special chocolates the hippie left at your campsite before he scurried off, muttering about spruce bark beetles. But there’s one thing we all can agree on: few Visions in the Forest are more terrifying than the sight of Vaughn Monroe’s family. Yes, Vaughn Monroe, best known for singing “Riders in the Sky” in the short Vision in the Forest, loves the great outdoors, and so does his family, despite the fact that two of them appear to be the living dead. His youngest daughter, who has yet to adopt the ghastly pallor so fancied by her mother and sister, encounters Smokey the Bear in the forest and learns an important lesson: stay the hell away from grown men who dress as Smokey the Bear and lurk around the forest. Mike, Kevin and Bill each experienced “Visions in the Forest”* during the riffing of this short.

A Badger’s Bad Day is the harrowing tale of a Badger who works as a middle manager at a cell phone case manufacturing plant. He returns home after a particularly exhausting shift to discover a window broken on his house, and the front door ajar. His family is gone, but there are signs of a struggle. A bloody knife is discovered in the bathroom sink, and a severed toe is prominently placed on the kitchen table, on top of a taunting ransom note. Badger, filled with rage, must hunt down his family’s abductors on a journey that will uncork the decades of repressed rage he had worked so hard...so hard to keep down...Sure, Badger’s having a Bad Day...But for the kidnappers, it’s about to get even worse... What’s that? Not even remotely resembling the plot of this short? In reality, Badger just gets sprayed by a skunk and then encounters other woodland creatures who seem more indifferent than hostile to him? Well I guess that wouldn’t really equal a “Good Day.” Though does that by definition make it a “Bad Day”? Some might say...dear god! Is that a toe on my kitchen table!?! Oh wait, no, it’s a Cheeto. Mmm, delicious... Mike, Kevin and Bill consider any day involving badgers to be a Good Day.

Anybody who strapped in for the thrill ride that was Families: Food and Eating probably assumes they got the whole story. Three families from three different countries prepared food, and they ate it. Knuckle-whitening stuff, no doubt, but could there possibly be more? Hold on to your culturally-appropriate hat, because THERE SURE IS!! That food didn’t just come from nowhere, sonny, and Families: Earning and Spending is here to fill you in! All the stereotypical families are back. The smug, stoned San Franciscans, the efficient, unsmiling Japanese, and the hard-working, thank-God-they-can’t-see-the-spoiled-San-Francisco-family Mexicans! It’s a full-on prequel...or is it a series reboot? Hm. Well, the characters are the same, so, leaning prequel...but there’s definitely some retcon happening, though, so probably reboot? Eh, who knows. We’ll just have to let the rabid, Hitler-invoking commenters over at the “Families Shorts Series Wiki” fight it out! Join Mike, Kevin and Bill and spend a little well-earned time with Families: Earning and Spending!

Kangaroos - considered by many to be one of the top five marsupials in the world for drunken Irishmen to box, these creatures remain elusive and mysterious to most of us. (Exception: local kangaroo hoarder Crazy Dennis.) The creatively titled short film Kangaroos should put an end to all your questions, especially if your question is “Are there no kangaroos in America because many years ago they were all eaten by Wild Lions” which the short would have you believe is answered "Yes." Another question that will be answered affirmatively by this short? "Are kangaroos horrible, terrifying creatures that we would all be better off without?" Mike, Kevin and Bill, despite their best preparations, still had the validity of their knives questioned during the recording of this short.

The story begins with The Red Hen’s brother and their parents being slaughtered by the evil Queen Gedren’s army because The Red Hen rejected the Queen’s sexual advances. The Red Hen survives violent assault by Gedren’s troops, and even gives Gedren a kind of souvenir: a brutal scar on her face. Later that night, The Red Hen is visited by a spirit who grants her the strength to seek her revenge. In her quest, The Red Hen accepts the company of the mighty Lord Kalidor, but also gives him a warning: she will never lie with any man unless he can defeat her in a swordfight. Kalidor challenges her and they spar, but neither of them is able to defeat the other. They call it a draw. Kalidor at least wins her heart.

Description of our new short The Red Hen or slightly-altered synopsis of 1985 Brigitte Nielsen & Arnold Schwarzenegger flick Red Sonja? Impossible to say. But, either way, there will be plenty of hijinks involving duck urine (that part is true) when you join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for the tale of bloody revenge/docile farm life that is The Red Hen!

What do ice-skating reindeer, pipe-smoking santas and a parade of aquatic champions have in common? You’ll see them all in the RiffTrax Live: Christmas Shorts-Stravaganza! The stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000® have a sackfull of delightful and demented shorts to riff live onstage. Some of the forgotten gems of Christmases past prove to be the perfect targets for the rapid-fire riffs of Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett. And if that wasn’t enough, they’re even joined by comedy legend “Weird Al" Yankovic for a musical short about the wonders of pork! It’s funnier than Ernest Saves Christmas and far less creepy than The Polar Express! Join Mike, Kevin, Bill and Al for a festive night of hilarious holiday comedy that is destined to become traditional Christmas viewing.

Most of us know the basics of dental hygiene. Brush after after every nine breaths, floss with a business card on public transportation, and gargle with Mountain Dew. So to be honest, it’s fairly insulting that the producers of Tooth Truth with Harv and Marv thought we needed an entire instructional video. And while it may be insulting that they thought this, the reality of their unspeakable creation verges much more towards horrifying. Harv and Marv are twisted little hobo/imp/hobbits, with laughs that rival the Ice Cream Bunny’s in terms of future scream-yourself-awake nightmares. And see that creature in the Tooth Truth poster? Looks like someone who should be playing Poison covers at a country fair right? Well, that’s the Tooth Fairy in this sick universe! That’s right, she sneaks into your children’s bedrooms after they are asleep and pays them for pieces of their mouth! Mike, Kevin and BIll team up to riff Tooth Truth with Harv and Marv, the pinnacle of the mismatched buddy tooth instructional video genre.

Before going any further, we should stop to let you know that our new short County Fair was produced by ACI, the same acid-fueled company that brought us the notorious Grasses short. We’ll pause now while those of you who have seen Grasses stop reading this immediately to purchase County Fair. Ah, the rural county fair -- the kind of place that everyone takes their children, then immediately remembers that county fairs are no place for children, or decent folk of any age. Carnies, deep-fried treats that make the KFC Double Down seem like a heart-healthy option, and rides that are either 100% rust or coated in the blood of previous riders, there’s no end to the number of ways a county fair wants to kill you. County Fair takes this bacteria farm of an environment and adds new levels of terror, with songs straight out of a bottomless David Lynch fever dream. Dip your funnel cake in liquid mescaline and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill on the ferris wheel to eternity with County Fair!

Quick! Say the first word that comes to mind when I mention porcupines. Ok... Sure, why not...That one’s not really what we're looking for, but keep 'em coming...Ok, that's a little weird that you thought of that...Oh god! How would that even work!?!? You know what, let's stop that exercise. NOT the results we were expecting. How would you even get the banana out of the rubber chicken once you were hooked on to the trapeze? You know what, it's not important. The word we were looking for was "salt". That's right, porcupines like the star of our latest short, Prickly, love salt and will stop at nothing to get one sweet, sweet lick of the decidedly non-sweet substance. Dont believe us? Possibly because you've never heard this so-called "fact" before and it sounds like it needs to be accompanied by a big fat, 72 point Wikipedia-style "citation needed" label? We agree that it does. So here's our citation: Prickly the Porcupine, a great new short in which one brave porcupine goes off in search of all the salt his heart desires. Of course, we just did a short that claimed there were no kangaroos in America because Wild Lions ate them all. So you probably should take

anything you learn in them with a grain of...Dammit! Prickly ate the end of the sentence!

The internet era is filled with mysterious, indecipherable messages. The comment “firsties” on an article - what could it possibly mean, and what purpose could it serve? An all-caps email forwarded by your grandmother warning of the potential dangers of the ethanol gasoline conspiracy...but only after scrolling past thousands of strange, hieroglyphic “>” symbols. Or a text message like “lolwut gmafb rusrsly X-D”, which, according to the work of our finest crypto-linguists, translates roughly to “Pass the frog-banana, Harold.”

But our new short The Mysterious Message shows that failures in communication happened even back in the ancient period known as Pre-Geocitian! In those days, something called “handwriting” was the culprit. Now used primarily for that one actual check you still have to begrudgingly write each month (ugh, rent) handwriting was once so common that a faux-scary short film with a faux-good Vincent Price impersonating narrator had to be made! From an easily-baffled mailman to a lovelorn secret admirer to a rollerskating waitress, you’ll shudder at the totally avoidable terror!

Since riffing The Mysterious Message, Mike, Kevin, and Bill have taken to writing all tweets and texts in pen. So far they have destroyed 14 cell phone screens and a stranger’s laptop.

Sometimes it’s really hard to be a good sport. Like when your fifth grade basketball team gets embarrassed 41-17 on the court, so you convince all the boys on your team to hock a loogie into their palms before shaking hands with the winning team. Then the goody-two-shoes on your team, James, rats you out to coach and you get in big trouble. So, as kids do, you dedicate your life to developing an elaborate revenge plan against James, culminating in cut brake lines and you doing 10 years hard time for no good reason. Hey, we’ve all been there, am I right? Kids will be kids!

Our new short, Being a Good Sport, tries to help you avoid such scenarios, but mainly just proves that snotty kids who don’t play well with others should be shunned for the safety of everyone involved. Embracing these adorable little psychopaths will earn you nothing but a knife in the back! Consider yourself warned!

On their way to riffing Being a Good Sport, Mike, Kevin and Bill played a friendly game of rock paper scissors to decide who got shotgun. The fistfight that ensued lasted until sundown and destroyed 3 residential blocks.

Animals make their homes in lots of fun, interesting places! Some burrow into tree bark, while others burrow into the dense, matted armpit hair of a bench-napping Nick Nolte! Some gather twigs and leaves to construct nests, while others nest in the exhaust pipe of the inoperative Dodge Pacer in which Nick Nolte resides! Some dig elaborate underground tunnel systems, while others dig tunnels in the massive stack of restraining orders, ignored subpoenas, and unpaid adult pay-per-view bills that Nick Nolte keeps around so that he has something to wipe up his sick!

Mike, Kevin, and Bill invite you to join them for Animal Homes, which provides a window into the everyday lives of gophers, opossums, and other hideous rodent beasts that you usually only get to see on the side of the freeway, being very, very still!

Sure, great, here we go...”beginning” responsibility, and “getting” ready for school. Hey kids, how about for once you just GET responsible and BE ready for school? We’re tired of coddling you! Oh, you can’t eat your breakfast, because we put the plate up on top of the fridge and you can’t reach it because you’re only five years old? Yeah well everyone’s got some kind of sob story, just figure it out buddy! Oh, sure, cry, guess you don’t need any help learning how to “begin” doing THAT.

Inexplicable rage aside, Beginning Responsibility: Getting Ready for School centers on two wholesome 1950s lads, Pete and Ricky, and their morning routines. One boy’s home runs as smoothly as a Swiss watch, while the other is as disorganized and maddeningly chaotic as one of those Canadian watches you never hear about (and now you know why).

Hurry up and join Mike, Kevin and Bill for Beginning Responsibility: Getting Ready for School because the late bell already rang twice and if you don’t get inside now all the good educations will be taken!

Who among us doesn’t love a good adventure? A chance to escape our routines and stimulate our minds and reinvigorate our sense of fun. Yes, there’s nothing like the thrill you get from emerging from your burrow, nervously looking around, and perhaps grabbing a nut before darting back underground to huddle amongst your brothers.

What’s that? Not exactly how you define adventure? Something more along the lines of travelling, camping, whitewater rafting? Well, I apologize. I didn’t clarify that I was using the definition of adventure as found in the latest RiffTrax short Adventures of a Chipmunk Family. It’s packed to the brim with adventures, if you consider expanding the series of underground tunnels that the chipmunks live in in preparation for winter to be an adventure.

Also, a weasel shows up. You know what, we probably should have mentioned that first...Forget everything you just read and remember this: weasel.

Mike, Kevin and Bill tried to weasel out of riffing this short until they realized there was a weasel in it. Just wanted to emphasize that, yes, there is a weasel in this short. Weasel.

GET TO DA CHOPPA!!! Many of us have heard these iconic instructions hundreds of times. They’ve been shouted at us during important life events: graduations, weddings, or most likely, watching Predator hungover at two in the afternoon at Dan’s. Few of us ever take the shouter up on the Choppa-getting-to however.

Except Billy! Billy is a boy who acts where the rest of us cower in fear, or perhaps ask Dan to pass us the gatorade. Make no bones about it, in Billy’s Helicopter Ride, Billy gets to da Choppa.

The fact that Da Choppa is driven by Uncle Joe, who looks like he was rejected from the Grapes of Wrath cast on the grounds of being “too drifter-like”, does not deter Billy’s father from letting Billy take an unaccompanied tour of their town in the helicopter. While touring their town they see many exciting things such as: their town from a slightly elevated position than normal.

Will Billy seize the controls in a manic episode and plunge the helicopter downward, spiralling towards their doom? Yes he will!* So buy it and witness every thrilling second of Billy’s Helicopter Ride!

*An utter lie.

Yes, the short that brought the house down at RiffTrax Live, answering questions about paper that nobody was asking, is now available in a brand-new studio version! By now the sick, sad tale of young Willie and his demented belief in a talking paper bag, whom he names Mr. Paperbag (proving that “crazy” and “creative” don’t always go hand in hand) is the stuff of legend. Their nightly adventures to the forests of the American South will remind you of Bonnie & Clyde, if you don’t know anything about Bonnie & Clyde and assume that they mostly talked about paper. Willie learns a lot from his creepy little friend, primarily about the meaning of loss as Mr. Paperbag crumples and dies before his very eyes! (no, seriously, that happens!)

Mike, Kevin and Bill have never had a conversation with a paper bag, unless you count the ones containing giant bottles of MD 20/20.

Aesop’s Fables. These stories, with their universal morals, have inspired us all. Tales such as “The Fox and the Grapes”, “The Lion and the Mouse” and “The Two Cat/Bear things that go to the North Pole and one dies but comes back to life and they see a polar bear.”

Not familiar with the last one you say? Perhaps you remember it by its more common name Frozen Frolics. No? We’re pretty sure it’s one of Aesop’s Fables, it says so right on the title screen...

Anyhow, Frozen Frolics answers that eternal question, “What was it like when people took acid before color had been invented?” The answer? Lots of black and white cartoon animals that sort of bob up and down repeatedly while a crazed mixture of consequence free violence happens all around them. Many credit it as the inspiration for The Jerry Springer Show.

Mike, Kevin and Bill learned a very important moral during their riffing of Frozen Frolics: cured meats are delicious.

Ever since this short debuted at RiffTrax Live, we’ve heard one question more than any other: “Why are you standing so close to me?” But a VERY CLOSE second to that is, “When are you guys gonna release that insane Grasses short??” Friends, you need ask no longer! Unless you were one of the people asking the first question, in which case the answer is “It’s a free country, I’ll stand where I want. Hey, you gonna finish that Hostess fruit pie?”

Here, in a new studio version, is At Your Fingertips: Grasses. It’s got everything! Arts & crafts so awful they would even disappoint Depression-era children, fancy headdresses galore, and child worship of a terrifying clay-faced god! Not to mention a certain inquiry about corn that ranks up there with “Who is Keyser Soze?” as one of cinema’s great questions.

While recording At Your Fingertips: Grasses, Mike, Kevin, and Bill kept something else at their fingertips: lots and lots of bourbon.

Let’s just be upfront: this is a sequel to the infamous Grasses short and you should buy it right away. Yes, the mad geniuses at ACI films have recruited a new group of children to glance nervously at the authority figures standing off-camera as they’re forced to make crafts out of common household garbage. This time, the waste product of choice is cardboard boxes. Yes, before Calvin and Hobbes turned a cardboard box into a transmogrifier, the children in this short were showing similar sparks of imagination by pretending to assemble crafts that were clearly made by adults when the camera wasn’t rolling. There are no fancy headresses in this short, but you will witness an entire city made of blocks, complete with corpses floating in a motel pool. Also, two youngsters live out every child’s fantasy and use boxes to set up their own furniture moving business. And it wouldn’t be an At Your Fingertips short without twisted creatures brought into existence through the power of rubber cement and undiagnosed psychosis. At Your Fingertips: Boxes continues the proud tradition of its predecessor. Mike, Kevin and Bill can only look forward to At Your Fingertips: Pizza Savers.

A cutting, thoughtful, and sober analysis of the coming world energy crisis, Borrowed Power affirms -- WAIT WAIT DON’T GO just kidding!! It’s really about an extaordinarily ugly teenager killing someone with his car! Or did he? That question is the raw mystery of this driving scare film, which brings to life the character of young, reckless, hideous Jerry, and his equally unpleasant friends. In his hurry to get to a sock hop, or a malt shop, or some other dull and awful thing old-timey teenagers did to pass the time until video games and psychedelic drugs became available, Jerry drives his giant car like a gosh-darned fool. After his (potentially) lethal ride, he’s scolded by a vaguely governmental official who calls in Jerry’s parents, who somehow take the ugly levels EVEN HIGHER! You won’t believe your eyes! Mike, Kevin, and Bill have taken the key lesson of Borrowed Power to heart, namely, whatever you do, try not to be outrageously ugly while doing it.

There are lots of places you could take eggs. You could take eggs to a party! You could take eggs to the museum! You could take eggs to prom! You could take eggs to the workplace of your romantic rival, lock his office door from the inside and then plug in a hot plate, put a skillet onto that hot plate and slowly, one-by-one, crack the eggs on the edge of the skillet, letting them sizzle as you maintain steady eye contact with this man, your nemesis, as his terror grows exponentially in the face of your unflinching refusal to answer his questions about why you’re there and what you’re going to do to him. Or you could take Eggs to Market! From filthy chicken cages to depressed factory workers to big goopy buckets of yolk matter, Eggs to Market is full of delightful behind-the-scenes egg-packaging fun! Mike, Kevin, and Bill enjoyed Eggs to Market, but it did nothing to change their view that eggs should primarily be used as bacon grease delivery systems.

Juan and His Donkey! Rockin’ your commute on KBLZ 105.3! Stay tuned because we’ve got our producer Timmy The Gimp in nothing but a kilt out in front of a funeral home, and a guy in a turkey costume is gonna blast him with paint balls! It’s gonna be off the- Wait, what? Juan and His Donkey is not a wacky morning show DJ Team? It’s an educational short from Coronet, part of the popular “A Boy Of ____” series? Are you sure? I mean, that sounds feasible, but what is it meant to teach exactly? Hm...Cultural differences...I dunno. Seems like it’s just going to prove dated and offensive...You’re sure we can’t just run with the Morning Zoo thing? Well fine. A Boy of Mexico: Juan and His Donkey is NOT wacky, and there are no interns harassing old ladies. The donkey isn’t even painted like a zebra. But this tale of a poor Mexican boy who chops firewood for a living and longs for nothing more than to buy his donkey Pepito a new serape is quite dated and proves quite ripe for riffing. Especially when a rich city slicker runs out of gas and Juan and Pepito stumble across him and ROCK HIS COMMUTE on KBLZ 105- OW! Don’t hit, we’ll stop! Mike, Kevin and Bill are not rockin’ your commute with traffic on the nines. Leave them alone on the nines.

When you ask a company like ACI, makers of the now-infamous “Grasses” and “Boxes” shorts, to create a film teaching kids to count to ten, there are three things of which you can be certain. One, you can count on the fact that if you’re talking to someone at ACI, they are attempting to speak to you on a telephone made out of old, damp egg cartons. Two, you know the end product they give you will not teach children how to count, but WILL teach them how to succumb to the chaos of life and turn their backs on reason with whimsy and a shaky, nervous smile. Three, well, we’d list a third thing here, but we learned to count from ACI and frankly, after two we always get confused and take a nap under the kitchen sink.

One Turkey, Two Turkey plunges the viewer gobble-deep into the hideous, squawking world of a commercial turkey farm. Juxtaposing images of these terrified birds awaiting execution with a cheerful, legitimately catchy song about counting is just the sort of special touch that only ACI could give. (note: other “special touches” given by ACI have resulted in criminal charges)

Mike, Bill, & Kevin were so disoriented after riffing One Turkey, Two Turkey that they picked up forks and knives and chased each other in a … Read more »

circle for a full 3 hours before someone had the sense to fry up some bacon and snap them out of it.

It’s summer vacation! School’s out and you have all the time in the world to hang with your best bud and...ponder the meaning of nothingness? In What is Nothing? we join two youngsters who, as all rascals do, sit around and contemplate the void. Whether they’re journeying to the library to look up “Nothing” in the dictionary, or coming up with profound truths such as “caterpillars matter to caterpillars”, one thing is certainly true: we want some of whatever these kids are on. What is Nothing? will have you longing for the bygone days of your youth, when entire days could be spent eating cookies, riding bikes, silently screaming about your own insignificance and watching Gilligan’s Island reruns. Mike, Kevin and Bill yell riffs into the abyss on What is Nothing? Oh wait, that’s not an abyss...That is a microwave oven somebody left on the side of the road.

We Discover the Dictionary weaves the enchanting tale of three grade school children who discover the dictionary for the first time. And that’s all well and good: they use it to write a thank you note to a police officer who must have lost a bet or something, because he had to come talk to their class about bike safety. But if we may nitpick for just a second... As far as discoveries go, “Discovering the Dictionary” probably ranks down there with Columbus “discovering” America in terms of least impressive feats. First of all, the dictionary, much like America, was already there the whole time. It was just sitting on teacher’s desk, gathering dust. Second, much like America, people were already using the dictionary before these three idiots found it. In fact, it’s hard to argue that anybody could “discover” the dictionary when it’s in fact a book created by other people. Thirdly, these children immediately begin to abuse the dictionary, looking up words like “poop” and “weiner.” Sure, this isn’t quite offering smallpox blankets to women and children, but monsters come in all shapes and sizes!!! Sorry...Sorry...we just found out we don’t get Columbus Day off from work and are kind of bitter. Don’t get us started on the Pinta either… Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as they discover the dictionary, ignore the thesaurus and drop Bartlett’s Book of Quotations on a reallly gross beetle.

When you see the title of our new short, Feelings: I’m Feeling Alone, you might think to yourself “Alone? That’s gotta be the saddest thing you could put after the words ‘I’m Feeling’ in an educational short meant for small children.” Not so! Consider these other titles in the series. “Feelings: I’m Feeling My Ex-Girlfriend’s Wet Doormat When She’s Not Home.” Or “Feelings: I’m Feeling Like the Last Bit of Hamster Food in the Bowl that Even my Disgusting Hamser Won’t Eat.” Then there’s “Feelings: I’m Feeling the Grooves in Mickey Rourke’s face,” and, last but not least, “Feelings: I’m Feeling Like Seeing Transformers 3 with my Wife on our Anniversary.” A whimsical, musical foray into the infinite sadness of childhood, Feelings: I’m Feeling Alone went the extra mile to bum out schoolkids, who were already pretty bummed out because they were watching awful educational shorts in school. And if you think the short builds to a resolution or offers kids any kind of hope for the future, you clearly haven’t watched enough of our shorts! Grab that blanky you’ve had since you were four and join Mike, Bill, and Kevin for Feelings: I’m Feeling Alone. What’s that? You lost that blanky? A college ex shredded it out of spite? Wow.

That’s...that’s pretty sad. *siiiigh*

Setting Up a Room is about two women setting up a kindergarten classroom. It lasts for 27 minutes. To attempt to explain anything more about it would be an act of futility. It is one of the most baffling pieces we’ve ever encountered here at RiffTrax. It may not be for everyone. Like one of those Magic Eye images, you may have to stare at it for a little while before its brilliance snaps into place. Fortunately, you will have plenty of time to do this, because as we mentioned earlier, it is 27 minutes long. No detail of the room-setting-up is unaddressed. Blocks are put away one by one. Cubby doors are tested to make sure they can fully be opened. Pegboard placement is hotly debated. And all the while a simmering resentment bubbles beneath the surface between the two leads. Probably because they were forced to appear in a 27 minute short instructing other adults how to set up a room. We’ve already said to much. Please join Mike, Kevin and Bill for one of the greatest things you will ever witness.

Many of the educational shorts we riff seem to have been designed not to teach children, but instead to confuse them into a state of dizzy, nauseous acceptance. Most try to hide this deception with an authoritative narrator, some pretense of structure, or official-sounding “key terms.” Our new offering, Join Hands, Let Go! makes no such attempt, and in fact is so bold as to put contradictory instructions right in the title! Do we join hands, or do we let go? Who are the children in this film? Where are they going, and why? Is the mustachioed man with the wacky outfits connected in any way? Is he a good man or a bad man? He seems like a bad man. Will I ever go to college, or even learn basic math, if we keep watching films like this in school? The answer Join Hands, Let Go! provides to all these questions is a firm, definitive, “whatever.” Too odd to describe, too useless to be believed, you must join Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they succumb to the brightly-colored nonsense brainfart that is Join Hands, Let Go!

Do you ever get scared? Do you ever get the creeps? More importantly, are both of these questions wildly inappropriate for an educational short to pose to a bunch of nine year olds? Of course they are, yet The Creeps Machine soldiers on with whatever its mission might be. In theory, it’s supposed to reassure kids that they can conquer their fears. It does this by springing a hideous clown named Old Bobo upon them, thereby guaranteeing that they never sleep for the rest of their childhood, which fortunately will end much sooner once they’ve witnessed The Creeps Machine. The Creeps Machine features lurking old men, Rube Goldberg devices, a menacing gorilla’s hand, zero coherence and of course, Old Bobo. In other words, perfect educational fodder for Mike, Kevin and Bill to riff.

A discussion of great, important series would be incomplete without mention of Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Twin Peaks, and, of course, the “Boy of” shorts. We’ve previously presented A Boy of Mexico: Juan and His Donkey, and our new installment doesn’t disappoint in fulfilling the naming scheme of “Boy of [country]: [name of boy from that country] and His [stereotypical animal from that country].” Told through the eyes of a narrator who insists on inserting himself into the story of Rama’s family life even though he never appears on screen, and there’s no reason to think the people in the short know he exists, it is a sweet tale of physical labor, visibly moist living conditions, and heaps and heaps of elephant feces. Despite this, the film contains less excrement than NBC’s “Outsourced”, which was 100% excrement.

Grab whatever animal best represents your background (for most of us, a stuffed Ewok doll) and join Mike, Kevin and Bill for Boy of India: Rama and His Elephant!

It's true that the educational shorts we dig up have been described as “less educational than an episode of The Jersey Shore” in a review from Bizarrely Contrived Comparison magazine. Shown in classrooms, they formed young minds, in the sense that stomping a jar of wet clay flat is still a way of “forming” it. But our new short What Are Letters For? takes the miseducation of America’s youth to a bold new level, by teaching the alphabet yet LEAVING OUT certain letters. Which letters? That arrogant but rare Z, or perhaps the co-dependent Q that refuses to work without its U? No, they’ve instead plucked out all the vowels, those pesky soft letters that you almost never see in any words ever. Teamed up with random animals and objects, this short is easily your best bet for helping kids unlearn what scraps of language they might have learned! They’ll be committed to an illiterate future with no job prospects beyond fry cook, or popular tween vampire novelist. Having happily adopted the short’s distate for vowels, Mk, Kvn, nd Bll sk y t jn thm fr Wht r Lttrs Fr?

Meet The Wordsmith! Some say this wacky old gent has a way with words! Good thing, since he lives on the Island of Grammaria, where he runs a workshop teaching all the little boys and girls the rules of...Say, is that a monkey over there in the corner of the workshop?

It is! Boy, this is going to be one heck of a short! What’s that you say, Wordsmith? Ignore the monkey, and focus on basic sentence construction? OK, OK...So, the predicate is always followed by the - I’m sorry, it’s just kind of hard with the monkey right there. It’s just that it’s bound to do something hilarious any minute and - Right, grammar. Focus on grammar.

You were saying how a sentence is like a treasure map because it doesn’t make any sense if you don’t follow it in the proper LOOK, WHY WOULD YOU HAVE A MONKEY IN THIS SHORT IF YOU’RE NOT GOING TO EVEN ACKNOWLEDGE THE MONKEY!? WHY TEASE US THAT WAY?! WHY!!! WHY!!! WH-!!!

We here at RiffTrax would like to apologize for the previous copy, which was written by an intern driven mad by the inexplicable fact that this lengthy short refuses to acknowledge the presence of a background monkey throughout its duration. Well, he was either driven mad by that or by The Sentencesmith’s hideous nightcrawler-like lips. The point is, he’s dead now.

Mike, Kevin and Bill will never refuse to acknowledge the monkey.

For decades, the phrase “I’m looking for a job in cosmetology” has been a great, positive way to let your girlfriend know it’s probably in her best interests to seek a more compatible mate. Cosmetology is a profession traditionally filled with glamour, cutting-edge chic, and hip, attractive stylists--and our new short Jobs in Cosmetology manages to include none of those things! Even better, it presents a 1960s paradise of dead-eyed matrons squirting what appear to be bottles of diner BBQ sauce onto enormous beehive haircuts. It’s garish, hideous, and baffling--in short, the kind of thing we here at RiffTrax live for. Grab a magazine and plop down in a salon chair next to Mike, Bill, and Kevin for Jobs in Cosmetology! (And please, help us convince Kevin the full-body perm is a bad idea...)

There’s no two ways about it, Let’s Pretend: Magic Sneakers is a gleeful, brightly-colored, downright whimsical piece of insane evil. A young boy, grime-encrusted as a train hobo, has seemingly been left to fend for himself in a glum warehouse district. He plays with the garbage he can find, all the while smiling and laughing, probably because his brain is collapsing into a vegetative state from going days without food. Among the filth, he discovers the Magic Sneakers, which can dance and move all on their own! Overjoyed at finding intact footwear, the boy follows the sneakers on what’s sure to be an uplifting adventure (or at least, a trip to a place where he can get some soup)...but no, the sneakers cruelly lead him through a drainage ditch to the kind of remote wilderness location where people tend to “disappear.” Things get even more sinister when a cloaked figure (who looks more like a violent meth addict from Breaking Bad than a playful spirit) appears, his sneaker trap successful!

Is there hope for the boy? Have we maybe imposed a little more darkness on this story than is necessarily there? Join Mike, Kevin and Bill in the twisted world of Let’s Pretend: Magic Sneakers to find out!

Every community needs a Broken Bookshop. You’ll find it in town square, over by the Moth-Ridden Mattress Hut, just around the corner from Shaky Sam’s Shattered Stemware Emporium. Because it’s not enough to buy a used book, what you really want is a book that’s been abused, stained, made damp, shredded, and then painstakingly reconstructed into something you would still rather not touch, let alone buy. That’s the sound business model featured in our new short, Beginning Responsibility: Broken Bookshop. It focuses on the sweet old man who owns the shop and happens to secretly BELIEVE THAT BOOKS TALK TO HIM. His delusional senility may seem folksy and charming, until he brings an innocent boy into his world of pointless book repair. When he aggressively insists to young Andy “My books talk to me, and maybe they’ll talk to you too!” you know that this shop deals not only in broken books, but also broken hopes and dreams for the future.

At first glance we thought this short was a documentary on Borders, then we realized the title says “Broken,” not “Broke.” Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as they take a brief rest from their busy book-destroying schedule to riff Beginning Responsibility: Broken Bookshop!

What child wouldn’t want a wild crow as a pet?...is a question you might sincerely ask if you had never encountered children or crows before. Crows, the repulsive, squawking harpies of the suburban skyline! Crows, the chosen pet of that drunken buffoon Uncle Billy in It’s A Wonderful Life!! Crows: where do they go at night? Nobody knows, and that’s the most terrifying thing of all!!! But when one family’s attempts at warding off the sinister black hearted beasts fails (because their scarecrow is less intimidating a Cabbage Patch Doll*), they decide to do the only logical thing and flee the harbingers of doom. No, of course they don’t; they devise a crude trap to capture it. It works almost instantly, presumably because this is exactly what the crows want to happen. After a couple weeks of feeding the crow beans** in its cage, they name it Corky and it becomes a lovable member of the family. But then...! Everything turns out alright actually... Except for a teacher that on a scale of “ladylike” to “very mannish” ranks as a “deluxe Eleanor Roosevelt”, who swoops in after it wraps up to harangue the elementary school children that watched this short about what they learned about crows. Mike, Kevin and Bill learned that they should stop every short before the haranguing begins. *So, still quite terrifying **Yep

Oh, you like reading, do you? You like reading just the way it is now, you say? Well tough, because here’s how reading is gonna be FROM NOW ON. From now on, reading will only be done upside-down, see? And someone’s gonna drip flat Pepsi into your nose while you read, you get me? And we better not catch you reading outside of a derelict tire factory, because derelict tire factories are officially the ONLY places that reading will be tolerated from now on, okay, wise guy? And no more books, from now on you’re only gonna read the labels on your grandpa’s medicine, and if you complain, you’ll lose privileges to read anything except the letter “Q”, capische? Those rules have nothing to do with our new short, but we do believe in them and will enforce them aggressively. Reading From Now On is the tale of a young, comically illiterate boy who lives in the shadow of an older brother who arrogantly shoves his book-learnin’ in everyone’s face. Will our hero crumble under the sibling pressure, learn to read, or fake learning to read by memorizing the names of a few pictures and shouting them on demand? Who knows, but it’s probably the last one! Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for the classic revenge story, Reading From Now On!

The 1970s were an exciting era in the world of educational shorts. The films shifted focus from “attempting to teach kids something practical” to “reminding them that life is a yawning, silent void with no purpose or warmth.” Yes, Friends puts the FUN back in ennui! It’s full of those treasured childhood memories we all share. Like when a girl finds a gigantic, broken TV antenna in a trashcan, and drags it behind her for the rest of the day. Or when an even weirder girl offers her money in exchange for friendship, which leads to crying, and eventually to that most iconic of games - the plum fight! Chucking ripe fruit at each other in an abandoned brick ruin, these girls learn the true meaning of friendship: no one is really on your side, and no one understands. Time for recess, kids! Grab a juicebox (grape ‘n dust flavor) and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill in the chummy abyss of companionship called Friends!

Running a Lemonade Stand is a childhood rite of passage, much like going off the high dive or finding a bloated corpse floating in the swimming pool right after you went off the high dive. Whipping up a bunch of artificially lemon flavored substance and selling it to neighborhood adults who would have preferred a beer was, for many of us, our first step towards becoming the financially responsible adults we are today, adults who would really prefer it if you waited until the end of the week to cash that check we just wrote you. The short The Lemonade Stand ponders the eternal question of What’s Fair? When one partner blows off selling lemonade to toss around the old horsehide, the other wonders who the hell still uses the expression “toss around the old horsehide.” When their lemonade sales skyrocket during the partner’s absence, he’s left with a tough decision: whether or not to screw over the Winklevoss twins and abscond with all the profits. The Lemonade Stand: What’s Fair? is an intriguing corporate thriller, that also features a little boy who performs an entire scene with a lemonade cup in his mouth. Mike, Kevin and Bill would have preferred a beer.

The Clean Club was created to teach kids about basic hygiene and washing habits, and it’s our dear hope that it will find new life as an instructional film shown at Comic-Con registration. It’s a horrific tale of children who have reached such hobo-in-a-ditch levels of filth they become delusional, and start to believe that ordinary bathroom objects are talking to them, sometimes in disturbingly seductive voices. And if you’re not gonna listen to sexy dental floss, who are you gonna listen to? The short also introduces us to some nauseating claymation germs who would make the Garbage Pail Kids shiver, locked in fierce combat in a battle against soap for their own survival. The important lesson: every time you wash behind your ears, you are inflicting gruesome death upon the goofy anthropomorphic germs who live there happily. Kill, kids! Kill for your own survival! It’s your only hope!

Mike, Kevin and Bill have been denied membership to The Clean Club ever since the launch of their failed business venture, Foxy Septic Tank Wrestling. (It looked good on paper!!!)

Sometimes, we find something special. Something so strange, so distinct, and so wonderfully sad that by the time it ends we’re curled on the floor, guts cramped from laughing, clutching clumps of our own freshly-pulled hair as the keepers come to usher us back into our comfortable pens. David and Hazel: A Story in Communication is just such a thing. What the now-classic Setting Up A Room did for, well, setting up a room, David and Hazel does for the gradual, quiet collapse of a 1960s American marriage. That may not sound particularly hilarious to you, in fact quite frankly it probably shouldn’t, but trust us, it’s a journey you’ll be glad you took. Nearly 30 minutes long, packed with tension and vintage office scenes - if the popular AMC show were called Sad Men instead, this would be that show. Instead of Don Draper we have David: not quite as sexy, perhaps, but just as distant and seemingly confused by the presence of a wife and children in his home. When there’s trouble at work and his devoted, quivering Hazel decides to ask about it, the action* really heats up (*infinite icy silence). All that, plus a freakish son who’s at least 75% alien and a roast beef dinner scene that stands as a master class in Dysfunctional Family Planning. Let Mike, Kevin and Bill bring David and Hazel into your home, but don’t you dare ask how or why it was made because that’s simply not your concern, dear.

Why would you want to go outside and sail a toy boat when you could sit in a classroom and watch a film about other kids sailing a toy boat? The existence of Sailing a Toy Boat asserts that you wouldn’t, of course, you dolt. This short must have inspired lots of discussion questions from the students who watched it, such as “are we going to sail toy boats now?” and “where are the toy boats?” followed by some statements, like “the film didn’t even tell us how to MAKE toy boats” and “I honestly would rather have learned some math because now I’m just sad I don’t have a toy boat” and finally, “let’s push teacher in the lake and see if she floats!” Look, it was just a more violent time, okay? Complete with a male dog named Penny and a father who ignores his children while narrating the film with his mind (no, really) be sure to join Mike, Bill and Kevin for Sailing a Toy Boat, the full-throttle prequel to Battleship!

Drinking problems! In real life? Devastating addictions that can ruin careers and tear marriages apart. Clumsily depicted onscreen in 70s educational shorts? Hilarious! Chuck is the oily star of Alcohol. Like Don Draper, he just needs a shot or two to take the edge off and close the deal. Unlike Don Draper, he then fails to close the deal, instead drinks more, and vomits onto his stapler. When Chuck’s wife finally pushes him too far by insisting that he remain mostly sober for a few hours and accompany her to dinner with his own parents, he takes off with the office lowlife on a bender you would never be able to forget, were it actually shown in the film. Instead, you’re treated to the hungover aftermath, as Chuck wonders how he let a tiger into his apartment, met Mike Tyson, and made a crappy cash-in sequel. Mike, Kevin and Bill team up to riff one of their top three intoxicating liquid substances, Alcohol!

We know what you’re probably thinking. “Cooks AND chefs in a single film?? Sure, you might be able to pull it off if we were talking one or the other. Just cooks, or just chefs. And that’s still a big ‘might.’ But to bring both together in one short? WHEN DID THE WORLD GO SO MAD?!?” Well, despite what your surprisingly aggressive hypothetical probable thoughts would have you believe, Cooks and Chefs is here to prove you wrong.

It’s a timeless training film for anyone aspiring to work in a restaurant, and more specifically one particular hotel’s restaurant where they only serve food so rubbery and fake-looking it’s indistinguishable from the centerpieces. So if that’s the job you’re looking for, your ship has just come in! Cooks and Chefs is full of helpful tips for the up-and-coming culinary professional. For example, did you know that it’s completely normal and expected for line cooks to be skilled ice sculptors? Well it is, so make sure and spend years training under a master before you even bother turning in that McDonald’s application, bucko.

Ever since seeing the atrocities committed against food in Cooks and Chefs, Mike, Kevin and Bill have been fasting* in protest.

*Drinking beer until not awake anymore, waking, repeating.

Danger Keep Out! is not just the sign any Taco Bell that carries the new taco whose shell is made of a giant Dorito is legally required to display. It’s also the name of one of the finest Canadian safety epics ever produced.

One day, Christine decides to explore the construction site next to her house with her friend Mario, mostly as an excuse to escape her brother Ricky, whose default setting is “high-pitched whine” (a bold vocal technique later made popular by Bon Iver.) Christine and Mario have fun climbing on equipment, scaling ladders and leaping into piles of granular substances which likely rendered both of them sterile.

Of course, all this fun comes to a horrific end when Christine sets a trap for Mario and he has a terrible accident (that’s actually what happens.) It’s then up to Ricky to save the day, which he does by lying to his parents faces and teaming up with a kid who looks like a less suave Steve Urkel.

Like Shake Hands With Danger but instead of a folksy narrator, you have one that is sometimes made of clay, Danger Keep Out! is one warning sign not worth heeding! Previous quote designed to pander for prominent placement on the box cover of Danger Keep Out! VHS edition.

The Fish That Nearly Drowned is about a fish who [SPOILER ALERT] nearly drowns. Whoops, guess that spoiler alert should have come a bit earlier. Forget you saw it! The titular fish in question might actually drown! Because that is something that a fish can evidently do!

But even though the question of whether or not the fish might drown, (he doesn’t [SPOILER ALERT] Dammit! Late again, spoiler alerts!) the true star of The Fish That Nearly Drowned is the narrator. Eschewing conventional educational short techniques, mainly because then it gets to use the word “eschew”, the short opts not to have a nebbishy man or lecturing woman narrate. Instead it has a fish do it. A fish named Silverus. A fish named Silverus whom the short informs us can communicate with the boy who maintains the aquarium while he plays ice hockey on a nearby pond.

Yeah, we thought that would get your attention. Balancing ridiculously named Narrator-fishes with a glimpse into the aquatic world that is, (we can’t believe we’re typing this), actually sort of interesting, you won’t want to miss The Fish That Nearly Drowned.*

*[SPOILER ALERT]** **Come on, now you’re doing it on purpose!!

Nutrition: The All-American Meal exists primarily as a guide to the wide and varied world of 70s hideousness. Throughout, a seemingly endless parade of unfortunate choices marches in front of the camera to lecture us about the “All-American Meal” of a hamburger, fries and a soda. Turns out that this traditional on-the-go feast is not actually that good for us.

Ah, how little these poor Carter-voting rubes knew. You will probably watch Nutrition while consuming the Pizza Hut Ten Dollar Meal box (contents: bread & cheese), or perhaps the monstrosity known as the Baconator. If you are lucky enough you may even scarf down a taco with a shell made out of a giant dorito, washed down by a varietal of Mountain Dew whose color did not exist in the 1970s. You will see these be-muttonchopped, floral print wearing ninnies lecture about the negative health properties of a burger that shockingly contained no onion rings or pulled pork. And you will laugh.

Then you will choke on a curly fry dipped in that new variety of ranch that is thicker because it’s specifically designed for dipping. So maybe hold off on those until after the short is done.

Not to be confused with the equally-pathetic Superman villain Toyman, The Toymaker is a strange Scandinavian man who makes toys for all the children in his village. Well, presumably. He doesn’t actually make any toys in this short, and there’s no village, but he DOES pit two of his own puppet creations against each other in a race war of his own making. Then he sort of heavily insists that they respect and bow to him as their Creator, makes them afraid about their place in the universe, and raises the other big philosophical questions kids have always associated with...toys. The answers to these questions may not be clear, but one thing is - The Toymaker is definitely taking huge swigs of blackberry brandy every time he ducks under his table.

Join Mike, Kevin and Bill in the sinister clutches of our fickle puppet god, The Toymaker!

Dinosaurs! They were fearsome! They were hulking! They were evidently quite poorly drawn!

Yes, dinosaurs once ruled the earth, and if you need any information about them, you are welcome to consult the hundreds, if not tens of thousands of movies, tv shows and books on the subject. Should any of those fail you, any given seven year old boy can likely deliver a PhD level dissertation on the subject, though they may get distracted during the part about the Pteranodons if there are Oreos nearby.

So, it’s safe to say, that there was no reason for the brief, hideously animated short Dinosaurs: The Age of the Terrible Lizard to exist. This did not stop two men, whom the short would have you believe are actually named Witold Giersz and Ryszard Slapczynski from writing and directing it. The narration has all the trademark Slapczynski touches, while the directorial flourishes are classic Giersz.

Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as they travel back in time to the age of the terrible lizard and try not to affect the future in terrible unforeseen ways, such as all taking the last name “Slapczynski”.

When you look back at your formative education years, there are a few flashbulb memories when even as a young child, you realized that the educational system was truly doing its job. The first time you could recite your multiplication tables. The day you learned how to spell Mississippi. And of course, the day the teacher showed Farm Babies and their Mothers and you just sort of stared at footage of pigs sitting in the mud for a while.

Yes, one day in the sixties, another crate of stock footage of animals arrived on the doorsteps of an “educational” film maker, and though their employees pleaded with them tearfully that it would not teach the children anything and instead might very well make them dumber, the cruel CEO demanded it be formed into something resembling a film that could be shown in schools. “I dunno, show the adult animals, then tell them what the baby animal is called,” they’d say. “Who cares, Coronet is gonna bury us all anyways!”

Farm Babies and their Mothers has a bunch of footage of cute baby animals running around. It has no educational content whatsoever. We think you’ll agree that this is a perfectly acceptable trade off.

Like Tarzan of the Jungle and Nanook of the North before him, Jimmy of the Safety Patrol heroically swings from vines of proper bus etiquette and drives a sled of huskies that look both ways at pedestrian crosswalks (we’re not exactly sure what Nanook of the North did, we’ve just heard of him in passing, probably from a weird uncle we’ve met like three times in our lives or perhaps a Far Side cartoon.) Not everyone respects the noble safety patrol though, probably because disrespecting them is the logical and many would even say right thing to do. If our childhood were rap albums, Safety Patrols were the skits: annoying, omnipresent and difficult to program your Discman so that it would skip over them. So it’s safe to say that your sympathies will probably lie with the kids who run around and play ball in the street, rather than the pre-pubescent NARC (Jimmy) that tries to keep them from getting run over, (Patrols with more than three fatalities on their watch don’t get to make the class trip to Washington DC). Join Mike, Kevin and Bill as repressed memories of their own tyrannical safety patrols come back to haunt them and they instinctively cower in fear of Jimmy of the Safety Patrol!

Our new short Joy Ride feels like beloved movie Dazed and Confused, but shortened dramatically, focusing on the minor characters, with less emphasis on keg parties up at the Moontower and more on the tragic consequences of reckless behavior. In short, it’s the perfect film!

When two young boys steal a teenager’s car and pick up a couple of girls for a high-speed drive up a mountain, what could go wrong? Well, yes, that. Exactly what you’re thinking. But not before they have the time of their lives! For example, they park the fast car so they can...sit in an abandoned, not-working car, in a grassy field, and pretend to drive THAT car instead. Yep, totally worth it.

Get “duded up” for some “hotshots” (actual slang used multiple times in this short) then join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for a seatbelt-free, Kool-Aid soaked Joy Ride!

Love That Car! is a short about automobile safety narrated in the style of the “nnnnnYEEES?” clerk guy you’ll recognize from the Flintstones and the Simpsons. That sentence should really be all the convincing anyone needs to check this out immediately. Young women, Boy Scouts, the elderly, none are safe from the sadistic glee of his twisted voiceover. They will suffer, and he will delight, and the world will go just a little bit mad! Join us for Love That Car!, a swingin’ trip back to the ‘60s: a time so free that everybody was gettin’ some, even cars.

You are of course familiar with the story of The Hare & The Tortoise. It is part of the grand tradition of children’s fables such as The Grapes & The Fox, The Cash & The Tango, and The Being Written Backwards and The Why Are These Things.

While fables such as these seem perfectly reasonable when you read them, their inherent madness truly becomes evident when filmmakers try to recreate them with real life animals. Racing tortoises is not a natural behavior of rabbits, and the unfortunate star appears to simply be attempting to flee the cheaply constructed set. In addition to the two titular animals, the short also features a goose, an owl, a fox and a raccoon, all of whom appeared terrified to be in close proximity to each other.

You’ll learn important lessons as you watch a narrator impose sentient thought on a bunch of drugged-up animals, but the true lesson of The Hare & The Tortoise is that you should study hard in school so you don’t end up being the guy who has to clean up after the animals on the set of The Hare & The Tortoise.

Get That Job is an instructional film that teaches adults all the secret tips for landing a high paying job. First and foremost, if a potential employer asks if you actually needed to watch a film called Get That Job in order to learn how to get a job, strongly deny having ever even heard of Get That Job.

Our main protagonist is a Ginger Walrus. After receiving his GED from Night School (Motto: Show Your Probation Card for half off science classes), he wants a job. The problem is, where to start? So he goes to a library to look for books about resumes, which is really what you should be doing instead of watching a worthless short film like Get That Job.

Eventually, he lands the big interview with a boss who is in no way overcompensating for his baldness by growing a ridiculous beard. Will our hero smooth talk his way into a dream job? Or will he mistakenly inform the delusional man interviewing him that he looks like the worst Wooly Willy variation imaginable in a suit. Join Mike, Kevin and Bill to find out!

Despite the title, our new short is NOT about popping Percocets, though there’s a good chance the people who filmed it were doing just that. Perc! Pop! Sprinkle! Such a mysterious title. What does it mean? Does it mean anything? It probably doesn’t mean anything, right? Who made these freaking shorts in the first place, and why? Who am I speaking to? How long will this rhetorical question routine continue? Which was your favorite Godfather movie? The answers to all these questions, and more, are definitely not to be found in Perc! Pop! Sprinkle!

This one takes the standard educational short goal, “waste the kids’ time while teacher sips from a flask,” to a whole new level, by actually showing OTHER kids having THEIR time wasted. A group of children, possibly detainees in a secret government prison, are put through a series of “exercises” meant to replicate the motions of common devices familiar to kids...like, y’know, an antique coffee grinder. But at least the motions...are also confusing and really dumb. Maybe the short’s real goal was to make kids shut up and appreciate ordinary jumping jacks and push-ups? Enough questions, just join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for the hallucinatory gym class fever of Perc! Pop! Sprinkle!

Choking: To Save a Life is merely one chapter in the wildly popular Choking series. It came hot on the heels of the legendary Choking: To Get Out of A ‘Couples’ Baby Shower and the controversial Choking: Your Tax Guy To Get Him To Approve Your Super Bowl Tickets As A Write Off.

We’ve all been there: enjoying a nice TV dinner of Swanson’s “Slightly Bigger Than Bite Size” salisbury steak (seems irresponsible on their part frankly), when all of a sudden BOOM! The person across from the table starts choking. “This could never happen to me” you say. Oh really? “Yes really,” you say. “Obviously if I am eating a Swanson TV dinner, I am doing so alone, possibly having not even bothered to do the crucial ‘stir’ maneuver halfway through the suggested microwaving time.”

Damn, she’s right! (“Obviously I am also a man” you say.) Well, the point is, someone you know is probably going to choke at some point in time, and you should know what to do in order to save their life. So watch this short, then do the exact opposite, and you should be fine. This applies to all haircuts, fashion and home decor seen in this short as well. .

Another vintage 70s short in the “stuff your parents should really have already taught you at home” series (see The Calendar: How to Use It for further knowledge), Tic Toc Time Clock makes learning about time fun! Well, not so much “fun” as garish, frantic, and creepy. And not so much “learning” as “confusing, overly complex, and pretty much the opposite of learning.” Also their budget apparently didn’t cover K’s for the ends of the words “Tic” and “Toc.” But all that aside, we think you’ll agree that this film was a great use of school budgets, and if it meant Grade F meat for the cafeteria, well, that’s good enough for our kids.

Tic Toc Time Clock tells the tale of a gym coach gone rogue. Instead of rope-climbing or push ups, he makes his students arrange themselves in clock formations on the ground, presumably as part of some ancient ritual meant to make people finally like gym coaches. He fails. As will any kids who learned to tell time from Tic Toc Time Clock!

A short in the classic 1950s tradition of “let’s talk about a thing that’s terrible without REALLY talking about a thing that’s terrible,” Say No To Strangers presents a world that’s mostly sunshine, friendly policemen, and hopscotch...but also the occasional driver who pulls over to offer a some-strings-attached lollipop while patting the empty passenger seat. We learned something new about the 50s from Say No To Strangers - apparently it was a time when puppies were being handed out willy-nilly by strangers, MOST OF WHOM were totally benevolent. You’d be walking down the street, thinking about Howdy Doody or The Bomb, when out of the blue a kindly old man on a bench would insist on giving you a puppy. Again, most of the time, these puppy offerers were acquiring puppies, one by one, and handing them out purely from the goodness of their heart. It really was a better, simpler time, and this rampant puppy availability makes you wonder why Cruella de Vil had to be such a jerk about getting hers.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin encourage you to Say No To Strangers, and also to Evites, friends holding petitions, and pretty much anybody you’ve ever known, met, or loved. Just stay home by yourself.

Live and Learn has an important safety message for kids, namely “Hey kids, here’s a bunch of ideas for cool stuff that would be super fun to do! Now don’t do any of the stuff, and how dare you even think about it, and certainly don’t consider litigation against the film that gave you those ideas!” It’s the 1950s educational film equivalent of Keith Richards talking about his crazy fun life doing drugs, partying, and getting rich, then telling you to Just Say No.

Push your friend out of a boat! Start a fire in the yard with gasoline! Check out what’s happening at the bottom of a neat ravine! The only consequence is repeated trips to the hospital where you’ll get wrapped in bandages like a scary mummy by a friendly nurse, so you simply cannot lose!*

Live and Learn! Or don’t and die, either way it makes for a very funny short.

*Certainly don’t consider litigation against the ironic comedy website that gave you those ideas. Also we cannot guarantee your particular nurse will be friendly.

-picture was already there

Our short Safety With Animals features more hilarious child endangerment than the inevitable FOX series Celebrity Child Boxing! The short teaches kids important skills, like, which wild snakes you should pick up - they claim the answer isn’t “none of them.” In order to protect the lives of the many, the filmmakers risked the lives of the few, specifically one sweet, confused little boy. Watch, as he: Tries to saddle an angry pony! Stands terrified and alone while horses circle him! And attempts to befriend a stray dog, which is apparently something children should be encouraged to do!

Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they try to pet a mangy dumpster dog while picking up venomous snakes, then call Child Protective Services on Safety With Animals!

Ten Long Minutes is the harrowing tale of one young man’s attempt to download a grainy .jpg of Alyssa Milano via CompuServe in 1996 before his parents -- wait, sorry, wrong story... just forget you ever read that.

Ten Long Minutes starts off like a classic grisly safety short. An unreasonably happy man goes to work in a factory, which experienced safety short viewers will know is a sure sign that brutal disfigurement and Play-Doh level gore effects are just around the corner. But then, a phone call, and a twist! This time the worker’s carelessness has put not himself, but his family in danger! Leaving him, and his sweaty “Wilford Brimley crossed with the Jump to Conclusions mat guy from Office Space” coworker to sit and imagine what went wrong for Ten Long (and, trust us, hilarious) Minutes!

Kevin is the new kid in class, and he’s got typical teenage problems. His mom obsessively hoards coffee pots and his dad has an insane inability to live without garlic salt. Oh, and he’s haunted by the ghost of a fellow student who died horribly in a bus accident last year.

Rather than do the obvious thing and blackmail this ghost into destroying his enemies, Kevin takes the opportunity to learn all about bus safety. The first thing he learns? Always buckle your seatbel-... What’s that? School buses never have those? Really? Kind of seems ridiculously negligent, doesn’t it? Has anyone ever figured out why that is the case?

Fortunately for Kevin, there’s a terrible bus accident and the driver is likely killed. He’s thus able to demonstrate all the lessons he learned, which include pointing in a general direction for people to exit the bus, and instructing kids to bend their knees when they hit the ground (as opposed to locking their knees and shattering their fibulas, as kids instinctively tend to do.)

Will Kevin be rightfully mocked and pantsed for his devotion to bus safety? Is emphasizing their own likely death the best way to teach children proper bus exiting techniques? Will Nic Cage urinate a stream of fire? Tune in to Ghost Rider and find out!

Jack is a youngster who has trouble respecting The Other Fellow’s Feelings. One day, the other fellow brings in a new bottle of perfume to show off to the ladies, and Jack bumps into the other fellow, knocking the perfume to the ground and breaking the bottle. After that, Jack follows the other fellow around saying “Stinky! Stinky!” Eventually the other fellow can’t take it anymore and she breaks down sobbing wondering why on earth in a short titled The Other Fellow’s Feelings they made The Other Fellow a young girl named Judy.

It checks all the bases for a classic 50s short: seven-year-olds who dress like fifty-year-old accountants, disembodied floating heads taunting helpless victims, and teachers who think the kindest solution is to demand answers from sobbing girls in front of the whole class. Plus, more taunts of “Stinky” than when Jabba The Hutt’s son was kidnapped. Buy the other fellow in your life a suitable gift depending on whether that fellow is a man, woman or wolf otherkin, then sit back on the couch and enjoy The Other Fellow’s Feelings.

The Day I Died is a fun, groovy, totally 70s take on the tragic consequences of teenage drunk driving. Plus there’s a great Sixth Sense-type twist at the end where you find out that the young narrator was actually dead THE WHOLE TIM--what’s that you say? Narrator tells us he’s dead from the beginning, then narrates his last day in creepy slow motion? The fact that he’s dead is even part of the title? Pretty hard to miss? I should really pay more attention? Fine, arguing person, you win. (Twist ending: there wasn’t actually an arguing person THE WHOLE TIME! It was just a lazy rhetorical device! Gotcha!!!)

Come for the beach drinking, stay for the narrator yelling at relatives and friends as they walk by his casket! Like one of these email forwards from your Grandma (complete with 36 point bright-red font and a million little arrows to scroll past) come to life, The Day I Died will scold its way into your heart!

We can all agree that Classroom Discipline is great. But what good is it if you can’t maintain it? Fortunately we have this short, which comes with the delightful realization that “Wow, they actually expected adult professionals to watch this.”

The film stars Mr. Grimes, (or “Grimey” as he liked to be called), in a classic “Goofus and Gallant” scenario. Which role would you emulate? The hostile, shrieking Mr. Grimes who hands out detentions as if they were pennies wrapped in tinfoil on Halloween? Or the cool, mellow Mr. Grimes who one day lets it slip that he still lives with his mother. Of course you’d pick the first one. Whether he’s an effective educator is beside the point, because clearly the second one’s admission has lost him the respect of at least the next ten years of students who parade through his classroom.

Find an eraser to hurl and synchronize your watches so you’ll know when to drop your textbooks. It’s time for Maintaining Classroom Discipline!

Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s...a kid wearing underoos who’s way too old to be wearing underoos!

This short tells us the story of Scotty, who is obsessed with a superhero named Rescueman. Rescueman’s specialty is rescuing people, believe it or not. We assumed that that was sort of par for the course for every superhero. Most of them have something else going on, but not Rescueman!

Scotty goes on a field trip to the airport and despite looking like he’s about to enter middle school, spends the entire time mentally composing Rescueman/Safety Woman slashfic and thinking about his new Rescueman underoos. Does the short end with Scotty fantasizing about rescuing his classmates from a horrific bus crash while wearing said humiliating underoos? Do you even have to ask at this point?

Rescueman teaches kids about bus safety the only way that the state of Pennsylvania knew how: incompetently with an absurd emphasis on bending your knees when you jump out of the bus. Join us, true believers!