Rifftrax is perfect for fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the beloved cult cable TV series about a man stranded in space with two robots and forced to watch terrible sci-fi movies, who kept circulating those tapes while hoping for more of their favorite show. Created by former MST3K writer and star Michael J. Nelson, Rifftrax continues his earlier show’s tradition of riffing movie commentary to go along with cinematic turds and classics alike. What Rifftrax misses from MST3K in its lack of skits and puppetry, it makes up for in its ability -- freed from the legal wrangling that constrained MST3K -- to riff on literally any movie Mike and his crew can stand to watch. Bill Corbett, who voiced Crow T. Robot during the later Sci-Fi Channel years of MST3K, and Kevin Murphy, who played Tom Servo, quickly joined Mike on the Rifftrax project, and once their commentary starts the only thing missing for MST3K fans is their silhouettes in the bottom right corner. Bill and I talked recently about the fourth year of Rifftrax, the Twilight movies, and whether Mike is the only funny Republican on Earth. Keith Daniels: You guys have been doing
Rifftrax for four years now. How’s that feel? How successful has it been?
Bill Corbett: It’s been pretty successful. It still strikes me as a little odd that people who are self-professed rabid
Mystery Science Theater fans who just pop up four-and-a-half years later and go, “Wow! I just heard about you guys!” [Laughs] We’ve been out there for a while now. It’s been great because we have a lot of the old fans, and because we’re doing it in a different way now and we’re working with some new material it seems like we have
new fans. It’s actually starting to work backwards now, where people know Rifftrax first and then go back and see some of our old stuff. Our puppet-y stuff.
KD: Over the weekend I went back and watched a couple of the later seasons of
MST3K, and one of the things that stuck out was how many jokes would be incomprehensible to someone who is now the age that I was when I first saw them.
BC: Yeah. That’s the danger with topical humor. It’s weird, I just read an article about that; I can’t remember where it was. I think they focused on
The Simpsons and how some of the classic episodes would mean almost
nothing to a freshman entering college right now. But yeah, that’s the danger of it. We actually try not to rely one-hundred percent on topical jokes, but it’s inevitable -- especially with the raw tonnage of jokes that we shovel out there.
KD: [Laughs] One of the neat things about
Mystery Science Theater was that the riffing, the movies, and the puppetry segments were all kind of conceptually integrated. The handmade, kind of amateur science fiction fit with the premise. Were you surprised that you didn’t really need that framework?
BC: Yeah. We don’t
need it, technically. There’s stuff about it that I think people miss and that I miss occasionally, but we’re just in a different gear now. But you’re right, it was really nicely integrated. You put it well, but even if people didn’t think of it quite that articulately, that came across. I think, for most people -- I might be wrong here -- but I think for many people at least the movie segments -- taking on movies and providing a meta-commentary -- was the main event. Not for everybody. Some people actually tuned in to see the characters and their little skits and their costumes. [Laughs] I enjoyed that a lot too.
KD: Oh yeah. It was one of the few forms of entertainment that my entire family liked, including my mom and my littlest brother. We’d all watch
MST3K together.
BC: It
was sort of modeled on a kids’ show premise. You’re probably too young to remember. I’m even marginally... like it wasn’t even around much when I was a kid. In the ‘50s and early ‘60s there were a lot of hosted shows with like, Vampirella, you may have heard of her, and more neutral characters like clowns. Well, clowns are not neutral characters anymore. They’re terrifying. But where they would show a movie. I remember in the New York area where I grew up there was a hosted show with
Three Stooges stuff all the time, and for some reason the character that they had presenting it all the time in these cheap little interstitials was a fictional cop. I don’t get it, [Laughs] but there you go.
KD: A lot of the movies the movies that you did before were
bad movies, but now that you can do whatever you want, are some of them more like a roast than a send-up?
BC: Yeah! Absolutely. Kevin Murphy coined that way of looking at it for our purposes a while back. I think we were trying to find a way to explain to people that just because we riff a movie now it doesn’t mean we think it’s an absolutely irredeemable piece of garbage. That was less true in
Mystery Science Theater where they were specifically supposed to be horrible movies. There was also a business reason for that, too. We couldn’t get movies that were non-horrible, as a rule. We still mix it up somewhat. We still have some old, really crummy movies that we can get the rights to, and those we just sort of roll up into a video-on-demand thing as opposed to our usual gear -- which is the MP3 commentary thing. We’ve done movies that we actually like quite a bit in different degrees among the three of us. We’ve done
Jaws, which we all have fond memories of. Um...
KD: ...
Casablanca...
BC: Casablanca! We actually specifically did that as something we called a “Rifftrax Challenge” to take on a certifiably, nobody-can-argue-that-this-isn’t-good movie. A couple of others. To differing degrees we’re all fans of the
Lord of the Rings series, and we’ve done those.
KD: Legal issues have been a running theme for you guys, sort of dancing around other people’s movie rights. Has that gotten any easier over the years, or has it gotten worse?
BC: Well, we totally sidestep it with the MP3 thing, because there’s no -- now I’m not a lawyer so take everything I say with a grain of salt -- but there’s absolutely no case that can be made that providing a separate MP3 commentary to a movie is illegal. That is mostly what we do, and if we don’t do that we do a fair amount of due diligence to make sure that [a movie] is in the public domain or that we can get rights to it without breaking the bank. There’s a probably a case to be made that we could just grab material and add our commentary to it and it would be altered enough to be parody, but we haven’t taken that step off the cliff yet. [Laughs]
KD: The pacing of modern movies is so frantic -- they’re so
loud and there are tons of jump-cuts. Is it hard to even find space...
BC: YES. Yeah, that’s a good observation. That’s actually a pretty noticeable writing challenge for us. We all divide up the writing in the movies now between Mike, Kevin, and myself, and we have two writers who work with us, and whoever gets the last... like, the third act in an action movie, just
groans because that’s when it hits the fan. That’s when they do the really micro-second jump-cuts and what we have started to call “Confuse-a-vision”. [Laughs] ‘What is going on here that I can actually make a joke about?!’ It’s always been a moving target. When people start writing with us or when they audition for us they learn that you can’t take a split-second shot and make a gigantic joke on it because the movie keeps going, like it or not. It’s both the blessing and the curse of what we do. On the good side, the movie keeps providing new stuff to joke about. It’s not like being a stand-up where you’re making it all yourself. On the other hand, you do have to time it with the movie to make sense. The really modern action movies especially present a particular challenge. That’s why we loved the
Twilight movies; they were really great for us.
KD: [Laughs] Because they’re so boring...
BC: They’re
so boring! And they leave these absolutely
gargantuan pauses between lines as they just sort of look moon-eyed at each other. It’s like, “Finally, I can write a substantial joke there.”
KD: I think those pauses are when you’re supposed to admire Robert Pattinson’s jawline...
BC: Yes, of course.
KD: That’s another challenge, when you do several movies in the same series.
BC: Yeah.
Twilight for us was... not a totally unexpected success, but it really was the closest we’ve had to like a viral success. The business just jumped, and even a couple of years after the fact it’s still one of our biggest sellers consistently. But yeah, we do have to find new places to go to. Every now and then we do make a joke that assumes a person has seen our previous Rifftrax or we indulge with callbacks, but we’ve started to a make a little bank of jokes, ‘We’ve already done this one. Don’t go there.’ [Laughs]
KD: When
Mystery Science Theater ended... I’m sorry that I don’t know a delicate way to phrase this, but did you hope that there would be something
else for you? Was there a moment where you realized, “Well, this is pretty cool. I’m lucky to have this.”?
BC: My experience might have been a little different from, say, Kevin’s. He was the only person in all of the various cast-members and writers of
Mystery Science Theater who worked on every single show from its cable access days to its very last [episode] in various different capacities. So
he might have been kind of ready. [Laughs] I, on the other hand, had worked there as a writer for a little while and then as an on-screen puppet guy. I could have taken a little more of it. So I missed it. But Kevin, Mike, and I started working right away again together doing a bunch of projects, most of which didn’t pan out to be much. We had
a website for a while. We did a pilot for National Public Radio that took forever to go through all the processes of eventually not happening...
KD: I had not heard of that! I can imagine you guys doing a
Car Talk kind of thing...
BC: Yeah we did a fully produced thing funded by National Public Radio, went out there and met with the president of NPR and Susan Stamberg, who always signified public radio to me, and it was beautifully produced by a guy who’s been in the business for a while and made us sound really good. But it just ‘wasn’t for them’, and it’s hard to know why that happens. [NPR is] a mysterious organization. In the end I think they thought it was a little too ‘wacky’ for them or something. I don’t know. It just wasn’t their tone.
KD: What about doing a podcast?
BC: We’ve thought about it, and it still might happen. It’s just that there are only so many hours in the day, and there’s a
lot of podcasts out there. [Laughs] All three of us try to keep up some semblance of work that is outside Rifftrax, too, but some day it could happen. One of our younger writers, Conor [Lastowka],
has a podcast called “Citation Needed” where he just basically goes through Wikipedia and highlights dubious entries.
KD: That is a rich well. [Laughs]
BC: [Laughs] It is indeed. It’ll never end.
KD: You weren’t a regular on the earliest Rifftrax. Was that around the time you were working on what would become
Meet Dave?
BC: Yeah. I was actually living in LA at the time and working on the movie. I think it kind of evolved in a sideways way, the whole thing, because Mike had been hired by Legend Films to just do commentary and just sort of write copy for them. Then, he asked Kevin
to do this thing that eventually became Rifftrax with him. Kevin had actually had this idea years ago to do podcast commentary. I can’t speak for Mike but I remember feeling at the time, “I don’t know if anyone would go for that.” Mike did a few [Rifftrax] by himself, and then he added Kevin, then he added me for a few, but it was basically just Mike and one of us. Then we just sort of made it official and started getting in the booth together and that’s been the vast majority since then. It basically took shape within a couple of months after starting.
KD: Do you mind if I ask a few questions about
Meet Dave?
BC: Absolutely.
KD: What did you learn about Hollywood during the process of making that movie?
BC: I wish I could say it was anything particularly original, just that it’s a tough and grueling process that often results in kind of mediocre material despite your best efforts. Anybody who’s worked in Hollywood has their own version of that [story], or many versions. This just happened to be the only screenplay I ever sold, under it’s original title of
Starship Dave. I wrote it with a friend of mine. It was my idea, but I wrote with
a friend of mine who I asked on board because I get lonely writing by myself and he’s pretty smart about structure and stuff like that. In my mind’s eye it was hopefully going to be a good, absurdist sci-fi comedy -- maybe like
Futurama at its best if I could pitch it somewhere, tonally. I wound up really liking everybody I worked with on the project, believe it or not. Even in the rapacious world of Hollywood I thought the producers were nice guys and all that. But it was such a mix of intentions. At some point the studios shifted from one to another and Eddie Murphy got put on it. He was
not really the problem, though I am aware that lots of people are not very fond of him anymore on a whole bunch of levels and for all kinds of reasons. I didn’t think he was the problem with it. I just think it was that, in the end, it had been yanked back and forth between too many writers and producers and got really messy. The smart jokes got kind of dumb. At one point they decided it needed to be a kids movie and so a whole subplot about a kid came in there. It was tough. I don’t think it was as horrible as it could have been, strangely enough, but it was not what I had in mind.
KD: And being a writer from a cable series and this being your first movie, you had no clout to say, “No, screw you, we’re doing it this way.”
BC: Not in the
least. Not in the least. There was a part of me that just wanted to ride the process as far as I could just to be fair to everyone else involved. And I did make a lot of money from it, bizarrely enough. Even though it was not a gigantic hit, it kept playing, and it’s one of those sort of subterranean kids movies that just keeps going and going and people buy it. It did well overseas. So it’s sour grapes to complain too much about it, but it did teach me what many people have learned before, which is that it’s really difficult to get anything made, period, and then when you do it can go off the rails in a hundred different ways.
KD: Nothing wrong with making money. I was reading
an interview with Michael Caine the other day. He said he made
Jaws 4 because “My mom needed a bigger house.”
BC: Well yeah. [In Michael Caine impression] I bet ya ‘e said it very charmingly though. [Laughs] I just want to add that, to be fair to everyone in another way, it was never a work of tremendous art. It was a silly, pop sci-fi movie. I just thought it [would be] a smarter, sillier version -- sillier in the right ways. Stuff happens.
KD: One of the things that kept
Mystery Science Theater in people’s minds for so long, especially with all the legal problems, was
tape trading, but you guys have had some real problems with piracy on Rifftrax. How do you feel about that?
BC: Well, you know, it’s weird, because I am both a part of Rifftrax and
not. I’m actually not employed by Legend [Films], which owns Rifftrax. I’m sort of a relentless, constant independent contractor. [Laughs] So I don’t get involved in that stuff so much, but I understand from the guys on the ground that they crunched some numbers about
Inception, which we did recently, and it turned out -- I don’t know how they got this data -- that twice as many people had seen it via piracy than had paid for it. So my knee-jerk is, “Well that’s just plain wrong!” But I know that digital stuff is complicated and also that this is a gigantic issue in the air right now. At what point does giving stuff away for free act as a magnet for people to buy your other stuff? I do know that Rifftrax is a really small company. It’s not like you’re ripping off Paramount Pictures or something. It’s
felt when enough people don’t pay for a certain thing. Eventually it will prevent us from doing more. People who are pirating can kind of do with that what they want.
KD: I notice that on Twitter we follow a lot of the same people: a lot of scientists, atheists,
Mother Jones... Do you and Mike ever clash about politics or religion?
BC: We’ve discussed it. I think at its worst we’ve had a couple of what you might call heated arguments, but never badly. Mike and I are pretty good pals. We don’t agree politically. We try to keep it out of the work, not just because it would be uncomfortable to us, but I don’t know that every arena has to be hyper-politicized and I think it would surprise people if our work suddenly took that turn. That’s not to say that we don’t take a swipe here and there. Like I said, with the sheer number of jokes we do it would be weird to avoid it entirely.
KD: You guys did do
those parodies of the campaign ads during the Presidential election.
BC: [Laughs] Those were just more absurdist. It’s funny, I don’t know if you know Peter Sagal from the NPR show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”. He’s a pal of mine, and I went to talk of his locally, up here, and he actually addressed that. He said, “I do have my own political feelings and opinions,” but he’s just decided that this is just going to be a gear where -- and I think it’s important to his mission at NPR -- but I do share his feeling, for lack of a better word, that we should keep some comedy that isn’t relentlessly political. It works out pretty well because [Mike and I] would be coming at it from pretty different places, as a rule.
KD: I was more surprised to find out that Mike is a conservative not because it’s weird for somebody to be conservative, but because there are so few
funny conservatives. Is Mike the only funny Republican alive?
BC: [Laughs] I’m not sure I’d agree with that, but I share your general feeling. Mike is undoubtedly one of the sharpest wits I’ve ever met. I think it behooves his comedy that he doesn’t go political that often.
KD: You follow a lot of prominent Buddhists, too, like Jack Kornfield. I really liked his book
A Path With Heart.
BC: Yeah, I read that! I can’t say that I’m a practicing Buddhist but I’m very interested. If I am
any religion it’s sort of leaning that way. Because it’s mostly not a religion. [Laughs]
KD: You guys have done a lot of educational shorts from the ‘40s and ‘50s. What have you learned about how we saw ourselves then versus how we see ourselves now?
BC: That’s a great question. I think what we’ve come up with after watching scads of these things was that there was this real impulse to control minute bits of behavior in the American public for a while there. [Laughs] That’s a
sinister way of looking at it; you could look at it as ‘help’ or ‘guide’. It just gets so obvious after a while that they were into micro-managing every hour of people’s day. There are films about how to eat, how to sleep, how to treat other people... That’s a cynical way of looking at it. There’s another way of looking at it as that they valued manners, they valued good civics or something like that. Beneath it all, though, was that somebody was making a lot of money from making these. [Laughs] There were a couple of places that just became
factories for these kind of generic advice shorts. As for what makes it different from now? I don’t know, I just don’t think people would buy such dead earnest, advice-ridden shorts like that at this point. We definitely have a sense of irony that didn’t seem to exist then. Those are singularly irony-free, those shorts. They don’t seem to have much of a sense of humor. For better or worse that’s the gear we’re in now. You just can’t get away with that stuff unless you’re a fundie.
KD: Does the self-awareness of modern things make them more difficult to make fun of? That they’re in on the joke?
BC: Yes! Definitely does. I think we do best when there’s a certain amount of earnestness going on. That’s, again, why
Twilight works, because the romance is supposed to be very important in that and we all know it’s not. [Laughs] Definitely, that earnestness and a sense of seriousness about itself. That is a real problem when do material that is kind of winking at itself. We tried to do -- well, we
did do [Laughs] --
Pirates of the Caribbean and it didn’t work. Too often we were fighting against their jokes. Then you wind up saying, “Well
that’s not very funny,” which is kind of a dickish comment. Not particularly funny unto itself.
KD: What else are you involved in right now? Do you have any theater projects?
BC: I just finished one. I did a Christmas play that was produced here in Minneapolis and now they’re just kind of sending it around. It was a comic book Christmas play where I tried to retcon all the prominent Christmas characters, starting with Santa Claus, but also Rudolph, as comic book heroes and villains.
KD: Who would Santa parallel as a comic book character?
BC: I made him into a dark... He called himself the “Red Avenger”. “Santa Claus” was only his interplanetary name or a Klingon-y version of it. He was sort of a dark loner who eventually gathered unto him a couple of other heroes to fight the bad guys, who were led by versions of Scrooge, the Grinch, Mr. Potter from
It’s A Wonderful Life, and Hans Gruber from
Die Hard. [Laughs]
KD: Besides Rifftrax, where else can people find the newest stuff that you’re into?
BC: Follow my Twitter feed. Follow Facebook. I occasionally do a live thing, either with Kevin Murphy, or do live riffs here and there. We just did one last month for Sketch Fest in San Francisco with some cool guests: Adam Savage, Maria Bamford, Paul F. Tompkins who’s one of my favorite comedians. I’m hopefully going to be doing more live performances of comedy stuff. I’m not a stand-up, though, so that makes it a little hard. [Laughs] There’s definitely a gear for stand-up comedy. I’ve only done that a couple of times when I was younger, and I did alright but it just didn’t feel like it was for me at the time.
KD: Is it the nerves, or being up there by yourself?
BC: No. I don’t have stage-fright as a rule, which is probably foolish of me. I was more of a writer and a playwright, so I think the problem was that a lot of my stuff was too elaborate without getting to the funny. [Laughs] So I got some laughs but it wasn’t rewarding enough. Somewhere in my lymbic system the reward didn’t come so I just didn’t pursuit it. I’m kind of fascinated with people who do it well, but I find it
excruciating being in the audience of someone who is not what I think is funny. It might be that I’m a snob, or maybe it’s a sense of self-preservation.
KD: Some writers can go on to be great stand-ups. Conan O’Brien is the classic example.
BC: Oh, it can be done. I just didn’t do it. [Laughs] That will be on my tombstone.
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