Rifftrax - May The Shorts Be With You

May the Shorts Be With You
There is a great disturbance in our shorts, as if the copywriter suddenly cried out in terror when he realized how terrible an opening line that is for a DVD description and was suddenly silenced because he was fired.

Hi! New copywriter here. May The Shorts Be With You is our latest collection of scum and villainy. You’ll watch the binary sunset as you ponder What Is Nothing?, experience life as a padawan learner (on the egg carton assembly line) in Eggs to Market, and resist the urge to go over to the dark side of The Creeps Machine!

May The Shorts Be With You contains nine of our favorite bafflingly inept shorts and best of all, there is nary a prequel to be found anywhere on the disc!

Boy of India: Rama and His Elephant
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!


Eggs To Market
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.


Feelings - I'm Alone Feeling
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 Hamster 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*


Jobs In Cosmetology
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...)


Making Sense with Sentences
Meet The Sentencesmith! 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, Sentencesmith? Ignore the monkey, and focus on basic sentence construction? OK, OK...So, the predicate is always followed by the - I’m sorry, it’s 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.


The Creeps Machine
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.


We Discover The Dictionary
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.


What Are Letters For?
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?


Credits
Who done it.