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The Wizard w/ RiffTrax Audio



Uh, wow... some people consider The Wizard prerequisite viewing for anyone who wants to call themselves a retro gamer, but I actually found it a condescending ball of tripe on the level of Daniel X, maybe because I'm not a teenage boys who thinks anything referencing video games is high art and the "He touched my breast!" scene was something other than obnoxious. Beneath the "We referenced Ninja Gaiden, aren't we awesome!" mentality is a mobius strip of three kids running from a bounty hunter, getting found, and escaping, again and again, with a gut-punch thrown in as if to say "No, wait, this isn't just pandering to NES gamers, it's a high-brow, emotional tragedy!" The Super Mario Bros. movie is actually far more entertaining than this, and thus made for a superior RiffTrax.

I'm also not sure what to think of the GamerGate joke.

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Manos: The Hands of Fate w/ RiffTrax Audio



Time for a confession that's going to call into question my status as a Mistie: I don't care for the Manos: The Hands of Fate episode. I have some nostalgia for it because it was the first MST3K episode I ever saw (through the MST3K Essentials DVD). But on rewatches, the movie is so lifeless it suffocates the jokes and I end up bailing halfway through.

I decided to try out the RiffTrax version after reading this Cracked article, hoping the crew would have discovered new ways to tackle the movie in the past twenty years. Well, if you liked the MST3K version but want a fresh batch of jokes the RiffTrax version provides, though I do miss Joel's Freddy Mercury joke. But the movie's stench is as overpowering as ever and wow, I had forgotten how much of it is people repeating their lines three times. It's great how much shameless padding it needed to be an hour long.

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