While most movie fans decided to get an early jump on Captain America: Civil War Thursday night, others decided to see the Rifftrax crew take on a cheesy low-budget time travel movie that was part of season eight of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Time Chasers is about a guy who took his small plane and added a Commodore 64 to make it a TARDIS with wings. He visits the future and the past, and unwisely sells the idea to a corporation that is evil and enjoys changing the past. It’s up to the inventor and his reporter girlfriend to set things right.
The new version is pretty good, with a new set of riffs compared to the original. Some people, however, may wish that some rude guy drinking a beer would join in. As fans know from the original episode, Mike was “replaced” on the Satellite of Love by his mean brother Eddie because Crow changed the past. Eddie was a tough slob who decided to drink a beer when there were “too many 7’s” on the screen. He was also very abusive of the bots, especially Servo. Imagine if “Eddie” came back for the Rifftrax show.
The crew talked about re-riffing the movie in a special press conference last week. “When we did it, it was just like about two years after they filmed it, which was the weirdest thing, because the previous questioner was right. Like, they got in touch and wanted to hang around. But we’ve gotten a lot of material from David Giancola (the movie’s director and writer) now for retro-tracks and always had a special fondness in my heart for this one, because it is a weird combination of competence on a bunch of levels and then just utter madness on another few and there’s a lot of room for jokes”, Bill Corbett said. “So, we do try to do a top to bottom re-write. Like, we don’t look at the old version at all, and then we actually go back and look at it and try to make sure we don’t have anything that’s very similar. Every now and then we’ll make an exception – we’re double-dipping like that.” Rifftrax has re-riffed Manos and two Christmas movies for its live shows, and an old MST3K favorite, The Magic Sword.
The crew also pointed out that it tries to be good-natured in its ribbing of a bad movie. They even invited the original cast to the show in Nashville, Tennessee.
As with any re-riffed movie, they showed the complete version, which included some scenes that were cut from the MST version including a very odd bike chase through the forest.
Here’s a couple of the riffs:
“Edgewood Entertainment Limited presents”
…some pretty limited entertainment.
Nick takes Lisa to the future for the first time (and it only makes sense if you’ve seen The Room)
Lisa, you and the basic laws of physics are tearing me apart.
Nick lands in a dystopian future
So how you like it in the future, Jules Verne?
He winds up in 1777
Oh, it’s Larry King’s fifth birthday.
There’s also riffs on Spin Doctors, history re-enactors in general, Guess Jeans, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Dan Cortese.
The show will be repeated on May 17th, which means it will again compete against Marvel (the season finale of Agents of SHIELD), and will eventually be offered for sale, likely by the fall.
The Time Chasers show was a great start to its 2016 season, but everyone is looking forward to June 28th when many cast members from Mystery Science Theater 3000 return for a live show. Imagine two Crows, both original hosts and the presumptive new host (Jonah Ray) taking on bad educational shorts. News on the other two shows scheduled for the fall and December are also expected soon.
