They messed up the short, unfortunately. The file posted today has half the riff, but the entire 22 minute film. Still kinda goofy fun, sort of a gas station version of Hired!

*whew* I thought I was the only one who got the full 22-minute video by mistake.

Fun watching last night but still…a bit disconcerting once the riffs stopped and the film continued.

This practice of dividing Rifftrax into two halves is annoying me. Not because of the cost but because they often don’t get round to the second half for a while. We’re still waiting on the bizarre “woman American” conclusion.

Long ago in the depths of time my dad worked for a service station back when they actually were “service stations” instead of conveniences stores with gas pumps. My dad told me stories of all the shabby tricks they used to squeeze the customers and the short film hit them all within the first couple minutes–hit the windshields first, then come up with some excuse to look under the hood (e.g. checking the windshield wiper fluid level), and it goes from there. About the only thing the film missed was surreptitiously nicking the fan belt to make it look like it was failing.

Weird, though, how it turned into an extended discourse on the cooling system. Who sponsored this thing, ethylene glycol manufacturers? I’m not entirely joking with that, because the film made special mention of using glycol antifreeze instead of the older-fashioned “two quarts of alcohol”.

Yeah, they have done at least one or two 20-minute-plus single shorts before, and a few others approaching that. And they’ve done much shorter ones, too. I’m not sure what their standards for length are.

Still, as long as the *average* comes out to about 99 cents per ten-to-twelve minutes of film time, I’ll be happy.

FYI, a fixed version of the short has now been posted. The broken version was 171MB and the new version is 82MB.