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Weekend Discussion Thread: Riffback!

Our buddy Bill writes:

“Riffback,” or moments when you made a joke just before the guys did.

Mine was during Godzilla vs. Megalon, when the two guys driving the truck make a joke about getting paid 100,000 yen. I said to my buddy, “Oooh, four bucks,” followed almost immediately by Joel saying “Yeah, great, what is that, four bucks?”

Funny he should send this, because I had one last weekend while watching K13- SST-Death Flight. The simulation guys are calling out technical jargon like “B-7!” I said “You sank my battleship!” just before Servo did.

Did this ever happen to you? Tell us about it.

67 Replies to “Weekend Discussion Thread: Riffback!”

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  1. Ang says:

    I know it’s happened to me a few times but I can’t remember any specifics for MST episodes but I do remember one from CT’s Wasp Woman. When the credit comes up ‘Directed by Roger Corman’ I said something like “so they spent like two days on this one” and then Josh said “So you know this was three days well spent”. :smile:

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  2. BruceShack says:

    I’ve had two Psychic MSTie Hotline moments (as I like to call them):

    The first was Monster-A-Go-Go during the scene at what is supposed to be a lab with a row of what look suspiciously like washing machines behind them. After I muttered to myself, “They film this at a laundromat?”, Crow says, “What are they doing at a laundromat?”

    The second was Santa Claus when Santa enters the multicultural toy factory/sweat shop to address the kids/proles and you can barely hear him. I quipped, “I think he said blessed are the cheese-makers” when, seconds later, Servo says the exact same thing.

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  3. dad1153 says:

    It’s only happened three times. In 1997 with “TISCWSLABMUZ” I immediately said ‘that’s Nicolas Cage!’ when RDS’ face appears (the Brains waited about 45 minutes before saying ‘you will become Nicolas Cage’ during the hypnotism scene).

    Then just last week with KTMA “SST Death Flight” I had two. I said ‘Ted Koppel, co-pilot’ and a couple of minutes later Joel says ‘and his co-pilot is Ted Koppel.’ Then, when Sam Fujiyama appears on-camera, I said ‘Quincy is on the case!’ literally a second before Servo says ‘how does Quincy figure into this?’ Other than these three I’m content with being a vegetable viewer that lets the Brains do the joking/riffing for me. :mrgreen:

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  4. Dr. Ted "Hotcha!" Nelson says:

    In “Hamlet,” my friend and I were going nuts trying to figure out who was dubbing Claudius. We had just realized it was Ricardo Montalban when the bots made a “Rich Corinthian Leather” riff which really blew us away.

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  5. Sorry — this “bust” thing is on my mind (hmmmm).

    It actually predates most likely ALL of you — in the 50’s all the girls would sing “we must, we must, we must increase our bust, the tighter the sweater, the bigger the better, the boys depend on us” usually as they put their two palms together in front and pushed them opposite (try it and you’ll see why. Or watch “Gidget” (1959))

    (And now you know what a sick old man I am :>)

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  6. Mr. B(ob) says:

    I don’t remember specific ones now as it’s been so long since first viewings of episodes where this happened, but I can say that those were always favorite moments for me when I was thinking of a comment or joke about what just happened in the movie and then Joel or Mike and the ‘Bots actually said exactly what I was thinking. I think it was back in “This Is MST3K” that Kevin Murphy said that those are the moments that connected with fans in a special “they are in my brain” kind of way and he was absolutely correct. Those moments I believe create a special “this is really for me” bond between the fan and the show.

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  7. crowtdan says:

    I used to call the Comedy Central hotline to find out which episodes were being shown for the next month. I had to plan my taping around a busy work schedule. I remember hearing that “Being Fron Another Planet” was coming up and I thought Being from another planet I would not know that. Sure enough Tom Servo used it right out of the gate.

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  8. Justin T says:

    It happend to me and my friend James when we watched [b]Beginning of the End[/b] on Saturday.

    It was the scene where Peter Graves and the Army have captured a giant grasshopper alive so he can figure out how to make a call to attract them. He starts to explain to the female reporter how the setup works and my friend goes “So it’s like a lie detector?” and not long after he said that Mike and The Bots make the same observation! Then I threw out some questions I would ask the grasshopper like “Is corn a grass?” just a minute or two before Mike does the same thing and riffs his own questions such as “Have you ever taken part in a plague?”

    We really got a kick out of that.

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  9. Matt D. says:

    #58- I hope beyond hope that you went to the Rifftrax live show broadcast in theaters a month ago or so when the corn/grass controversy reached its zenith.

    As for the topic at hand, eh I don’t have any that I remember.

    As for a possible topic for a weekend discussion, I would do one about uncommonly asked MST3K questions. I have a few questions myself that I think could get answered from the people who peruse this website.

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  10. Brandon says:

    I thought of another one. During the end credits of Manos, where they just play clips from the film, and I thought, “These are all outtakes.” Guess what Joel says at one point later?

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  11. Justin T says:

    Matt D: Yes, I went to see Rifftrax Live: Reefer Madness. That’s why I used that line ;-)
    That short was awesome.

    Wish I could think of another episode where I called a riff beforehand.

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  12. In “Space Mutiny” I said to myself that “Grandma Daughter” looked like Debbie Reynolds. Sure enough, when she was standing in between the blond man & her father someone in the theater said “Sting, Debbie Reynolds & Santa.”.

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  13. omega2010 says:

    I was watching Casino Royale with the Rifftrax playing in my iPod because my mom just wanted to watch the movie. Near the end of the movie Bond is clearly using a laptop that is connected to the Internet while sitting in a boat in the waters of Venice. I heard my mom make a comment about WiFi being available on the waters of Venice right before Mike ALSO made a comment about getting WiFi in Venice.

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  14. Glen BW says:

    In Teenage Strangler, (right after the big fight at school, before the race sequences) when one of the two boys says ‘Tomorrow’, and the other one utters the same word, I just happen to think something like ‘I love you’ from the Annie soundtrack. Tom Servo seems to have the same thought as well, though like Crow says, ‘it’s pretty obvious!’

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  15. At the end of “Cave Dwellers” we see the credits….using footage from another movie! Anyway, there is this one sequence where a shirtless man is in some sort of underground tunnel which is mostly gray. I thought it looked like the dwellings of the underground bomb worshiping mutants from “Beneath the Planet of the Apes”. Sure enough, Crow says “I think he’s looking for James Franciscus and Charlton Heston”.

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  16. Lee S. says:

    The best example of this for me is in “Mitchell.” They started playing this mellow electric piano music in the background, and I thought it sounded like “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?” by the Lovin’ Spoonful. A moment after I had that thought, Servo started singing the lyrics and I laughed harder than I think I ever have before while watching the show.

    By the way, this is my first post here. I’ve been watching the Joel episodes for the first time ever, and this site has served as a great companion.

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  17. Luke A. says:

    While I was watching the Cinematic Titanic treatment of “Doomsday Machine,” there was one scene where a chracter said “Get your hands off of her,” and I just said with the Titans, “You damn dirty ape!”

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