RiffTrax / YMMV - TV Tropes

Accidental Innuendo: This line from The Force Awakens:
Rey: This is the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than fourteen parsecs!
Han Solo: Twelve!
Bill (as Han): Don't make me come in there and Fanservice you, young lady!
- They're riffing on a Mythology Gag, but consider the common definition of fanservice and, well, this is Harrison Ford we're talking about.
Awesome Music:
- The full version of the main theme, as written and performed by Jonathan Coulton.
- The extended "Hobgoblins" song, which Kevin performs over the outro of that movie's live riff. It incorporates the Stylistic Suck version from the original episode, but redeems it by putting some actual effort into the verses (and the instrumentation).
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: The guys latch onto an obscure Victorian English anti-Welsh rhyme "Taffy Was a Welshman" for some absurd reason to the point where Disembaudio recites the entire rhyme during the credits.
  - Mike's fondness for these rhymes is lampshaded during Oblivion 2.
- Joel's "Podium switch!" during the MST3K Reunion where he and Jonah randomly ran around on stage (invisible to anyone watching the broadcast). It ends as suddenly as it begins and is never brought up again.
Catharsis Factor: The riffers unloading on particularly hated scenes, characters or examples of Values Dissonance can make them a lot easier to sit through. For example, after "Drawing for Beginners: The Triangle" shows how to draw a tipi/"wigwam" and its occupant:
Narrator: Why, that's big chief Rain-in-the-Face!
Mike: "What's that he's holding? Why, it's General Custer's still-beating heart!"
Crosses the Line Twice:
- Some of the Black Comedy in Titanic does this. Making jokes as people die or fall to their deaths can get that way.
- When they refer to Donnie Wahlberg's character in The Sixth Sense as "Tighty Whitey Suicidey".
- An especially nasty one was the claim during The Last Jedi that Carrie Fisher's untimely tragic death was the only way she could get out of continuing in the franchise.
- For the Manos: The Hands of Fate live, they give the Master's dog the line "I miss Michael Vick." This drew groans from the live audience, which they claim they anticipated.
- The guys seem to take particular delight in making fun of David Carradine's death. You'll be hard-pressed to find a commentary where they don't mention it at least once even if the movie has nothing to do with Carradine.
- Santa's Summer House: Bryan is confronted by Santa about his miserable childhood, leading to this comment.
  "Please, Santa, I'm so tired of cutting myself."
- In the last twenty minutes of Grizzly, there are numerous shots of characters on horseback. Mike complains the movie needs to pick up the pace and says it needs to either "Christopher Reeve it or Catherine the Great it". Kevin goes "Wow." Mike doubles down: "I mean, come on."
Even Better Sequel: Is considered by many fans to be one to Mystery Science Theater 3000 due to less constraints and a wider range of riffing material. Of course, others consider it either a Creator-Driven Successor with the trio merely moving forward.
Friendly Fandoms: With Best of the Worst. It helps that the films they tend to cover often overlap.
Genius Bonus:
- There are a handful of surprisingly high-brow references and jokes in each riff.
  "Welcome to Mandelbrot Station."
  "There may be a test tomorrow, there may not be." "Ah! Schrödinger's Pop Quiz!"
  "Uh, yeah, this Joseph Campbell crap's really derivative, you got any Carl Jung?"
- There are a surprisingly large number of tributes to "Howl" and On the Road, especially in the shorts.
- The Phantom Menace: Jar Jar is called the most embarrassing character since Stepin Fetchit. Unless you're ninety years old or interested in African American cinema, you probably have no idea what that means, though they're hardly the first to make that comparison.
- Revenge of the Sith: Obi-Wan says "So uncivilized" and the riffers say, complete with British accent, "Sometimes I don't think these Coolies deserve the British Raj."
- At one point, they compare the pauses in Edward and Bella's dialogue to "Brobdingnagian".
- I Am Legend name-drops Danish physicist Niels Bohr.
- In the short "The Day I Died", they crack a joke about Planck's constant, a reference that makes Niels Bohr sound mainstream.
- Mythology Gag: Bohr was referenced in MST3K many times, including one host segment.
- "When a man threatens to poop on the drink cart, take him at his word. Look it up."
- The Bourne Identity: Kevin jokes about the sociological concepts of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft.
- Cool as Ice: Kevin mentions the Trilateral Commission and the Reptilians. It's just one of several examples of them making jokes involving conspiracy theories.
- In the "Drawing for Beginners: The Triangle" short, the narrator makes a rather awkward reference to "Chief Rain-in-the-Face" after drawing a tipi. Mike responds with a quip about killing General Custer—which is pretty good on its own, but a lot funnier if you know that Rain-in-the-Face was an actual Lakota chief, who was rumored to have killed Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
- The Star Wars Holiday Special: The guys riff an ad for a CBS showing of the 1966 film The Bible. As the announcer reads out a Long List of Biblical names, such as Abraham, Noah's Ark, David, Sodom and Gomorrah, Bill throws out "Nimrod" and "Dorcas". While both are Inherently Funny Words, they are actual people in The Bible.^note
  "I don't think they're in this."
- Dovetailing with Crosses the Line Twice, in Abraxas, they make a joke about a classroom full of small children reenacting the Stanford Prison Experiment.
- They mention the Lambada a couple times, such as in Thor. Unless you study South American dances, or are old enough to remember the media hyping it as "The Forbidden Dance" back in The '80s, you probably have no idea what they're talking about.
Growing the Beard: In 2011, when The Crater Lake Monster was riffed, fans started to flock to the site as it started doing older, obscure films a la MST3K, and not completely focusing on major film commentary.
Harsher in Hindsight:
- Iron Man:
  Terrence Howard: "Next time, baby!"
  "And Terrence locks up his role in the sequel!"
  - In fact, a lot of listeners probably assumed it was an intentional reference — the riff was released the same day Howard was dropped from the sequel.
- Red Dawn: As the film surveys some battle wreckage, they quip "Oh my gosh, they replaced our town with Detroit!" Guess where the remake was filmed?
- During the announcement video of Breaking Dawn, Kevin falls in love with Bill's recently passed kidney stone, and after Bill "kills" it by throwing it away a heartbroken Kevin starts tearfully and loudly singing "I Will Always Love You" while Mike makes an offhand comment about Kevin "mourning the death of his dearest love". However, barely two days later the joke got a HELL of a lot darker with Houston's death.
- The Return of the King: They see a devastated, flooded city and say "The Jersey Shore, present day." A few years later, Hurricane Sandy hit.
- Alien: They remark that "Ian's been chugging that Lance Armstrong energy drink stuff!" Five years later, Armstrong admits to using steroids.
- All the riffs about Matthew McConaughey's acting skills are pretty ironic given his recent Career Resurrection. Hell, Mike is even a fan of True Detective. The riffers now emphasize the fact that McConaughey is The Stoner and a Granola Guy, such as their version of his eulogy to Evel Knievel.
- A New Hope has R2D2 telling Luke that he stood by his mother as she died. Flash forward to The Rise of Skywalker, where R2 is by Leia's side as she dies.
- The Anaconda live listed "optimism for Ghostbusters 3" as a movie mistake. Two years later, due to a variety of factors, the 2016 reboot ended up being one of the most controversial films in recent memory.
- Batman & Robin has Bill wondering if Poison Ivy was planning on bombing AnthroCon after saying she'll get rid of the "furred and feathered pests." Jump to 2014 when Midwest Furfest became the target of a chlorine attack.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Iron Man: While on a little tangent about how Robert Downey Jr. can improve the type of hat he is wearing, they suggest a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker. Cue the announcement for who plays the detective in the 2009 film...
  - Also, during the scene where Tony's suit ices up and he tells Jarvis to deploy the flaps, Mike quips: "You said we didn't need flaps, you installed spinning rims instead". Come The Avengers, when Jarvis claims that the new suit isn't ready yet, Tony actually says "Then skip the spinning rims."
  - And given how much Throw It In! was involved with Tony's dialogue, courtesy of the pop-culture-savvy RDJ being given a Harpo Does Something Funny free hand... It MIGHT have actually been a shout-out to the riff on his part.
- The Avengers: The riffers spend some time pondering about Coulson's relationship with a cellist ... a character who later gets a whole episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., played by Amy Acker.
  - In a much darker example, the riffers constantly tease Samuel L. Jackson for not being able to throw around "MF bombs" in the Marvel Cinematic Universe like he can elsewhere. In The Stinger of Avengers: Infinity War, Fury's last words before being dusted are a cut-short "Motherf—!"
- During shots of the Home Tree in Avatar, Bill references Disney's Animal Kingdom. Guess what's now getting its own land at the park?
- During the podracing scene in The Phantom Menace; "It's like a live-action Speed Racer!" The Live-Action Adaptation of Speed Racer came out a year and a half later.
- Captain America: The First Avenger: The riffers tell Cap "Don't let Ant-Man become an Avenger." Cut a few years forward to a self aware Deadpan Snarker take on Ant-Man sparking one of the best received sub-series in the MCU and becoming an Avenger with few complaining after 2019's Avengers: Endgame- that is, a character Rescued from the Scrappy Heap by Rifftrax's own brand of humor.
- One of the riffers has Red Skull express shock that his death ray kills people instead of shrinking them. Spider-Man: Homecoming would use a similar joke when The Vulture uses a similar weapon to vaporize a flunky who screwed up...and then chewing out his other subordinates for handing him the death ray because he "only" wanted to make him float around for a bit.
- Revenge of the Sith: They tease Padmé waiting for Anakin in one scene by saying "Mickey Mouse is waiting for him," to which Kevin says as Mickey Mouse "*chuckles* Hi, Anakin! *chuckles again*". Guess who bought Lucasfilm five years later and made Star Wars Episode VII?
- A man went to court after throwing sand into Darth Vader's face.
- Daredevil: Mike continues Matt Murdock's narration by stating that he would become a hero called Batman until a rich kid from Gotham sued him for the copyright. Well, guess who played the rich kid from Gotham in the DC Extended Universe?
  - Jared Leto is named as one of the "charisma-free actors" Elektra has beaten up. He plays the Joker opposite Affleck.
- Dr. Who and the Daleks: Kevin jokes about how the Daleks are made to shoot each other. ("You shot me! You knew it was me, Carl! You looked me in the eye!") That was funny enough. Then, it got funnier when what the Doctor really did to the Dalek fleet around Gallifrey was revealed in "The Day of the Doctor".
  - Also, at one point they riff about the inside of one Dalek's armor being covered with posters of "the chick who plays Arya Stark". A few years later, Doctor Who introduced a character named Ashildr...
  - And again in a riff where Bill and Kevin discuss Dalek... waste management... issues. We would eventually see the Dalek city's sewer in The Magician's Assistant/The Witch's Familiar. Crosses into Harsher in Hindsight when we find out what the Dalek sewer actually is...
- Revenge of the Sith: Bill raises the possibility of three more sequels during the aftermath of Mace Windu's death. Two years later...
- Some of the pre-show cards for the Starship Troopers live had movie titles to unscramble. The answer card for one for Monsters University commented "At least it's not Cars 3". Months later, Pixar announces Cars 3.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Kevin is disappointed and frustrated that the film doesn't include Radagast the Brown, among other characters. Radagast would later appear as a supporting character in The Hobbit trilogy.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: When we first meet Gollum, Kevin quips, "Still, I'd take him over Jar Jar in a heartbeat!" which Mike replies, "Meesa, too.". On April 29, 2014, Disney and Lucasfilm announced that Andy Serkis will be in the next Star Wars film.
- X2: X-Men United: One of the gags has one of the guys call Iceman "gay" and says "Same difference" when corrected as "mutant". A few years later, the comic character is actually revealed to be gay.
- X-Men: The Last Stand: At Jean's death, Mike says "Yes, the bliss of freedom from the X-Men franchise". Since then, Famke Janssen has appeared in not just one, but two more X-Men films.
- Their jokes about the Kansas City Royals qualify now that they've made it to the World Series for the first time since 1985.
  - In the Santa Claus Conquers the Martians live, Santa makes three baseball bats, with the riffers commenting; "One for each hit the Royals will get, next season!". The Royals made it to the World Series, the following year! Which they won.
- The Last Airbender becomes this as one of its guest riffers, Janet Varney, would later star in the sequel to the show the movie was based on.
  - Especially after the Grand Finale of the aforementioned show, at least with regards to these lines: "So do you think they mean 'bender' the way British people use it?" "Google it, folks!"
- Their gag in Transformers (2007) about Anthony Anderson being "the whitest black guy in the world" is even more appropriate since he became the star of a show called Blackish.
- A walrus was born at Sea World and named Ginger. She even looks like the main character from "Get That Job"!
- A Running Gag during Jurassic World involves insinuating that Zach and Gray’s actors (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins) aren’t especially invested in their performance or acting in general and plan to ditch the business as soon as the film is wrapped. Naturally, both continued acting in real life, but Robinson’s career in particular took off and he soon garnered critical acclaim and popularity for his lead role in Love, Simon, which can make the riff hilarious for those recognizing Robinson via Retroactive Recognition.
  - One of the first riffs is Kevin hoping that the "monster under the bed" that the boys' mom mentions will be played by Jeff Goldblum in a cameo. This was released at the end of 2016, a few months before it was revealed that Goldblum would Role Reprise Dr. Ian Malcolm in what turned out to be a glorified cameo in Fallen Kingdom.
- The "Red Wedding" joke in Fun in Balloon Land becomes even funnier knowing the crew would riff the infamous episode.
- The Wizard: The "give Bowser an erection" joke becomes oddly prophetic in the wake of the Bowsette meme.
- High School Musical: One of the riffers ask "Didn't Chris R. threaten Denny up here?" This becomes even more hilarious when you realize that Zac Efron (Troy), later played Dan Janjigian (the actor who played Chris R.) in The Disaster Artist.
- Cloverfield (recorded in 2008): The riffers urge the monster to knock down Trump Tower. Flash forward a decade or so later, and they're still making jokes at ex-President Trump's expense.
- Attack of the Puppet People: At one point, a man suddenly walks in on Franz. One of the riffers, as Franz, shouts "For God's sake, no coffee!" This brings to mind a similar gag six years later in Sonic the Hedgehog, where Agent Stone interrupts Robotnik to offer him a latte. Unlike the riff of Franz, though, Robotnik actually wants the drink.
- Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny: When the grandmother being rear projected onto the background as Thumbelina looks at her, with Bill remarking that she was "the great and powerful Oz". Enter 2017, around six years after they first riffed it, and they riffed on an adaptation of The Marvelous Land of Oz, directed by the same exact person who made Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, Barry Mahon.
- During the 2016 MST3K Reunion show, they riff a short called "A Talking Car". Kevin misreads the title as "A Talking Cat" and gets excited at the idea of watching a film about a talking cat. Flash forward to 2018 where they actually do end up riffing the family film A Talking Cat!?!, Kevin wasn't as thrilled this time around.
- In the riff for The Karate Kid Part III they joke about Terry Silver bribing the judges at the All-Valley Karate Championships. Years later, Silver would return as a character in Cobra Kai and do exactly that.
Ho Yay: They're not above commenting on it when they see it. And hell, even when they don't see it.
Snape: [shoving Quirrell against a wall] You don't want me as your enemy, Quirrell.
Bill: Now shut up and kiss me.
Hype Backlash
- The intro and outro to The Dark Knight is all about how a Vocal Minority, especially on the Internet, were proclaiming it to be the Greatest Film Ever Made. Bill ties a rope around his ankle, like priests in the book of Exodus, in case the splendor literally kills him and they have to yank his corpse out of the recording booth. Kevin warns the others that he may weep openly, though it later turns out he thinks they were going to watch First Knight, and says that The Dark Knight sucked.
- This was Bill's opinion of A New Hope, if his rant at the end is any indication.
Memetic Mutation:
- From the "Grass" short shown at the Reefer Madness live, "IS CORN GRASS?" and "IS BAMBOO CORN?" are both making the rounds.^note
- From "Get That Job!": "Ginger walrus!"
- Your friend Palpatine... "And your pal, Friendpatine" from Revenge of the Sith has been making the rounds on Reddit and tumblr.
- After the Space Mutiny Kickstarter began, fans started putting David Ryder's infamous screaming face everywhere, which the crew highly encourages to keep doing.
Retroactive Recognition: Janet Varney provides guest commentary in certain episodes, namely Dirty Dancing, Dreamscape, Footloose and The Lost Boys. She's also featured in the Sketchfest live shows.
Sacred Cow: The group doesn't just tackle bad movies; they have also riffed on Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, and the original Star Wars trilogy.
The Scrappy: Disembaudio, if only because of his voice. They Lampshade this in the commentary for The Room. Dis shows up with a few of his friends, who have similar voices. The riffers ask if they find that annoying.
Tear Jerker:
- The 29 minute short David and Hazel: A Story in Communication is profoundly depressing. Lampshaded constantly by the riffers.
- The Friends short manages to be even more so. The riffers even compare it to the former.
- The segment in the first "National Geographic Total Riff-Off", wherein an Irish veterinarian cares for a stranded baby seal named Sally for eight years until her death. The description of his reaction and subsequent Heroic BSoD is extremely appropriate for anyone who lost a pet they were extremely close to. The riffers immediately call it out as a Downer Ending.
- The Each Child Is Different short has some surprisingly sad moments (due to most of the students being The Woobie). Luckily, there are many Crosses the Line Twice riffs.
- GrimTrax was made in part because the subject matters of some of the shorts featured were too depressing to release on their own.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Joke: Some longtime viewers were surprised that the gang didn't use a "Utini" gag or even comment on it being used by the Jawas who briefly appear at the end of The Rise of Skywalker, considering its status as a major Running Gag in other riffs.

YMMV / RiffTrax

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