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Thanks to you, the Kickstarter community, we shattered RiffTrax Kickstarter records in 2016 when you helped us fund our Mystery Science Theater 3000 Reunion show. This year, we're headlining our Live show slate with one of our biggest names ever!... "Which is what," you're asking? We can't actually tell you just yet, but it will be revealed once we hit our goal! For now, we're simply calling it the...
SUPER SECRET MYSTERY SHOW!!!
All will be clear in time, but trust us, it's going to be a fun one. The show will be August 17th, and the title will be revealed soon!
Along with with our friends at Fathom Events, we'll once again broadcast the ensuing hilarity into hundreds of movie theaters across America on August 17th. This comedy event of the year will be pure riffing heaven — and with your help we get to do it LIVE on the big screen!
But First!
We're kicking off the season with a live show featuring one of our most requested titles of all time, SAMURAI COP, the story of a dumb, leather-jacketed, giant-mullet-wearing detective who sorta fights like a samurai but mostly tries to pick up women with the sophistication of a drunk frat boy!
We’ll riff this cult favorite LIVE on April 13th, 2017.
But that's not all!
Last year’s MST3K Reunion Show was such a success, we’re bringing back RiffTrax regulars, along with some special celebrity guest riffers for a Summer Shorts Beach Party – and YOU are invited! This amazing night of riffing and comedy will include: Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett! PLUS confirmed special guest riffers Mary Jo Pehl and Bridget Nelson, and some very funny yet-to-be-announced guests! It’ll be a summer-themed night of crazy riffed educational shorts culminating in a grand finale: a SUPER RIFF-A-PALOOZA with all the guests at once!
The Summer Shorts Beach Party will be filmed live in front of a big shorts-wearing beachball-tossing crowd on June 15th, 2017 at the Belcourt Theater in downtown Nashville – the Beach Capital of Tennessee, and simulcast to 700+ theaters all across the U.S.A.
To fund this year of amazing RiffTrax Live events, we need your help. The cost to pull it all off is beyond doing on our own, but with a little help from our fans, we can make it happen. In exchange, we've come up with some exciting rewards and VIP packages just for you, including an exclusive Kickstarter backer shirt designed by Shirt.Woot superstar Adam Koford, aka ApeLad! Check out his design for last year's backer shirt:
So friends, please join us once again and help us make another year of hilarious RiffTrax Live adventures possible: SAMURAI COP on April 13th; SUMMER SHORTS BEACH PARTY on June 15th; and the SUPER SECRET MYSTERY TITLE on August 17th – all broadcast LIVE to hundreds of movie screens all over the USA.
With your help, this year could be the biggest one yet!
RiffTrax Live is a shared comedy experience that is best enjoyed with friends. RiffTrax, MST3K and comedy fans alike throughout America will meet up in theaters to enjoy the show. We hope to see you there, too!
WHO we are
The guys at RIFFTRAX have been providing hilarious movie commentary for years. First as writers and stars of the cult TV comedy show MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 – and then online since 2006, as RIFFTRAX. Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett have taken on movies both bad and not-so-bad – from TWILIGHT to oddities like FUN IN BALLOONLAND, with one and only one mission: to make them funny.
RiffTrax has written and performed comedic riffs for over 400 titles that range from major Hollywood blockbusters, to obscure B-movies and educational short films. We've even been on TV on the National Geographic Channel, riffing zany animal shows. And that's not all - we have an amazing new RiffTrax app that magically syncs our Riffs to the biggest blockbuster movies like STAR WARS and HARRY POTTER!
Celebrity guests on various RiffTrax offerings have included Neil Patrick Harris, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Joel McHale, Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, Paul F. Tompkins, Jonathan Coulton, Andy Richter, Kristen Schaal, John Hodgman, Mythbuster Adam Savage, Maria Bamford, Chris Hardwick, Fred Willard, NPR's Peter Sagal and loads more.
If you're still not familiar with us, check out this video for a little taste of what we do at RiffTrax:
Why we're on Kickstarter
In 2009 we did an experiment: a live show in Nashville, riffing the Ed Wood classic PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, simulcast to 500 movie theaters around the U.S.A. It was ragingly funny, and RiffTrax Live was born! Since then, we've done over 20 more live simulcast shows, including: "MANOS" THE HANDS OF FATE; the sorpnl-filled D-movie BIRDEMIC; the bug-infested classic STARSHIP TROOPERS; the SyFy sensation SHARKNADO; an MST3K CAST REUNION SHOW and many more, most of which were only made possible thanks to the generous support of the Kickstarter community.
Movie rights and film remastering cost a decent chunk of change, and the production costs for the Live Shows themselves are crazy high, especially getting the rights from SECRET STUDIO for the CAN'T TELL YOU YET title - so to have this madness make any economic sense, we really need your help. We have our deal with Fathom Events locked in, we have the dates reserved for the shows, and we have a lot of great stuff ready to be riffed for three nights of hilarious entertainment – the rest is up to you!
What do YOU get out of this deal?
Tons of great stuff!! For starters, backers at every level get first dibs on tickets to see all of these live shows in person – including the August show, which is sure to sell out. That's an EXCLUSIVE advance purchasing window just for backing us at any level on Kickstarter!
We've got awesome rewards for every level of backer. Check out the massive list on the right to see all the goodies up for grabs!
Unfortunately, while we can’t give away tickets to the individual movie theaters as rewards, we CAN give you digital downloads of two of them: the SUMMER SHORTS BEACH PARTY and SAMURAI COP shows, along with the other exclusive rewards created just for backers. In the past, these have included behind-the-scenes videos, never-before-seen shorts, digital downloads of live show scripts, and more! All that, plus the priceless warm fuzzy feeling of knowing YOU helped make putting RiffTrax on the Big Screen possible.
We're also offering some fantastic VIP packages that include meeting the RiffTrax gang in Nashville, tickets for the best seats in the house, getting your picture in the credits, and even being able to write a riff that will be used in a Live Show script!
Wondering what goes on at our VIP meet-and-greets? Check out this video from last year's Reunion Show gathering:
What if we get extra money, past our goal?
With your help, we’ve surpassed our goals in each of our four previous Kickstarter campaigns. And just like with those projects, all of the extra money we raise will go towards securing the rights for showing the movies in theaters, the top-notch production of the live shows, making possible some amazing celebrity guests for the Beach Party show, and to create all those awesome rewards!
We’ll be up front here: making these shows happen costs more than our base goal. That’s just the reality of it. If we’re able to raise extra money, those additional funds go right back into putting on the best production we can.
With all that being said... THANK YOU! We have the best fans in the world, and we know how lucky we are. This year will mark our 25th RiffTrax Live show - we couldn't have done it without our fans, and we sincerely thank you for your support over these many years. We can't wait to make you laugh even more during 2017 – so join us for RiffTrax Live!
Risks and challenges
The biggest challenge to this Kickstarter is that we are unable to do the most obvious thing: pre-sell actual movie theater tickets to all the live shows. The reason for this is that we can't control which theaters will pick up the show, and on top of the fact that they all use different systems, the logistics of pre-selling tickets to all the various theater chains is pretty much impossible.
But we ARE able to offer digital versions of at least TWO of the shows - the SUMMER SHORTS BEACH PARTY Show and SAMURAI COP - as rewards, along with the other fun rewards available at all levels.
In the end, all we want to do is provide you with some great laugh-out-loud evenings, this year going even bigger than before. Thanks for being part of MST and RiffTrax history!
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