Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short where we see the return of Mr. Mac.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a film about - you guessed it - handling daily problems.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a film where a kid looks through a film thingy and sees absurd examples of courtesy.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff a film about a mistreated customer. And if you think that guy had it rough, wait until you meet Norman.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about walking to school, which follows children Jim and Margie taking a (awfully long) walk to school.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about how we're pronouncing words wrong.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about dealing with customers at your job.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about crossing the street like the alphabet.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short film where Vaughn Monroe's family goes camping and one of the daughters witnessed seeing Smokey Bear.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about a badger who has a bad day thanks to other animals.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin return to the American, Mexican, and Japanese families they met last year to see how each of them earn and spend.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about one of Australia's known animals: Kangaroos.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short film about a red hen which involves duck urine.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short with two small hippies who seek over kids and a glitter-wearing tooth fairy.

Ah, the rural county fair -- the kind of place that everyone takes their children, then immediately remembers that county fairs are no place for children, or decent folk of any age. Carnies, deep-fried treats that make the KFC Double Down seem like a heart-healthy option, and rides that are either 100% rust or coated in the blood of previous riders, there’s no end to the number of ways a county fair wants to kill you. County Fair takes this bacteria farm of an environment and adds new levels of terror, with songs straight out of a bottomless David Lynch fever dream. Dip your funnel cake in liquid mescaline and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill on the ferris wheel to eternity with County Fair!

Quick! Say the first word that comes to mind when I mention porcupines. Ok... Sure, why not...That one’s not really what we're looking for, but keep 'em coming...Ok, that's a little weird that you thought of that...Oh god! How would that even work!?!? You know what, let's stop that exercise. NOT the results we were expecting. How would you even get the banana out of the rubber chicken once you were hooked on to the trapeze? You know what, it's not important. The word we were looking for was "salt". That's right, porcupines like the star of our latest short, Prickly, love salt and will stop at nothing to get one sweet, sweet lick of the decidedly non-sweet substance. Dont believe us? Possibly because you've never heard this so-called "fact" before and it sounds like it needs to be accompanied by a big fat, 72 point Wikipedia-style "citation needed" label? We agree that it does. So here's our citation: Prickly the Porcupine, a great new short in which one brave porcupine goes off

The internet era is filled with mysterious, indecipherable messages. The comment “firsties” on an article - what could it possibly mean, and what purpose could it serve? An all-caps email forwarded by your grandmother warning of the potential dangers of the ethanol gasoline conspiracy...but only after scrolling past thousands of strange, hieroglyphic “>” symbols. Or a text message like “lolwut gmafb rusrsly X-D”, which, according to the work of our finest crypto-linguists, translates roughly to “Pass the frog-banana, Harold.” But our new short The Mysterious Message shows that failures in communication happened even back in the ancient period known as Pre-Geocitian! In those days, something called “handwriting” was the culprit. Now used primarily for that one actual check you still have to begrudgingly write each month (ugh, rent) handwriting was once so common that a faux-scary short film with a faux-good Vincent Price impersonating narrator had to be made!

Sometimes it’s really hard to be a good sport. Like when your fifth grade basketball team gets embarrassed 41-17 on the court, so you convince all the boys on your team to hock a loogie into their palms before shaking hands with the winning team. Then the goody-two-shoes on your team, James, rats you out to coach and you get in big trouble. So, as kids do, you dedicate your life to developing an elaborate revenge plan against James, culminating in cut brake lines and you doing 10 years hard time for no good reason. Hey, we’ve all been there, am I right? Kids will be kids! Our new short, Being a Good Sport, tries to help you avoid such scenarios, but mainly just proves that snotty kids who don’t play well with others should be shunned for the safety of everyone involved. Embracing these adorable little psychopaths will earn you nothing but a knife in the back! Consider yourself warned!

Animals make their homes in lots of fun, interesting places! Some burrow into tree bark, while others burrow into the dense, matted armpit hair of a bench-napping Nick Nolte! Some gather twigs and leaves to construct nests, while others nest in the exhaust pipe of the inoperative Dodge Pacer in which Nick Nolte resides! Some dig elaborate underground tunnel systems, while others dig tunnels in the massive stack of restraining orders, ignored subpoenas, and unpaid adult pay-per-view bills that Nick Nolte keeps around so that he has something to wipe up his sick! Mike, Kevin, and Bill invite you to join them for Animal Homes, which provides a window into the everyday lives of gophers, opossums, and other hideous rodent beasts that you usually only get to see on the side of the freeway, being very, very still!

Sure, great, here we go...”beginning” responsibility, and “getting” ready for school. Hey kids, how about for once you just GET responsible and BE ready for school? We’re tired of coddling you! Oh, you can’t eat your breakfast, because we put the plate up on top of the fridge and you can’t reach it because you’re only five years old? Yeah well everyone’s got some kind of sob story, just figure it out buddy! Oh, sure, cry, guess you don’t need any help learning how to “begin” doing THAT. Inexplicable rage aside, Beginning Responsibility: Getting Ready for School centers on two wholesome 1950s lads, Pete and Ricky, and their morning routines. One boy’s home runs as smoothly as a Swiss watch, while the other is as disorganized and maddeningly chaotic as one of those Canadian watches you never hear about (and now you know why). Hurry up and join Mike, Kevin and Bill for Beginning Responsibility: Getting Ready for School because the late bell already rang twice and if you don’t get insi

Who among us doesn’t love a good adventure? A chance to escape our routines and stimulate our minds and reinvigorate our sense of fun. Yes, there’s nothing like the thrill you get from emerging from your burrow, nervously looking around, and perhaps grabbing a nut before darting back underground to huddle amongst your brothers. What’s that? Not exactly how you define adventure? Something more along the lines of travelling, camping, whitewater rafting? Well, I apologize. I didn’t clarify that I was using the definition of adventure as found in the latest RiffTrax short Adventures of a Chipmunk Family. It’s packed to the brim with adventures, if you consider expanding the series of underground tunnels that the chipmunks live in in preparation for winter to be an adventure. Also, a weasel shows up. You know what, we probably should have mentioned that first...Forget everything you just read and remember this: weasel.

GET TO DA CHOPPA!!! Many of us have heard these iconic instructions hundreds of times. They’ve been shouted at us during important life events: graduations, weddings, or most likely, watching Predator hungover at two in the afternoon at Dan’s. Few of us ever take the shouter up on the Choppa-getting-to however. Except Billy! Billy is a boy who acts where the rest of us cower in fear, or perhaps ask Dan to pass us the gatorade. Make no bones about it, in Billy’s Helicopter Ride, Billy gets to da Choppa. The fact that Da Choppa is driven by Uncle Joe, who looks like he was rejected from the Grapes of Wrath cast on the grounds of being “too drifter-like”, does not deter Billy’s father from letting Billy take an unaccompanied tour of their town in the helicopter. While touring their town they see many exciting things such as: their town from a slightly elevated position than normal. Will Billy seize the controls in a manic episode and plunge the helicopter downward, spiralling towards

Who needs friends when you have a talking paper bag named Mr. Paper Bag?

Aesop’s Fables. These stories, with their universal morals, have inspired us all. Tales such as “The Fox and the Grapes”, “The Lion and the Mouse” and “The Two Cat/Bear things that go to the North Pole and one dies but comes back to life and they see a polar bear.” Not familiar with the last one you say? Perhaps you remember it by its more common name Frozen Frolics. No? We’re pretty sure it’s one of Aesop’s Fables, it says so right on the title screen... Anyhow, Frozen Frolics answers that eternal question, “What was it like when people took acid before color had been invented?” The answer? Lots of black and white cartoon animals that sort of bob up and down repeatedly while a crazed mixture of consequence free violence happens all around them. Many credit it as the inspiration for The Jerry Springer Show. Mike, Kevin and Bill learned a very important moral during their riffing of Frozen Frolics: cured meats are delicious.

Ever since this short debuted at RiffTrax Live: Reefer Madness, we’ve heard one question more than any other: “Why are you standing so close to me?” But a VERY CLOSE second to that is, “When are you guys gonna release that insane Grasses short??” Friends, you need ask no longer! Unless you were one of the people asking the first question, in which case the answer is “It’s a free country, I’ll stand where I want. Hey, you gonna finish that Hostess fruit pie?” Here, in a new studio version, is At Your Fingertips: Grasses. It’s got everything! Arts & crafts so awful they would even disappoint Depression-era children, fancy headdresses galore, and child worship of a terrifying clay-faced god! Not to mention a certain inquiry about corn that ranks up there with “Who is Keyser Soze?” as one of cinema’s great questions. While recording At Your Fingertips: Grasses, Mike, Kevin, and Bill kept something else at their fingertips: lots and lots of bourbon.

Let’s just be upfront: this is a sequel to the infamous Grasses short and you should buy it right away. Yes, the mad geniuses at ACI films have recruited a new group of children to glance nervously at the authority figures standing off-camera as they’re forced to make crafts out of common household garbage. This time, the waste product of choice is cardboard boxes. Yes, before Calvin and Hobbes turned a cardboard box into a transmogrifier, the children in this short were showing similar sparks of imagination by pretending to assemble crafts that were clearly made by adults when the camera wasn’t rolling. There are no fancy headresses in this short, but you will witness an entire city made of blocks, complete with corpses floating in a motel pool. Also, two youngsters live out every child’s fantasy and use boxes to set up their own furniture moving business. And it wouldn’t be an At Your Fingertips short without twisted creatures brought into existence

A cutting, thoughtful, and sober analysis of the coming world energy crisis, Borrowed Power affirms -- WAIT WAIT DON’T GO just kidding!! It’s really about an extaordinarily ugly teenager killing someone with his car! Or did he? That question is the raw mystery of this driving scare film, which brings to life the character of young, reckless, hideous Jerry, and his equally unpleasant friends. In his hurry to get to a sock hop, or a malt shop, or some other dull and awful thing old-timey teenagers did to pass the time until video games and psychedelic drugs became available, Jerry drives his giant car like a gosh-darned fool. After his (potentially) lethal ride, he’s scolded by a vaguely governmental official who calls in Jerry’s parents, who somehow take the ugly levels EVEN HIGHER! You won’t believe your eyes! Mike, Kevin, and Bill have taken the key lesson of Borrowed Power to heart, namely, whatever you do, try not to be outrageously ugly while doing it.

There are lots of places you could take eggs. You could take eggs to a party! You could take eggs to the museum! You could take eggs to prom! You could take eggs to the workplace of your romantic rival, lock his office door from the inside and then plug in a hot plate, put a skillet onto that hot plate and slowly, one-by-one, crack the eggs on the edge of the skillet, letting them sizzle as you maintain steady eye contact with this man, your nemesis, as his terror grows exponentially in the face of your unflinching refusal to answer his questions about why you’re there and what you’re going to do to him. Or you could take Eggs to Market! From filthy chicken cages to depressed factory workers to big goopy buckets of yolk matter, Eggs to Market is full of delightful behind-the-scenes egg-packaging fun! Mike, Kevin, and Bill enjoyed Eggs to Market, but it did nothing to change their view that eggs should primarily be used as bacon grease delivery systems.

Juan and His Donkey! Rockin’ your commute on KBLZ 105.3! Stay tuned because we’ve got our producer Timmy The Gimp in nothing but a kilt out in front of a funeral home, and a guy in a turkey costume is gonna blast him with paint balls! It’s gonna be off the- Wait, what? Juan and His Donkey is not a wacky morning show DJ Team? It’s an educational short from Coronet, part of the popular “A Boy Of ____” series? Are you sure? I mean, that sounds feasible, but what is it meant to teach exactly? Hm...Cultural differences...I dunno. Seems like it’s just going to prove dated and offensive...You’re sure we can’t just run with the Morning Zoo thing? Well fine. A Boy of Mexico: Juan and His Donkey is NOT wacky, and there are no interns harassing old ladies. The donkey isn’t even painted like a zebra. But this tale of a poor Mexican boy who chops firewood for a living and longs for nothing more than to buy his donkey Pepito a new serape is quite dated and proves quite ripe for riffing.

When you ask a company like ACI, makers of the now-infamous “Grasses” and “Boxes” shorts, to create a film teaching kids to count to ten, there are three things of which you can be certain. One, you can count on the fact that if you’re talking to someone at ACI, they are attempting to speak to you on a telephone made out of old, damp egg cartons. Two, you know the end product they give you will not teach children how to count, but WILL teach them how to succumb to the chaos of life and turn their backs on reason with whimsy and a shaky, nervous smile. Three, well, we’d list a third thing here, but we learned to count from ACI and frankly, after two we always get confused and take a nap under the kitchen sink. One Turkey, Two Turkey plunges the viewer gobble-deep into the hideous, squawking world of a commercial turkey farm. Juxtaposing images of these terrified birds awaiting execution with a cheerful, legitimately catchy song about counting is just the sort of special touch

We Discover the Dictionary weaves the enchanting tale of three grade school children who discover the dictionary for the first time. And that’s all well and good: they use it to write a thank you note to a police officer who must have lost a bet or something, because he had to come talk to their class about bike safety. But if we may nitpick for just a second... As far as discoveries go, “Discovering the Dictionary” probably ranks down there with Columbus “discovering” America in terms of least impressive feats. First of all, the dictionary, much like America, was already there the whole time. It was just sitting on teacher’s desk, gathering dust. Second, much like America, people were already using the dictionary before these three idiots found it. In fact, it’s hard to argue that anybody could “discover” the dictionary when it’s in fact a book created by other people. Thirdly, these children immediately begin to abuse the dictionary, looking up words like “poop” and “weiner.” Sure

It’s summer vacation! School’s out and you have all the time in the world to hang with your best bud and...ponder the meaning of nothingness? In What is Nothing? we join two youngsters who, as all rascals do, sit around and contemplate the void. Whether they’re journeying to the library to look up “Nothing” in the dictionary, or coming up with profound truths such as “caterpillars matter to caterpillars”, one thing is certainly true: we want some of whatever these kids are on. What is Nothing? will have you longing for the bygone days of your youth, when entire days could be spent eating cookies, riding bikes, silently screaming about your own insignificance and watching Gilligan’s Island reruns. Mike, Kevin and Bill yell riffs into the abyss on What is Nothing? Oh wait, that’s not an abyss...That is a microwave oven somebody left on the side of the road.

When you see the title of our new short, Feelings: I’m Feeling Alone, you might think to yourself “Alone? That’s gotta be the saddest thing you could put after the words ‘I’m Feeling’ in an educational short meant for small children.” Not so! Consider these other titles in the series. “Feelings: I’m Feeling My Ex-Girlfriend’s Wet Doormat When She’s Not Home.” Or “Feelings: I’m Feeling Like the Last Bit of Hamster Food in the Bowl that Even my Disgusting Hamster Won’t Eat.” Then there’s “Feelings: I’m Feeling the Grooves in Mickey Rourke’s face,” and, last but not least, “Feelings: I’m Feeling Like Seeing Transformers 3 with my Wife on our Anniversary.” A whimsical, musical foray into the infinite sadness of childhood, Feelings: I’m Feeling Alone went the extra mile to bum out schoolkids, who were already pretty bummed out because they were watching awful educational shorts in school. And if you think the short builds to a resolution or offers kids any kind of hope for the future.

Mike, Bill, and Kevin riff on a short about two teachers setting up a kindergarten classroom. And that's the short.

Do you ever get scared? Do you ever get the creeps? More importantly, are both of these questions wildly inappropriate for an educational short to pose to a bunch of nine year olds? Of course they are, yet The Creeps Machine soldiers on with whatever its mission might be. In theory, it’s supposed to reassure kids that they can conquer their fears. It does this by springing a hideous clown named Old Bobo upon them, thereby guaranteeing that they never sleep for the rest of their childhood, which fortunately will end much sooner once they’ve witnessed The Creeps Machine. The Creeps Machine features lurking old men, Rube Goldberg devices, a menacing gorilla’s hand, zero coherence and of course, Old Bobo. In other words, perfect educational fodder for Mike, Kevin and Bill to riff.

A discussion of great, important series would be incomplete without mention of Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Twin Peaks, and, of course, the “Boy of” shorts. We’ve previously presented A Boy of Mexico: Juan and His Donkey, and our new installment doesn’t disappoint in fulfilling the naming scheme of “Boy of [country]: [name of boy from that country] and His [stereotypical animal from that country].” Told through the eyes of a narrator who insists on inserting himself into the story of Rama’s family life even though he never appears on screen, and there’s no reason to think the people in the short know he exists, it is a sweet tale of physical labor, visibly moist living conditions, and heaps and heaps of elephant feces. Despite this, the film contains less excrement than NBC’s “Outsourced”, which was 100% excrement. Grab whatever animal best represents your background (for most of us, a stuffed Ewok doll) and join Mike, Kevin and Bill for Boy of India: Rama and His Elephant!

It's true that the educational shorts we dig up have been described as “less educational than an episode of The Jersey Shore” in a review from Bizarrely Contrived Comparison magazine. Shown in classrooms, they formed young minds, in the sense that stomping a jar of wet clay flat is still a way of “forming” it. But our new short What Are Letters For? takes the miseducation of America’s youth to a bold new level, by teaching the alphabet yet LEAVING OUT certain letters. Which letters? That arrogant but rare Z, or perhaps the co-dependent Q that refuses to work without its U? No, they’ve instead plucked out all the vowels, those pesky soft letters that you almost never see in any words ever. Teamed up with random animals and objects, this short is easily your best bet for helping kids unlearn what scraps of language they might have learned! They’ll be committed to an illiterate future with no job prospects beyond fry cook, or popular tween vampire novelist. Having happily adopted the s

Meet The Sentencesmith! Some say this wacky old gent has a way with words! Good thing, since he lives on the Island of Grammaria, where he runs a workshop teaching all the little boys and girls the rules of...Say, is that a monkey over there in the corner of the workshop? It is! Boy, this is going to be one heck of a short! What’s that you say, Sentencesmith? Ignore the monkey, and focus on basic sentence construction? OK, OK...So, the predicate is always followed by the - I’m sorry, it’s kind of hard with the monkey right there. It’s just that it’s bound to do something hilarious any minute and - Right, grammar. Focus on grammar. You were saying how a sentence is like a treasure map because it doesn’t make any sense if you don’t follow it in the proper LOOK, WHY WOULD YOU HAVE A MONKEY IN THIS SHORT IF YOU’RE NOT GOING TO EVEN ACKNOWLEDGE THE MONKEY!? WHY TEASE US THAT WAY?! WHY!!! WHY!!! WH-!!!

For decades, the phrase “I’m looking for a job in cosmetology” has been a great, positive way to let your girlfriend know it’s probably in her best interests to seek a more compatible mate. Cosmetology is a profession traditionally filled with glamour, cutting-edge chic, and hip, attractive stylists--and our new short Jobs in Cosmetology manages to include none of those things! Even better, it presents a 1960s paradise of dead-eyed matrons squirting what appear to be bottles of diner BBQ sauce onto enormous beehive haircuts. It’s garish, hideous, and baffling--in short, the kind of thing we here at RiffTrax live for. Grab a magazine and plop down in a salon chair next to Mike, Bill, and Kevin for Jobs in Cosmetology! (And please, help us convince Kevin the full-body perm is a bad idea...)

“What Makes Things Float?” It’s no longer just something for your stoned roommate to mumble before he spreads Nutella on a Chipwich. It’s also an educational short which features two boys who just want to get some damn fishing done but are instead incessantly lectured by an off-camera stranger. Floating, as it turns out, is pretty complicated to figure out. After breaking new ground in determining that fishing sinkers do not float (this required a 3.2 million dollar grant), we’re taken to a science lab, that clearly did not receive any of this grant money. Here, a motley collection of misfit equipment that looks like its sole purpose is to inflict injury upon young scientist’s eye region, is used to determine “What Makes Things Float?” How exactly is this determined? Sand. Lots of sand. If you’re a petulant Jedi, you may want to stay clear of this lab. Instead, stay in your fishing boat with Mike, Kevin and Bill. They’ll only end up drinking all your beer and daring each other to e

There’s no two ways about it, Let’s Pretend: Magic Sneakers is a gleeful, brightly-colored, downright whimsical piece of insane evil. A young boy, grime-encrusted as a train hobo, has seemingly been left to fend for himself in a glum warehouse district. He plays with the garbage he can find, all the while smiling and laughing, probably because his brain is collapsing into a vegetative state from going days without food. Among the filth, he discovers the Magic Sneakers, which can dance and move all on their own! Overjoyed at finding intact footwear, the boy follows the sneakers on what’s sure to be an uplifting adventure (or at least, a trip to a place where he can get some soup)...but no, the sneakers cruelly lead him through a drainage ditch to the kind of remote wilderness location where people tend to “disappear.” Things get even more sinister when a cloaked figure (who looks more like a violent meth addict from Breaking Bad than a playful spirit) appears, his sneaker trap success

Every community needs a Broken Bookshop. You’ll find it in town square, over by the Moth-Ridden Mattress Hut, just around the corner from Shaky Sam’s Shattered Stemware Emporium. Because it’s not enough to buy a used book, what you really want is a book that’s been abused, stained, made damp, shredded, and then painstakingly reconstructed into something you would still rather not touch, let alone buy. That’s the sound business model featured in our new short, Beginning Responsibility: Broken Bookshop. It focuses on the sweet old man who owns the shop and happens to secretly BELIEVE THAT BOOKS TALK TO HIM. His delusional senility may seem folksy and charming, until he brings an innocent boy into his world of pointless book repair. When he aggressively insists to young Andy “My books talk to me, and maybe they’ll talk to you too!” you know that this shop deals not only in broken books, but also broken hopes and dreams for the future. At first glance we thought this short was a documen

What child wouldn’t want a wild crow as a pet?...is a question you might sincerely ask if you had never encountered children or crows before. Crows, the repulsive, squawking harpies of the suburban skyline! Crows, the chosen pet of that drunken buffoon Uncle Billy in It’s A Wonderful Life!! Crows: where do they go at night? Nobody knows, and that’s the most terrifying thing of all!!! But when one family’s attempts at warding off the sinister black hearted beasts fails (because their scarecrow is less intimidating a Cabbage Patch Doll*), they decide to do the only logical thing and flee the harbingers of doom. No, of course they don’t; they devise a crude trap to capture it. It works almost instantly, presumably because this is exactly what the crows want to happen. After a couple weeks of feeding the crow beans** in its cage, they name it Corky and it becomes a lovable member of the family. But then...! Everything turns out alright actually...