Total Riff Off

Killer Shrimp ‘N Friends - no, it’s not a new appetizer platter at your favorite casual dining restaurant, but it IS a smorgasbord of strange creatures, people, and underwear! From a ball-breaking mantis shrimp, to the seemingly-named-by-Wes-Anderson Geographer’s Cone Snail, to a dog with a penchant for unmentionables, to the UTTERLY HORRIBLE thing baby koalas put into their mouths, there’s plenty of weird stuff in the natural world for us to sink our, er, teeth into. All that, plus an old man and his seal (strange reboot of the classic Hemingway novel), terrifying dino-birds, and tasmanian devils - not quite as tornado-y as cartoons have led us to believe, much more into “killing things and living inside them”.

A giant demon bat is terrorizing a Mexican village! Well, it’s actual fairly normal sized, as far as bats go. It’s really no more a demon than any other bat, now that you mention it. And “terrorizing” is being a bit sensational. It bit a cow. Maybe. But it’s good that there’s not a giant demon bat, because the guy National Geographic sends in after it is woefully under qualified to handle such a thing. We’re frankly uncomfortable letting him near the cow. Richard Terry is a certified Poor Man’s Colin Farrell, with luxurious hair and a talent for pretending completely normal everyday scenarios are fraught with peril. He thrusts his camera in the face of irritated Mexicans and demands information about the demon bat that these people have never heard of, since they presumably are spending all their time dealing with real threats, such as the Chupacabra. This episode was so goofy we ended up riffing the entire thing. Enjoy Total Riff Off: Demon Bat.

Meet Dominic. He’s in love with a goose. What’s that? You’ll be right back after you alert the authorities? We completely understand. So like we were saying, this guy is in love with a goose named Maria. He slowly walks around a park and she follows him. It’s riveting. The goose even flies next to him as he rides around on a Vespa. Eventually, Dominic has a severe Vespa accident, possibly because there was an enormous goose flapping around right next to his head while he was trying to drive. Oh, and at some point in time Maria appears in an OK Go music video. You can’t make this sort of stuff up, nor can you flesh it out to an entire hour long show, so we also riffed some alligator wrangling rednecks and a corpse sniffing dog named Bullwinkle. It’s a whole gaggle of laughs! Watch it with your loved ones, (who are hopefully not geese).

Never one to let something like “not finding the made up creature we all knew never existed in the first place” discourage him, monster hunter Richard Terry is back on the prowl again! This time he’s seeking out the Mekong Flesh Eater, a creature that if it were real* would have the Thai people living in utter terror! When a Thai woman is attacked by the creature while gathering shellfish in the river, Richard leaps into action and visits a cave that is not on the river. He bravely manages to get himself stuck almost immediately. Upon making the shocking discovery that the creature that attacked the woman in the river is not in an unrelated cave, he’s left to bumble around Thailand harassing the natives in search of a constantly changing goal that is at various times: a catfish, a cobra, a legendary creature called the Naga, D.B. Cooper, a fearsome catfish, and someone to lend him money for a plate of curry.

Oh, those weird wacky animals, will they ever learn? The answer is no, no they won’t, because they are weird wacky animals and weird wackiness is all they know. As the ancient ape prophet Chimpicles once said, “Let he who is without wackiness fling the first poo.” And further, well-behaved animals rarely make history, or even amusing headlines, and they CERTAINLY don’t make it into our Animals Behaving Badly special which, ultimately, is what this paragraph is all about! You like cheetahs? We’ve got one pooping in a sunroof. You like raccoons? We’ve got one gettin’ tossed like a frisbee. You like orangutans and/or cigarettes? We’ve got a segment that brings them together at last. You like rats with a penchant for devouring their young? We’ve got… wait, let’s go back to why you like that. Are you doing okay?

This time he’s in search of the Mapinguari, aka the Brazilian Bigfoot, aka, Probably A Slightly Larger Than Average Coyote or Something. It’s been terrorizing villagers. They will not leave their huts for fear it might thrust a camera in their face and demand they sign a release form—Oh wait, that’s just Richard. The Mapinguari on the other hand is constantly pretending he’s in danger and making perfectly normal situations seem fraught with peril—Sorry, sorry, that’s Richard again too. Along the road to eventual disappointment and inevitable humiliation, Richard will scoot along a log, drug an anteater, and get drenched by a waterfall. It may be his most successful monster hunt yet.