RiffTrax Shorts

Sometimes, we find something so special, and so wonderfully sad that by the time it ends we're curled on the floor, guts cramped from laughing, clutching clumps of our own freshly-pulled hair as the keepers come to usher us back into our pens. What the now-classic Setting Up A Room did for setting up a room, David and Hazel does for the gradual, quiet collapse of a 1960s American marriage.

The Clean Club was created to teach kids about basic hygiene and washing habits, and it's our dear hope that it will find new life as an instructional film shown at Comic-Con registration. Mike, Kevin and Bill have been denied membership to The Clean Club ever since the launch of their failed business venture, Foxy Septic Tank Wrestling. (It looked good on paper!)

The short The Lemonade Stand ponders the eternal question of What's Fair? One partner blows off selling lemonade to toss around the old horsehide, the other wonders where the hell he went. When their lemonade sales skyrocket during the partner's absence, he's left with a tough decision: whether or not to screw over the Winklevoss twins and abscond with all the profits.

Yes, Friends puts the FUN back in ennui! It's full of those treasured childhood memories we all share. Like when a girl finds a gigantic, broken TV antenna in a trashcan, and drags it behind her for the rest of the day. Or when an even weirder girl offers her money in exchange for friendship, which leads to crying, and eventually to that most iconic of games - the plum fight!

Reading From Now On is the tale of a young, comically illiterate boy who lives in the shadow of an older brother who arrogantly shoves his book-learnin' in everyone's face. Will our hero crumble under the sibling pressure, learn to read, or fake learning to read by memorizing the names of a few pictures and shouting them on demand? Who knows, but it's probably the last one.

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. 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 devise a crude trap to capture it. Hence, Corky!

Focuses on a sweet old man who owns the shop and who secretly believes 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 also deals in broken dreams for the future.