Slant Magazine

Slant: Speaking of groaners, there are often moments when you presumably hit each other in the studio. Are you actually hitting each other? Or is that all foley work?

BC: That's become our signature bit. We are violent to each other. Apparently.

KM: There was one movie recently where someone actually had a crossbow in the studio.

Slant: Will you guys be recording the Reefer Madness show for a future release?

MN: I think so. That's always to be determined because of different rights issues and stuff and so we hope to, but we can never guarantee it.

BC: We did for the first two movie theater shows.

Slant: Okay, I have one question that's totally personally motivated. You use the word "batch" all the time to refer to a man's junk. Where the hell did that term come from?

BC: I wanna know about your personal motivation. [MN and KM laugh] I think it was a way of not saying something dirtier, for our Standards and Practices, but I don't know the origin of it.

KM: "Area" was another one we used a lot. "Basket" sometimes. I think "man-batch" was what it was sometimes called, but it was just a way of talking about that particular part of the human body without making the thing any more than PG.

MN: It could've come from the sports world. They're always coming up with stuff like, "Oh! Right in the mess!"

BC: Finding new ways to talk about that general part of the anatomy.

KM: Which we are always talking about anyway.

BC: When we're not hitting each other.

MN: Do enough sword-and-sandal pictures, and, you know, all those leather-clad man-batches start to—

KM: It's unavoidable. Try doing 300 without batches.

MN: See, you got us excited with that question.

Slant: I feel like that's going to be the high note of the interview.

BC: And isn't that telling?

Slant: I also had a question—

BC: It's batch-related, isn't it?

Slant: It comes from your response to the batch question, yeah. You mentioned wanting to keep things PG, and obviously that made sense when you were on basic cable, but now even when you're riffing on sometimes R-rated movies, you do still tend to stay relatively family-friendly. Why make that decision?

MN: I'll cop to being the most puritanical of these guys. I just think it makes you more creative to restrict that. And it just sort of opens up a can of worms to go into that because then you have to make the decisions about where and when to do it, and it's just easier to work around it, I think, and come up with different ways. But we have a legacy of fans who are used to it and so it might be a little bit jarring.

BC: Here and there we've broken the rule, when the movie is rated thusly, but I feel like we're plenty filthy enough as it is.

KM: Foul language is always better as punctuation.

Slant: And sometimes even the censoring buzzer really works in your favor.

KM: That's true.

Slant: Bill, in particular, really manages to make the buzzer work.

KM: Bill's daily conversation is nothing but a string of hideous obscenities anyway.

Slant: I started following you on Twitter the other day, and I see that you guys are playing shuffleboard all the time. What's the story with that?

MN: This is the fuel that keeps RiffTrax going. We're partnered with another company that sort of expanded in a different way and are doing a different thing than we used to do, and so we had a very buttoned-down office until we moved recently and we just took a little poll and said, "What do we want in the office? It's gotta be something fairly quiet." And we came up with shuffleboard. It's like the water cooler for the office, but it's great fun so we decided to put it out live and try to convince the world how exciting shuffleboard is.

Slant: What else is in store for RiffTrax? What can we expect from you in the coming months?

MN: Well, we've got obviously the live show in theaters, but also part of this madness with the shuffleboard is to get our system down to do live shows on the Internet and make sure that they're high enough quality, and that we can do flash shows—things that are announced and pulled together real quickly, like if there's certain shorts that we just wanna do for a special engagement on the Internet. So that's something that we're keenly interested in, because we just like to be that close to the fans where you can kinda give them something special on the fly like that, be real spontaneous.

Slant: Is there a release lined up for the website between now and the live show?

MN: We're doing the John Travolta TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.

KM: 1976.

BC: It's an amazing little artifact of American history.

KM: He wears the same shorts that teenage girls are wearing now—the really tiny, little disturbingly short shorts. Throughout the whole movie.

MN: And America is going to fall in love with Paul Williams all over again. [KM laughs] The music of Paul Williams, that is.