I've been watching RiffTrax for a couple of years now. I laughed till I wept as Messrs Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett (late of MST3K) added their hilarious commentary to the various red-headed stepchildren of modern cinema: Wickerman; Firewall; Transformers; Beowulf; the Star Wars prequels, etc.

But this week, the RiffTrax crew has unveiled a completely different kind of strategy: riffing on the classics. As the ad copy explains, "Sure, it's easy enough to make hay out of a bear-suited Nicholas Cage, but what really tests one's mettle is to see how he reacts when he's staring down the business end of THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER MADE." The new campaign is being branded "RiffTrax Challenges", the plural noun ominously suggesting that there will be several classic movies subjected to the riffing treatment in the near future.

The first test case: Casablanca. I was skeptical at first. Well, ok, more than skeptical. I wept openly, threw a lot of dishes at the wall, called several radio DJs in the Bible Belt to coordinate the public torching of RiffTrax mp3s and other memorabilia, and sent Joel Hodgson a personal telegram letting him know that he has always been better than Mike Nelson. I regret those things now (except for the dish-hurling - they were dirty anyway).

The new Casablanca riff is very, very good. The riffs are consistently laugh-out-loud funny, and while I won't spoil it for you, there is an exquisite "inside joke" that is so perfectly placed, I almost snorted an entire plate of cookies out my nose (we'll talk later about why I had an entire plate of cookies in my mouth). It was fun to watch Mike, Kevin, and Bill tackle a classic of this magnitude, and they pulled it off with style; the riffing is extremely funny, yet without vandalizing the film in the process.

I'm crossing my fingers for a RiffTrax commentary on It's a Wonderful Life! next ...