Cinematic Titanic

So every Christmas, my brother-in-law supplies me with geeky gifts, usually from Comic Con. Autographed photos, drawings, and so on. Well, you can imagine my consternation when I opened a DVD of "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" performed by some group called "Cinematic Titanic."

Really? Someone else dared riff on this? Let me explain why this upset me: one of my holiday traditions is to break out one of two Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. This year, it was "Santa Claus," a Mexican kids' movie that featured a fight to death between Santa and the devil. Seriously. It's so great.

The other is "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians." So how could some other group dare transgress such a great episode?

I didn't realize that this was done by Joel Hodgson along with four other MST3K veterans. Tonight I broke it out and decided to see how they updated it.

It was okay. Part of the problem is I've seen the MST3K version so often, I "heard" the jokes from that a split second before they made the new ones. It was still very funny.

The only gripe I have is that I didn't totally understand the format of the show. I guess the cast was in some sort of compound to make some sort of time capsule thingy. Why? No idea. I mean, in a show like this, the premise backstory isn't all that important, but it would have been nice to know exactly why these five people are being forced to watch bad movies.

So I guess I have something new to watch for. It'll be fun to see some "new" bad movie riffs!