Rifftrax Year: 2012
Riffers: Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett
"I'm tellin' ya', young punks, there's nothin' like livin' on a real dirty kid."
"...is a sentence that should prompt immediate jail time."
If you're wondering what your underwear's voice might sound like, this is the short for you (and they actually sound like Kermit the Frog). This is a more recent short than most that Rifftrax and MST have tackled, filmed and released around 1990, which sees a California Raisins style claymation portraying germs "jiving" and "rapping" about the horrors of cleanliness. The stories they tell see children being lectured by inanimate objects around the house about how dirty they are before they are forced to clean up, killing all germs on their body.
It's one of those educational films that tries to make learning "cool" for kids, which was especially painful in that late-80's/early-90's way that adults tried to emulate the way they thought children talked or responded to. Picture those lectures by people who walk into a room that start out "Hey man, I know what's cool!" ::turns hat around and sits in a chair backwards:: "And I need to talk to you about somethin' totally lame that thinks it's cool, know what I'm sayin'?" Most of the time it was about drugs, while this one is about washing your hands, which feels like too much effort for that lesson.
80's kids like me might get a bit of a cheap thrill in the animation style, which was fairly popular back in the day. The designs of these creatures is horrid, but then again they're supposed to be. And we might get a laugh out of remembering lame videos like this we've sat through back in our day.
Mike, Kevin, and Bill are here to laugh with us too, and for the most part this short is a slam dunk. The short gives them plenty of strange, surreal images to react to, while the jive talk gets imitated and mocked to great effect. If there is a fault with this short it's not a fault of the riff itself, but rather the short, which gets heavily repetitive about halfway through. But this one had me throwing my head back and laughing quite a bit.
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