When Should Grown-Ups Stop Fights? (Rifftrax Shorts)

Rifftrax Year:  2013

Riffers:  Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett

It's a fact of life that children fight.  It is important to know which fights may actually be harmful and what kind of adult response is demanded of them to .  Unless the children are the Jets and the Sharks.  Then just let them rumble.

This short doesn't provide any answers but is actually a discussion piece for teachers on how to work around playground behavior.  We are given four scenarios:  a fight over a tricycle, a disagreement on physics, random outbursts from a single source, and sand being tossed around.  The short then asks us to review and discuss each scenario with our fellow teachers.

Except I'm not a teacher.  So...

Yet this short might be interesting to parents as well.  As someone who has lived with children ages 2-4, a lot of what is covered in this short is true to crash course that is dealing with children.  These scenarios and potential discussion help us prepare for occasions like this, which I assure you WILL happen.

This short has a monotonous narrator who only intermittently discusses what's going on onscreen.  This allows Mike, Kevin, and Bill to get plenty of jokes in at this short's expense.  Childish fighting and temper tantrums allow for some fun and creative riffs over what could cause such rifts, with my favorite probably going to the children getting into a sandfight while playing boat, which our riffers ponder probably started because they were fighting over "who gets to play Ginger and who gets to play Mary Anne."

There is a point in which we are forced to sit through the same footage twice in a row in order to study it more closely, which gives them the opportunity to offer new riffs for the same scenes.  This might be a point of struggle, but our trio seems game for it.  If nothing else it might give them an opportunity to bring about lines they couldn't fit in earlier that they might have had to cut.  The second round isn't as strong as the first, but this short is pretty funny over all, making it an easy recommend.

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