Rifftrax Year: 2008
Riffers: Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett
Drugs Are Like That has two children playing with Legos, and while whistling and humming they grumble little details about drugs without any context. Honestly, if these kids are casually contemplating drugs while playing with toys, I'd consider this a warning sign, but they have a narrator to help toss out analogies to remind them that drugs are as bad as screaming toddlers, jumping over cracks in the street, getting cookies, and spinning around on a swing before playing baseball for some reason.
While I'm not 100% up to date on how our school system currently tries to educate on drugs, I for the most part hope they're more informative about it today than they were when I was a kid. Granted, I'm not sure if my little brain could have processed what drugs were and what they did, but just having people walk into my school every other day and say "Say NO to drugs!" and then leave always left me a little confused due to subject ignorance. In retrospect, it does feel like that ignorance was something of a power play move to hammer in that this thing you know nothing about is a BAD THING, and while I can see how the end justifies the means it's also a scenario that led to me getting angry at my parents for going to a "drug store" for prescription medication and my discomfort in said store which made me feel as if I were some sort of criminal. Sometimes clarification can do wonders.
Drugs Are Like That at the very least tries to inform on the way drugs are habit forming, which I can appreciate personally, but it also scoots around the subject haphazardly. It throws analogies at us once again without telling us what drugs are, and while I can see the points the short is trying to make as a (barely) more educated adult, as a child these things would have flown well over my head because I had nothing to compare them to. Drugs are habit forming is the moral of the story, but the way my brain would have processed these messages would be that if I took drugs I'd cry like a baby, skip around like an idiot, eat cookies, and go swimming. I've long since learned that I don't need drugs to make an ass out of myself.
I understand most of these analogies, but they can reach pretty hard at times. I recognize that the short has good intentions, but it comes off a little strange and stumbles when it tries to provide its point because it never directly states it. Drugs are habit forming and can destroy your life if you let them, this is true, but I learned that through other means and not films like this. In fact in comparing drugs to things like a grown adult playing "Don't Step on a Crack" it would be very easy for a child to misinterpret as "Drugs are goofy, funny things!"
Speaking of funny things, I pretty much knew this was going to be a classic short when it opened with this exchange as we hear the two mumbling children while the camera is focused on the interior of a closet...
"Movie? Are you in the middle of something?"
"We could come back!"
"Sit down, you two! If I have to sit through this, so do you!"
Mike, Kevin, and Bill do their best to follow the logic of the short, but mostly come up a little bamboozled. They take the analogies at their face value and play with the validity of them, and their commentary is hilarious. But at the same time they have fun comparing the two scenarios, as the short shows us a baby who loses his pacifier and starts crying, while Bill overdubs the child with drug withdrawal symptoms.
The riffing also targets our two lead children, who mumble obnoxiously while the camera zooms in on their hands or their eyeballs, who constantly go "Huh?" "What?" "What's that?" to every other sentence. They find the meandering nature of these segments frustrating and infuriating as they often at times get flat out angry at the duo or mock their strange digressions. It's pretty hilarious.
This is one of Rifftrax's best. You know what drugs are like? This short. I gotta have more, man! I got the shakes!
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