Farm Family in Autumn (Rifftrax Shorts)

Rifftrax Year:  2017
Riffers:  Bridget Nelson, Mary Jo Pehl

The second film in the wildly popular Farm Family series, where a video crew apparently planted themselves on some farm somewhere in Wisconsin and spied on a family doing farm and family stuff.  Because everyone wants to see that.  This episode in the Farm Family saga concentrates on the children, including narrator Steve, his brother Dale, and sister Pam, as they go through the fall season on their farm, and all the hard work that comes with it.  They also start up school and carve pumpkins for Halloween, all in addition to all the exciting and fun chores they have to do throughout the day.

Such thrilling cinema.  I can't catch my breath.

Farm Family is an educational series that tries to teach children about the rewards of hard work, though it really just makes them daydream about video games.  Autumn, in general, is such a dreary season that it's hard to get too enthused about anything this short is showing us.  It's a series of tiresome images in a scenery of dying grass and plants, and it makes me very sleepy.  And the fact that it's narrated by a child that sounds like he was just given a line card and a microphone and told to "Read!" doesn't help matters.  Farm Family in Autumn is a house that I don't want to visit, really.

Bridget and Mary Jo comment upon this short with that city slicker vinegar of theirs, mocking the hard work on display with a devilishly smug attitude, with snide comments of not having time for play because "The leaves need to be raked, and that's in your spare time!"  They have some fun with the family interaction, which falls so dull that the short tries to pass off grandpa seeing a deer as "exciting," leaving Bridget to observe "Is this grandpa nuts?  It's Wisconsin!  The school bus hits one at least once a day!"  There is also a fun sequence of the kids making Jack O' Lanterns that underlines the theme of disconnect between city folk and the humble farmer, but it's a funny disconnect that's worth listening to.  After all, us non-farmers are very proud of the fact that we're soft, have no callouses, don't work from dawn till dusk, and get fatter and fatter.

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