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Monday, January 17, 2022

Play in the Snow (RiffTrax Shorts)


RiffTrax Year:  2022
Riffers:  Bridget Nelson, Mary Jo Pehl

This short film shows all the fun things you children can do when it snows, which would be somewhat cruel if you showed it to kids in Florida.  On this particular snow day we see a group of kids build snow men, make patterns in the snow to play games, and even go skiing on mild hills, as well as the joys of traversing up hills in your skis so other children will make fun of you for walking funny.

There is the act of watching children play in the snow and then there is the act of playing in the snow yourself.  I think I'll get little resistance when I say the latter is preferable to the former.  Is this the next best thing?  I guess.  If you're in the middle of summer heat wave and desperately need a snow fix it might be serviceable, though the idea of making this type of short for kids and subjecting them to outside activities while showing this film in a classroom or whathaveyou would just make them antsy to not be watching this and get into a snowball fight instead.

"This big snowplow is hard at work."
"Waking everyone up at 6 AM."

This is a fairly slight effort by Bridget and Mary Jo, who spend most of it just coming up with amusing sentence continuations for the narrator like the one above.  It's mostly good for a few lols, and a few safe targets are shot at as well (it was easy to see from the get go that a Frozen "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" riff was going to happen and the ladies don't disappoint).  There are a few spots where the laugh that comes is bigger than anticipated, and there is even a point where Bridget's riff about "Flightless birds" makes Mary Jo laugh for about a half a minute (and it made me laugh pretty hard too).  It's a fairly good short for the library, though there is not much it does to keep from being overshadowed by bigger titles.

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