RiffTrax Bringing Plan 9 to Theaters on August 20

rifftrax-live RiffTrax was already a heck of a lot of fun, and now they’re taking their awesomeness to a whole new level. RiffTrax, for those who don’t know, are MP3s to play in sync with movies, done by Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett, formerly of Mystery Science Theater 3000, in the same style as the MST3K movie commentaries. They also have short downloadable videos including both the audio track and the video they’re making fun of.

If you haven’t checked out RiffTrax yet, you should, since each one is fairly inexpensive. They have some terrific ones, including ones with awesome guest stars like Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm. But on August 20, they’re taking a radical step, and doing a show that will be broadcast live to movie theaters around the U.S. (though it will be tape-delayed three hours in Pacific Time).

For this show, they will be riffing on a new short, but primarily on a color version (yes, really) of the classic so-bad-it’s-funny Ed Wood movie Plan 9 From Outer Space. They will have several guests for the event, including Veronica Belmont of Tekzilla and — a GeekDad favorite — the aforementioned Jonathan Coulton. If you’ve seen Plan 9 before, you can just imagine how much fun these guys will have with it; if you haven’t seen it, I can’t think of a better way for you to be introduced to it (and everyone should see it at least once in his life). They did a warm-up for the nationwide event in San Diego during Comic-Con, so they should be ready to bring down the house.

As for whether the event will be kid-safe, it’s not completely clear, but I would think so. I haven’t heard nearly every one of the RiffTrax so far, so I can’t vouch for them all. The ones I’ve heard are hilariously obnoxious, but only a few have explicit content, and the ones that do are always marked. Of course, I would imagine that most of the jokes will go over the head of many kids, so I would probably avoid bringing ones younger than 11 or 12 to it, myself. Also to keep in mind would be that, for those in Eastern and Pacific time zones, the event begins at 8pm.

Details can be found here, as well as a utility to search for participating theaters near you. I’m almost laughing just thinking about it!