I probably could have used this for the T entry but I didn't so I decided to make this a bonus feature.
According to Wikipedia (so it must be true!) someone at the National Geographic channel was a fan of Rifftrax and wanted them to do some riffs of Nat Geo shows. So they did three episodes where they did riffs on segments of Nat Geo shows. These were popular enough that they did another three episodes.
Pluto TV often shows all 6 in a marathon and while at first it was pretty neat, it got old fairly quick. For some reason I can watch Birdemic or ROTOR or Rollergator a thousand times but after three times I was bored with these. Maybe because they always show them all at once so it's a six-hour block which gets monotonous. Then they started to rerun it so it was 12 hours, from 7pm-7am. And what really drove me bonkers was they would sometimes do it 3 or 4 times a week! Why not just set up a whole separate channel for the fucking things then? Yeesh. BTW, that is how you run something into the ground very quickly.
Anyway, episode 1 is "Killer Shrimp N Friends." It's a bunch of Nat Geo animal segments. The titular segment is about a shrimp that can amp up to launch itself in a rocket punch to kill prey. There are other segments on badass animals like Tasmanian devils that will actually live INSIDE an animal once they've killed it until they consume the whole carcass. Another was on this bird called the cassowary that might look sort of like an ostrich but it has these nasty Velociraptor claws on its feet. A hot redheaded scientist warns people to "respect the cassowary" and while the riffers mock her, just last year I heard of someone who got close to a cassowary and died. So yeah, respect the fucking cassowary!
Episode 2 is "Demon Bat." It's the first taken from this dumb show called Man v Monster. This stupid British guy named Richard Terry who's a self-described cameraman, not a scientist, goes in search of a killer demon bat in Mexico. He talks to a bunch of people and navigates around a flood to go to an old temple and then goes into a cave. Guess what the "demon bat" turns out to be? A common vampire bat. The over-the-top "heroics" of Terry make this ripe for riffing.
Episode 3 is "A Guy and a Goose." The title segment is about this old guy in LA who befriends a goose called Maria in a park. The goose would follow him around and sometimes fly after him on his scooter. What a lovely story...except we soon see the goose follows EVERYONE around, including the band OK Go when they shot a video in the park. And to top it off "Maria" is actually a male! So this guy's relationship with the goose is about as real as any relationship on the Internet. There's another segment from some show about Florida guys who wrangle alligators and raccoons. They aren't too bright, as you might imagine. The final segment is about these guys who train corpse-sniffing dogs. They try to sell an army contractor on a Cocker Spaniel called Bullwinkle to find exploded body parts (gross!) but the guy wants a different breed of dog called a Malinois so they have to do a bunch of tests to prove the dog can do it. Fascinating.
Episode 4 is "Man v Monster." It's another Richard Terry episode. This time he's in Thailand looking for a river monster. The monster has been biting people in the river. First he thinks it might be a snake so he goes crawling around a cave miles from the river. Then he goes underwater in the "thick brown soup" of the river looking for snakes. Since he can't find a killer snake he decides it must be a catfish. Ironic because this whole show is like one big episode of Catfish on MTV only instead of a guy or ugly woman pretending to be a hot chick it's an ordinary animal pretending to be a monster. The catfish don't fit the bill so eventually Terry "discovers" that the culprit is a freshwater stingray. Which a local zoologist knows all about so maybe he should have just gone to her first.
Episode 5 is "Animals Behaving Badly." It's about, wait for it, animals behaving badly. Like a deer that humps a girl in Pennsylvania. And a gorilla that hurls a raccoon that wandered into their zoo enclosure--the raccoon survived. And an orangutan that smokes somewhere in Asia. There's also a nasty segment about how rat mamas will eat their young. Not all of them, just the weakest or something. Ick. I usually skip this episode for that reason.
The last episode is "Brazilian Bigfoot." This final installment features our hero Richard Terry in Brazil looking for another "monster." And guess what? Yeah, he doesn't find one. Only in this case he doesn't find anything at all, not even a common animal that could be at fault. Like the other two episodes he goes through his schtick of asking people their stories and then doing a bunch of stupid stunts like crossing a gorge on a narrow log and going into another cave and climbing up a tree to spend a night. In the end he thinks the animal might be a giant land sloth...which went extinct thousands of years ago. But it could totally still be alive! Given his track record, I'd doubt it.
These are pretty fun but they're not something I want to see all that often. Still, it might be fun if they riffed on more stuff like this like all those lame reality shows.
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