Ms. Consumer is a brand new free riff. You can keep track of our newest riffs and previews by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

And don't forget - we're still raising money on Kickstarter for Season 2 of the Kids on the Street!

Backers of our Kickstarter project have been able to see Mister A since Sunday, and this weekend they'll get to meet Ms. Consumer before anybody else gets the chance! Stop by, take a look at our incentives, and pledge to back the Kids on the Street for Season 2!

Mister A is a character from that category of safety films that threw a character into dangerous situations, knowing that he had all of the situation-awareness and self-preservation skills of a Disney lemming on his fifth martini.

One of the great things about doing movie humor is all of the wonderful life advice you can find squirreled away in these classics. Advice like, "When traveling abroad, carry only five one-pound bills in cash or civilization as we know it will end," and the all-important "don't eat breakfast in the middle of the street."

Care to support independent movie humor? Stop by our Kickstarter, where as little as a single dollar will help us out.

Second, we've released the penultimate episode of Season 1, The Wild Ride. Starring Jack Nicholson, this classic juvenile delinquent flick features Jack Nicholson shirtless, Jack Nicholson turning on the smarmy charm, and Jack Nicholson in some of the most boring racing action ever filmed. It's available now as a video download at the iRiffs store, and it's great fun for everyone.

And, finally, what's up with our ballyhooed URL change? Well, GoDaddy hasn't exactly been swift to let go of domain registrations. We're still waiting on the domain change to finalize, at which point you'll need to update your bookmarks. So if the Kids on the Street page suddenly disappears, remember -- we're moving to bringbackmidnightmovies.com

Meet Alpha Video.  You might have met them already without knowing it. If you've ever bought a $5 DVD of an old b-movie with wildly-colored cover art, then that was probably Alpha.

Like many purveyors of the public domain, Alpha faced a problem. If you put out a clear, brilliant copy of a public domain film on DVD, you're pretty much inviting every fly-by-night distributor to use your DVD as a master for their own products.

After all, the movie is in the public domain, and DVDs are pretty much pristine digital copies just waiting to be duplicated. All it takes is some ripping software, graphics software to make your own DVD label, and a few $5 DVDs to start your own lucrative movie distribution company.

Alpha Video gets around this easily. They don't sell public domain movies. Instead, they sell "special editions." These special editions feature new sound effects, sometimes new music, and have often been edited to put scenes into a different order than they were before. All of this allows Alpha Video to copyright the movie as a new production.

Which is all in their legal rights, and helps protect their DVDs from becoming another company's cheap master. In essence, they're doing what the Kids on the Street do when they use a public domain film, as well -- they're making a derivative work.

Which brings us to "The Wild Ride" and "The Violent Years." Back in October, the Kids on the Street got together and decided to riff on these two classic juvenile delinquent films. We obtained an inexpensive master from a public domain distributor, Glen got to work on the script, and it wasn't long before we were recording.

It was in clean-up on "The Wild Ride" that Elizabeth noticed something - in the middle of a dialogue scene, for apparently no reason at all, there was the sound of a dog barking.

Glen recognized it immediately from recording his riff of "Time Out for Ginger." The bark makes an appearance in quite a few Alpha Video special editions.

A quick check revealed that yes, in fact, Alpha Video did have a special edition of "The Wild Ride," it did have a valid copyright, and the distributor they had gotten the master from had copied that same version of the movie, merely cutting the movie right before Alpha Video's copyright notice showed up at the end of the credits. Not only that, but the same thing was true of their master for "The Violent Years."

It always pays to do your due diligence, kiddies.

Both movies were postponed until we could track down a copy of the movies coming from a reputable dealer. We found such a dealer (Festival Films FTW), got our masters, and now we're working on getting them ready for sale. There's just one more issue.

As we mentioned before, Alpha Video re-edits the movies they release. This means that our recording is all out of order for the clean copy we've obtained.

So Glen is at work, shifting back and forth between a scratch copy of our original riff and the editing files for a brand new edit. It's a longer process than usual, but we're sure that both will see release before the new year.

But could it be that Craig Ferguson's show is even geekier than you previously thought possible? Can the only late-night host to openly admit to being a Harry Potter fan possibly get any more geek cred? Is it even possible to raise the geekfactor on a show where the host actually keeps a TARDIS on his desk and practically foamed at the mouth when the BBC lent him a Dalek?

You bet your sweet bippy it's possible. Because all it takes is a brief look at the facts to discern that when you're watching "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson," you're not watching another Jay Leno/David Letterman/I-Wish-I-Was-Johnny-Carson clone!

No, you're watching the continuation of Mystery Science Theater, that much-beloved cow-town puppet show that hit the big time on cable by mercilessly mocking moth-eaten movies.

In the "So crazy the theory's just gotta be true" category, we present to you this. Joel rockets away from the Satellite of Love in an escape pod (conveniently disguised as a crate of hamdingers). Later, his replacement -- Mike -- narrowly escapes from the SoL with his robot friends as it hurtles on a "deadly trajectory" toward Earth.

Meanwhile, the SoL tunnels into the Earth's crust, becoming a basement where a hapless Scottish comedian is entrapped by a tight-fisted network.

What? You need more evidence? Okay....

What do you think, sirs?

We know it can be rough finding a good Christmas movie. There's out there that can crush the holiday spirit out of you like a sprig of mistletoe wrapped around a sledgehammer. So the Kids on the Street Film put together a curated list.

Now, this is a list of "Great" movies, not "Best" movies. For one thing, we want to leave some room for us to do another six movies next year, and if we declared these the absolute best, there wouldn't be much point in returning to the same subject later, would there? That said, we welcome your suggestions for next year's list in our comments!

There are so many different movies that could be considered Christmas classics, but anybody can snap up It's a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street. Choosing a version of A Christmas Carol? That's wading into the deep end of the pool. We're talking about a story where the main character has been portrayed by Albert Finney, Patrick Stewart, Jim Carrey, Tim Curry, and Sir Seymour Hicks (twice) -- and that's not even a quarter of the list.

Yes, Mr. Dickens' novel has been very, very good to the holiday season, and in particular to theater companies and film producers. It might have something to do with that whole "in the public domain" thing.

In 1951's A Christmas Carol, however, you'll see a lot more of the story than you're used to seeing adapted. The Cratchits may seem like a smaller part of the movie than usual, but it means there's more time to devote to scenes that have rarely made it into a film adaptation since. Don't be fooled by the budget price tag -- the blu-ray of this 1951 Christmas movie looks phenomenal.

Christmas movies have spawned some of the worst subgenres. There's the "Somebody has to replace Santa Claus" movie, the "Only one person can save Christmas now" movie, and the increasingly-popular "Santa Claus has a mercenary, business-like child" movie.

Scrooged is from the pretty-lousy subgenre of Dickens rewrites, and -- botched blu-ray cover art aside -- it remains a true modern classic.

Wait. 1988? This movie is over 20 years old? Maybe we're not allowed to call it a "modern" classic, then....

Nah, we'll call it a modern classic, since failure to do so would make some of the Kids feel very, very old.

What really sets this Christmas movie apart is that it clings to the spirit of A Christmas Carol without the slavish devotion to the text that kills so many other rewrites. It's all about digging deep to find what's important about the original story -- and being damned funny in the process.

Also, it opens with Lee Majors rescuing Santa from terrorists. How can you beat that?

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas is one of the best movies out there about finding the Christmas spirit. It's funny, heartwarming, and filled with toe-tapping tunes about the holidays.

It's also not a movie about Christmas.

Yeah, I said it. One of the best Christmas movies from the 1990's is actually not a Christmas movie. Maybe a lot of it is focused on Christmas, and there's a specific jolly fat man in a red suit who plays an important role, but this is a Halloween movie through and through, bouncing giddily from demented to twisted.

More than that, we see the folly of Christmas turned into Halloween -- not through some horrible plot to destroy the holiday, but by the hands of people who just don't know any better. It's not just a movie about the Christmas spirit, it's a movie about the Halloween spirit and how the two differ from each other, making it not just a movie about the importance of keeping Christmas as Christmas, but also of keeping Halloween as Halloween.

Hell to the yeah the Muppets get their own subgenre of Christmas movies. Once we include the made-for-TV Muppet Christmas movies, Henson's fine felt fellows would completely overrun this list. Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas has to qualify as a classic, both The Muppets' Christmas Carol and It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie are great movies from lousy subgenres (Dickens rewrites and It's a Wonderful Life remakes, respectively) -- the Muppets are just that good.

A Muppet Family Christmas is a made-for-tv special that stands out from such an impressive body of work by tying together the entire world of Jim Henson. It's not just the Muppets who are present in this holiday celebration, but the Fraggles and the gang from Sesame Street, too. It manages to be touching, pleasant, and sweet without ever being maudlin or treacly, and while keeping all of the sharp humor and slapstick the Muppets are known for.

And you want to know something criminal? It's not in print! And the out-of-print DVDs will cost you a princely (eep!) $69.99! Not only that, but it's likely not to come back into print any time soon, considering that the Muppets, the Fraggles, and Sesame Street are all completely separate entities owned by completely separate companies. So rare DVD scalpers are your only (legal) option until somebody works out a deal and gets this baby back on shelves.

Bill Murray makes a second appearance in the Christmas A-Go-Go list, this time as Dr. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters II. A movie that climaxes at New Years, which means that at least part of it takes place during Christmas. A fact illustrated by a split-second shot of the Ghostbusters topped with dapper Santa caps.

It's filled with supernatural suspense and slapstick, and shows New York City overrun by the dead-eyed grim specters of lost humanity. And then the ghosts start arriving. Ha! I kid. Kinda.

Sure, the movie isn't as good as the first Ghostbusters. But then, few movies are.

And holy crap is it becoming obvious we're kids of the 80's.

Well, if we're kids of the 80's, we might as well embrace it.

Every now and then, the holiday season just gets to be just a little bit much. It's not that you're sick of the spirit, so much as you're sick of the endless productions of A Christmas Carol, the parade of Santa replacements and cloying candy cane-covered claptrap. You just want to step back for a moment and enjoy something that isn't quite so red-and-green. But you still want that warm glow of the holidays.

That's why we've picked The Princess Bride. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Glen and Elizabeth happen to think of it as possibly the best movie ever, but man -- the only way this movie could have more of the holiday spirit is if it were actually a Christmas movie. It's romantic, infused with family togetherness, and filled with adventure.

And it features the single greatest action comedy sequence of all time.

There are lots of ways you can help, of course, up to and including buying some equipment on our Amazon wishlist. But probably the most important (and cheapest!) way you can help is simply by talking about us.

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And finally, word of mouth does wonders. If you talk about our movie humor, more people will stop by to check it out and see what it's all about.