DVD Riffs
On October 19, 2006, it was announced that The Film Crew would be providing commentary tracks for a series of B-movies beginning in July 2007 through Shout! Factory. To promote their announcement, the Crew offered a poll on their website asking viewers to sample clips of each film and choose which they would prefer to see released first out of the four titles announced.
The four titles, in order of votes received (and, as a result, their release order), are Hollywood After Dark, starring Rue McClanahan (of The Golden Girls fame), Killers from Space, starring Peter Graves, The Wild Women of Wongo, The Giant of Marathon, starring Steve Reeves.
The episodes were produced in 2005 in association with Rhino Entertainment, which was to distribute the episodes on DVD. However, Rhino was approached by Jim Mallon of Best Brains, who threatened to pull future releases of MST3K from Rhino's distribution unless they passed on the series (Mallon claiming that it was "too similar to MST3K" and that Rhino had to choose either MST3K or Film Crew). Rhino then ended its relationship with The Film Crew. It wasn't until 2007 that arrangements were made with Shout! Factory to release the material (requiring some "looping" of lines from the original scripts – specifically, "Bob Honcho" was originally named "Bob Rhino," and this had to be changed due to Rhino no longer being the distributor).
Releases were in NTSC format but have no region encoding. Each released episode contains at least one "extra" ("Ode to Lunch" in Hollywood After Dark and "Did You Know..." in Killers from Space).
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