TIMECOP Slide designs!

Hey there, Traxians! Erik here.

The next RiffTrax Live show, TIMECOP, is currently in pre-production - these things take a surprising amount of time and effort to make, and we have already been working in some capacity on many of the details since as early as February.

In that vein, of the first (and most loved) things we usually put together are the pre-show slides; for that reason, these feel like a true "kick-off" for the live show pre-production process in every sense of the word - and even MORE so this year, given that the star of the movie is well known for his kicking prowess.

Our graphic designer Jason Martin has developed a visual language for these, starting with well-known scenes and elements from the movie subject and illustrating them as silhouettes suitable for backgrounds on which our joke trivia will be placed. Here's a fancy animated GIF to give you a better feel for how it looks in the theater:

The writers always begin the process by coming up with the topics first, for obvious reasons, as a way of keeping things fresh from show to show. This time around, they came up with "Rules for Timecoppin'" — which feels thematically on point, since time travel rules are something these movies always make a big fuss about to the audience. They say, "Whatever you do, do NOT break the rules of time travel! Something crazy and/or terrible will happen!" and then, wouldn't you know it, they go and break the rules they explicitly said not to! (Minor spoiler for Timecop, I guess, but is it really all that surprising that they'd rely on this trope?)

After the wriffers have decided on the topics, they send them to Jason who finds imagery in the film that may or may not relate to the topic. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't - really, it's about creating a backdrop that's fun and relates to the movie, and that also isn't distracting or otherwise makes the text hard to read.

Fun fact: I actually did issue one minor change - the "Unpopular Fan Theories" image you will see in theaters will be altered slightly: there's a single white highlight on the TEC vehicle that, when it falls in between two words, would interrupt the "fluency" or reading flow of the sentence, making it harder to read. See, we take even these smallest of details very seriously!

Anyhoo, I always love seeing the fresh batch of jokes for these recurring topics. Which ones are your favorites?

Back with more soon. Have a great weekend!

Yours in breaking the rules of time travel,

Erik