Well, I wanted to start this thread for a few reasons, mostly because I am in a bit of a conundrum myself.
I liked the way my first iRiff came out, but as, I will admit, it was experimental in a lot of ways, I want to make sure my next one is even better. And so I come to the hard part: cutting everything down.
Looking around, I saw that, according to the Rifftrax average, there should be about 5-8 riffs per minute. I can understand that, but going through and making a script one of my biggest fears is dead time, and there are a heck of a lot of pauses in dialogue and dead space in Mortal Kombat that I just want filled.
Trouble is, maybe TOO filled...I checked my script and found in the first 8 minutes I had 111 riffs. That's about 14-15 per minute. Yikes. I know I need to weed that down, since that's just too much (and probably not all of them are that good), but a lot of the ones in the early part are ones I really, really like. I know they'll have to go, though, and that's hard to do.
I also know that Harass Bastards had already done this one, and I wanted to make sure that my version doesn't overlap with theirs (I DID write mine first, and then listen to theirs; I swear on this book of carpet samples that I did not rip off anything, and I mean that, because I know they could kill me). I was happy and sad to see some jokes the same; happy because that meant at least somebody noticed the same things I did, but sad because I would have to either change or completely cut my version.
So, what this thread is for, is for advice on where to really begin cutting, and for listing a few jokes that didn't make the final cut, but yet you still liked anyway. And reason, if possible.
The first few I've got, cut because they overlapped by too much:
"Pies iesu domine, etc." (Monks walking into throne room, like the Monty Python guys)
"Yes, that hurt baby very much." (Sonya gets kicked in stomach, Kano asks, "Did it hurt, baby?")
"Chairman Mao beautifies China!" (Shot of Outworld all destroyed; couldn't keep because HB's joke was far superior)
"Kinda want that cake, it looks good." (Shot of Kano eating at table)