"What Are letters For?" Available Now!

[Thrashalla]

http://www.rifftrax.com/shorts/what-are-letters

It's true that the educational shorts we dig up have been described as "less educational than an episode of The Jersey Shore" in a review from Bizarrely Contrived Comparison magazine. Shown in classrooms, they formed young minds, in the sense that stomping a jar of wet clay flat is still a way of "forming" it. But our new short What Are Letters For? takes the miseducation of America's youth to a bold new level, by teaching the alphabet yet LEAVING OUT certain letters. Which letters? That arrogant but rare Z, or perhaps the co-dependent Q that refuses to work without its U? No, they've instead plucked out all the vowels, those pesky soft letters that you almost never see in any words ever. Teamed up with random animals and objects, this short is easily your best bet for helping kids unlearn what scraps of language they might have learned! They'll be committed to an illiterate future with no job prospects beyond fry cook, or popular tween vampire novelist.

Having happily adopted the short's distate for vowels, Mk, Kvn, nd Bll sk y t jn thm fr Wht r Lttrs Fr?


http://www.rifftrax.com/shorts/what-are-letters

[Bob]

I think the sample has a broken link.

[Thrashalla]

Works fine here.

[Bob]

I get an error when I try and play it, but since I already own the short, if I am the only one with the error, meh.......

[PontifexPrimus]

Oh, how cute! They're actually trying to imply a relationship between with which letters words are written and how they are pronounced in English! And they even distinguish the two different "g" sounds, like in goat and giraffe. I laugh at that, though...

I also note that the short simply ignored the vowels, it's after all not like they are important letters - heck , I can't even remember when I last used one. Oh, wait.

It's a great short for riffing, though! I really enjoy these bizarre educational films that look like they've been assembled with whatever was at hand ("We only have a bunch of snippets of zoo animals and some kids playing left..." "Great, those words all start with letters, so that will be our next project!" "But we didn't get any for the vowels, they were too expensiv-" "Hell with it, we'll just leave them out. Go ahead and censor the 'ABC' song, and no one will notice!").

[mstgator]

Keep in mind that the full title of the short is "What Are Letters For? Initial Consonants" (if you can read quickly between the jump cuts), which would imply that this was part of a series... perhaps "Ending Consonants", "Consonants In The Middle Of Words", "Why Y?" and "Vowels Wherever" are still to come (I for one would love to hear the alphabet song with everything but the vowels censored).

[Rattrap007]

At least this short had something of a point to it.. Nice to see these again... Not much of a point, but at least a hint of one..

[Chimental]

At least this short had something of a point to it.. Nice to see these again... Not much of a point, but at least a hint of one..

And next Tuesday, a short on the magical world of hair.

[CJones]

Oh, how cute! They're actually trying to imply a relationship between with which letters words are written and how they are pronounced in English! And they even distinguish the two different "g" sounds, like in goat and giraffe. I laugh at that, though...

That reminds me of my favorite example of how English has an idiotic pronunciation system. Tough, Through and Though. Three completely different ways of pronouncing -ough, all of which begin with the letter T.

Still, it's less ridiculous than the Japanese writing system.