RiffTrax YouTube Channel Abruptly Shuttered in Another Legendary Case of Copyright ID Incompetency
They’re back now, but it was still a whole ordeal worth chronicling
August has taken quite a turn for RiffTrax, the movie riffing troupe composed of Mystery Science Theater 3000 alumni Michael J. Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy. Everything was going great, having had their crowdfunded live riff of Point Break shown to over 700 movie theaters nationwide on August 8 with an encore on August 13. Suddenly, just a few days later, Saturday afternoon August 17, the company’s YouTube channel was gone.
They announced such posting “This is normal, good, and FUN TeamYouTube - what the heck???????” to their socials with the above screenshot asking fans to share while being kind enough to whoever runs the Twitter account. By Monday morning, they had gotten no response, posting a “Don’t Make Me Tap the Sign” meme screaming “GOOD MORNING AND HAPPY MONDAY” and “THE RIFFTRAX CHANNEL IS STILL BANNED”. By the early evening, more than 7 hours later, the crew finally got an explanation, and boy was it a doozy.
They posted “An update regarding RiffTrax on YouTube 💔”:
Hey there RiffTrax fans,
You may have noticed our YouTube channel has been shut down, and we wanted to let you all know what’s going on.
First things first, thank you all for your support over the last few days. We are so grateful to have such a caring and committed community of fans. Unfortunately we have received word from YouTube that they will not be reinstating the official RiffTrax channel at this time. For those curious, our channel was terminated because a different channel belonging to our former parent company, Legend Films, was struck with several erroneous copyright claims and shut down. RiffTrax has been a separately owned independent company since 2017, and the RiffTrax YouTube channel had no active copyright complaints. YouTube claims that if the Legend channel is reinstated we will get access to ours back, but we have not been able to speak with anyone at YouTube directly.
Over the last few years, our channel averaged 127K hours [or just about 14.5 years] viewed per month and grow our subscriber base to roughly 120,000 of you fine folks. It’s disappointing to see that go away, but we watch Joe Estevez films for a living, so we’re used to disappointment. For those of you who enjoyed watching RiffTrax on ad-supported video, you can still do so on Pluto TV, Twitch, Tubi, Samsung and Freevee. Direct support will always be the best method of keeping RiffTrax strong, so consider purchasing a riff directly from the site or signing up for our streaming service, RiffTrax Friends.
Thank you all so much.
It’s worth noting that in the interim, Shout! Studios, who they’re highly affiliated with thanks to their partial ownership of Mystery Science Theater 3000, kept RiffTrax’s YouTube presence afloat with livestreams on both the company and MST3K YouTube channels. After a typical robotic response from the TeamYouTube Twitter that just restated what they already knew, a decidedly more human one came after midnight Tuesday that read “we're looking into this again rn. keep you posted!!” Tuesday morning proved fortunately and unfortunately that getting loud on Twitter will always work, as the saga ended on a happy note.
Rifftrax tweeted “❤️And we're back. We have to believe the attention you folks brought to the issue helped this along. Thank you all so much! We're going to work on uploading some free riffs onto the channel to celebrate.” Now may this never happen again. The reinstatement celebration begins with the declared legendary riff of Lycan Colony at 6 PM.