Featured Image Credit to Obviously Cloë’s Blog
First coming to widespread attention in 2009 with a 70-minute long review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which was praised for being a well-informed and funny takedown of the controversial (read: godawful) movie. Through word-of-mouth this one video put Red Letter Media on the radar for (literally) millions of viewers, catapulting them into the internet’s consciousness. Starting in the mid-2000s making low-budget independent films, creators Mike Stoklasa and Jay Bauman later moved on to focusing on a more review-oriented style, featuring most notably the Mr Plinkett character. Covering similar ground to Channel Awesome in terms of nerdy pop-culture commentary, Red Letter are known for putting a relatively high budget into their videos, with heavy use of sets. However, this focus on quality appearance hasn’t seemed to launch Red Letter above their prolific Channel Awesome rivals, being ranked in Alexa at 16,053 in the States, compared with CA’s rank of 2,150.
Stoklasa’s drawling, disgusting -old-man creation, Mr Plinkett, whose frequently acerbic reviews have gained millions of views on YouTube, is part character comedy, and part serious film critic. His slurred speech guides viewers through a series of astute observations about film making, with occasional references to murdering his wife and Pizza Rolls, a surprisingly successful formula among online film nerds.
Similarly to the Channel Awesome universe, much of Red Letter’s output is centred around tongue-in-cheek appraisals of nerdy film franchises, most notably the Star Trek and Star Wars movies, as well as original films. Half in The Bag, where Stoklasa and Bauman appear on camera and (largely) out of character, allows a more free-form general discussion of the merits of films, with short sketches at the beginning and end of the videos. These reviews tend to attract views in the 10s of thousands, rather than the millions of the Mr Plinkett reviews, but based around a more relaxed, less character-comedy driven angle, they provide analyses which are just as insightful, and a little more personable. As well as these, Red Letter have put together a number of (intentionally) cheesy feature-length films, attempting to capture the kitschy joy of the b-movie format. As mentioned here before Red Letter’s pattern over the last year or so has not been to try and expand their audience, but to consolidate their position as nerdy pop-culture pundits, whether or not this will hamper or help them is a matter for the future, but with very little change to their shtick since they began, it’s hard to see them evolving out of this niche.
Having produced 5 feature films available for viewing on their website as well as a smattering of shorts, and a good helping of in-depth reviews, Red Letter Media are a self-confident, relatively successful and highly competent independent production company. Pitching their shows to the passionately nerdy and pop culture geeks, Red Letter have also been careful not to limit their audiences, being careful to make everything they film easy to find on both YouTube and Blip. Still making Mr Plinkett and Half in the Bag videos, accompanied by their new series Best of the Worst, Red Letter are seemingly immovable from their goal of providing high-quality film reviews (no grainy web-cam footage here), with added comedy. However with a new trailer for a sci-fi comedy film called “Space Cop” out, they are, if not steaming into a bright new future, keeping a steady pace. Their feature films are, unfortunately not free to watch online. However, if you are interested in making funny, topical videos that niche audiences will go mad for, you could do a lot worse than look at what Red Letter have been doing.