For a while now, I’ve had the idea of recording an audio commentary on a few favourite movies and making them available for download on the web. (Never mind which ones, though I’m sure you can guess.)

I was a little worried about the copyright implications: I thought it’d be okay, because I wouldn’t be reproducing any copyrighted material, just a recorded commentary that you could listen to as you watched a DVD; since you had to buy or rent the DVD in the first place, no harm no foul, I thought. But you never know. Anyway, I put it on the backburner; I had plenty of other things to worry about.

I was, it turns out, being myopic: it didn’t occur to me to check to see if other people were doing it. Because, it turns out, they are. There’s even a (Windows-only) player that syncs up an amateur audio commentary file with DVD playback.

But the big news is that Mike Nelson — of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame — is getting into it himself with a new service called RiffTrax. For $1.99 (I think that price will change), you can download his wiseacre commentary — so far, just of MST3K’s favourite movie, Roadhouse — and listen along. (Via Slashdot.)

That, to me, says that it’s not only okay to proceed with my little project, it’s probably even a good idea. Of course, mine will be free — I’m no Mike Nelson!

Fortuitously, Robert stopped by yesterday to lend me — unprompted and unasked-for — a studio-quality microphone: just the thing for this sort of project. The fates, I think, are telling me something.