There comes a point in all Mystery Science Theater 3000 conversations, after everyone has weighed in on their favorite episodes, that the question becomes: Are you a Joel fan or Mike J. Nelson fan?

In a post-MST3K era, though, most fans will do whatever they can to get just a little taste of the show that made bad movies more fun than they had any right to be. While we got to see Joel Hodgson and Cinematic Titanic at the Ann Arbor Summer Festival this past season, Thursday night Nelson and crew will bring RiffTrax Live to movie theaters across the nation. Rave Motion Pictures and Quality 16 will be showing the feature at 8 p.m.

RiffTrax is like MST3K in that Nelson, Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo) and Bill Corbett (Crow T. Robot) offer hilarious commentary to whatever movie is being screened. However, the biggest difference (besides the missing silhouette) is that RiffTrax focuses on modern movies. Some are sold as separate mp3 files that can be synched to films such as "The Hunger Games."

Nelson and company will skewer the cult favorite "Birdemic," a movie described on the RiffTrax site as "the story of a software salesman who founds his own solar energy company after cashing in his stock options. Where it differs from the countless other Hollywood tales of software salesmen who found their own solar energy companies after cashing in stock options is that occasionally birds attack and kill people."

See a preview here.

But the question remains: Mike or Joel? Who is your favorite?