Lately, I've been thinking about why web "videos" like the musicvideo Hatten er din (turkish song "translated" into swedish) or All your base are belong to us (an absolutely grammatically incorrect translation from Japanese to English turned into an world-slogan) are so popular. I think that spoofs like Bondage Barbie or the Transgender Barbie (she/he is a darling) or the Lego Porn site (this is adults only, seriously!) belong to same genre of politically incorrect, ironic, corny (and more or less funny) genre or brand parodies - and there's is definitely also a question of "skill" involved here (displaying the photo- and computer manipulative skills of the makers) - which is accentuated by "the making of" or "the story of" texts that seem to accompagny quite a few of them. Perhaps I like them because they are for free - they are made "for fun", not to make money...Or maybe I like them because I'm a bit of a nerd and get most of the references or embrace the irreverence?!? Anyway, they seem to be works that generally appeal to people my age, mostly working and living on the net - half the fun gotten from these phenomena stems from sharing them with other colleagues in the field and then sharing the jokes together. So part of the popularity is also about enforcing community or building it - or trying to become part of it by signaling "I've seen it too...". Which I'm hereby guilty of, too :)
And there are more film for the i-net people: a few days ago, a guy told me about 405, the movie - which is a movie made mainly for the i-net, also involving a lot of image manipulation and barely one shot on location (it's about a jet that lands on a car that is close to driving into an old lady who is also driving a car. That's it. And it's fun!) - and there on the ifilm site, I found a link to the online film awards: apart from 405, George Lucas in Love (a must-see,if you're a Star War fan) and Killer Bean 2 (M&M meets the Matrix) got most of the awards. I.e. a few film get them all, just like the real Oscars, but here I suspect it's also got something to do with the lack of films to choose from in the first place ?!? Hope there are more of them coming up, though!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 14:05