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Beeker from The Muppets sings Ode to Joy.
Meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep meep, meep meep…
Gonzo, Camilla, and the rest of the chickens sing The Blue Danube Waltz.
Bock bock bock bock, bock bock, bock bock. Bock bock bock bock, bock bock, bock bock…
Somewhat related: Beaker sings Yellow by Coldplay.
Just Like the Movies is a short film by Michal Kosakowski that samples footage from movies that were made prior to September 2001 to recreate the events of 9/11. More info.
“It’s just like the movies!” was usually the first reaction of those watching the events of 9/11 in New York unfolding on their TV screens, no doubt recalling the endless number of catastrophes that Hollywood has proposed over the years. Now confronted with the reality of one such scenario — of unprecedented destructive and symbolic resonance — a feeling of deja vu arises while looking at these images.
Really well done. (thx, christopher)
Awesome real life Mario Kart by urban prankster Remi Gaillard. (via waxy)
In a compilation of 64 videos all shown on the same page, one man recreates Thriller — the beats, the howling, the singing — all by himself. This is pretty awesome, like Christian Marclay on speed. (thx, christopher)
For his Fabric of Brooklyn project, Tom Mason took photos of scenes in Brooklyn and combined them to depict super-bustling neighborhoods. Reminded me of this wonderful composite image of a busy airport by Ho-Yeol Ryu.
Filip Dujardin samples photos of buildings to create new photographs of improbable, impossible, or fantastical buildings.
These are great.
Update: More fictional architecture, this time by Philipp Schaerer. (via today and tomorrow)
A real life version of the Photoshop desktop. I love the little color swatches box. (thx, mark)
Two covers of Tom Waits’ Way Down in the Hole, the title song for The Wire: Tom Waits and Kronos Quartet and MIA and Blaqstarr. (thx, brandon)
From a review of A Christmas Tale, a movie by French director Arnaud Desplechin:
Artists who believe in the mystique of originality are often reluctant to reveal their inspirations. But the magpielike Mr. Desplechin revels in what the writer Jonathan Lethem has called the ecstasy of influence. “I didn’t invent anything,” he said. “Being a director is not such a grand thing. My job is just to show the audience what I love.”
The funny thing about the “ecstasy of influence” quote is that it was used by Lethem in a well-known Harpers article about plagiarism that was itself, in Lethem’s words, “stole, warped, and cobbled together” from a variety of other sources, which sources he lists at the conclusion to the article.
The phrase “the ecstasy of influence,” which embeds a rebuking play on Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” is lifted from spoken remarks by Professor Richard Dienst of Rutgers.
The ecstasy of influence would make a good name for this here blog. (via snarkmarket, another ecstatic influence fan)
Video of the Simpsons Halloween episode opening that spoofs the Mad Men intro.
Love Lockdown + Reckoner. Kanye mashed up with Radiohead, I pretty much gotta post it. (via delicious ghost)
I don’t know if this has been linked around everywhere or not, but this surprisingly realistic video of a dance-off between Barack Obama and John McCain tickled every last bone in my body. I watched it at least four times.
Here’s how to use the RJDJ iPhone app. You install the app, plug your headphones in, launch it, and press “Now Playing”. A song plays, the app starts to sample the sounds in your environment, and those sounds are remixed in real time and played back to you. It might be the coolest thing ever. Check out this video and this other video for a quick look at how RJDJ works. The first video shows some songs that use the iPhone’s accelerometer to modify and scratch the beat. (via waxy)
PS. It might only be the coolest app in theory…it’s also flaky as hell. It was working fine for me and then crapped out…there’s no music now, only sound sampling and it’s really quiet. Maybe you need to use the Apple headphones with the mic?
Truthful TV title cards. Heroes becomes No One Dies Ever, Mad Men is Drink Smoke Fuck, and Lost is Winging It.
Read in the right way, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style becomes an important reference for software development.
5.21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat
Young writersInexperienced programmers will be draw at every turn toward eccentricities in language. They will hear the beat of newvocabulariesabstractions, the exciting rhythms of special segments of theirsocietyindustry, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem for beginners is to listen to them, learn the words, feel the vibrations, and not be carried away.
By substituting “independent video game” for “short story” in The Ambition of the Short Story, (mashedmarket) turned the essay into a manifesto of sorts for indie game developers.
The Triple-A game is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the Triple-A game, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The independent video game by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains. And the independent video game can even lay claim to a kind of completeness that eludes the Triple-A game — after the initial act of radical exclusion, it can include all of the little that’s left.
The literal video version of A Ha’s Take On Me…that is, the words of the song are changed to reflect what actually happens in the video.
Band montage! Pipe wrench fight!
This. Is. Brilliant. (via andre)
Update: Here’s a slight twist on the theme…a meta song with lyrics about the lyrics. I like the built-in laugh track. (thx, elsa)
Update: And here’s the literal version of Tears for Fears’ Head Over Heels.
Anytime is a good time for a well-cut movie trailer mashup: here’s The Dark Knight version of the Toy Story 2 trailer. (via buzzfeed)
A supercut of every utterance of the phrase “what are you doing here?” on Doctor Who, including dozens of variations. Wow.
While following the market yesterday, I updated my Twitter account after a particularly precipitous mid-afternoon drop in the DJIA:
The DJIA trend line just kinda disappeared off the bottom of the chart there into Here Be Monsters territory about 30 minutes ago.
I meant “here be dragons” but you get the idea. Anyway, a reader sent in this chart that captures what many were feeling after the market closed.
The Sea of Dread, indeed. (thx, margaret)
This year’s harvest of crop art from the Minnesota State Fair included Grand Theft Festal, a mashup of Grand Theft Auto and Festal-brand canned corn done in millet, alfalfa, canola, and white clover seeds. The artist recorded a timelapse video of its construction. (via mark simonson)
IHOP meets House of Leaves. This will only be funny if you’ve read the book.
A collection of photos of custom and counterfeit Louis Vuitton products. Big omission: David LaChapelle’s photo of an LV’d Lil’ Kim. (via quips)
If I travelled through time for the purpose of attending high school, here’s what my yearbook photos would look like:
Make your own at Yearbook Yourself. The 1988 photo approximates what I looked like in high school. (via merlin)
For his Faces of Evil project, Hans Weishäupl made composite photographs of the world’s worst dictators by photographing hundreds of people in each dictator’s country and stitching them together. The results are a bit disturbing, particularly when viewing very large, clear, vibrant color photos of long-dead monsters like Stalin or Hitler. (via conscientious)
Many early 20th century hackers found the Ford Model T a perfect platform on which to build all manner of different mobile machines.
Among the 800 vintage automobiles brought by collectors were ones that had been converted to snowmobiles, racing coups and tow trucks. That was only a glimmer of the many innovative changes made by Model T owners, for uses Henry Ford never had in mind. They transformed the cars into tractors, pickup trucks, paddy wagons, mobile lumber mills and power plants for milling grain. An itinerant preacher converted his into a four-wheeled chapel.
Check out the slideshow for several examples, including the goat sidecar.
YouTubers are adding innappropriate new soundtracks to movie scenes, thereby ruining them. I stumbled across the Richie suicide scene from The Royal Tenenbaums set to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird (instead of Needle in the Hay) and then found a bunch more:
Terminator 2
The Matrix ruined
Star Wars, under pressure
2001
This Monsters Inc. one is actually fantastic.
Starship Troopers
A Clockwork Orange
Reservoir Dogs
Contact
Several of these originated on Something Awful.
In an attempt to make Billy Bob Thornton jealous, artist Jillian McDonald pasted herself into movie scenes kissing several well-known actors, including Thornton’s former wife, Angelina Jolie.
Will videos that bleep out ordinary words to make them seem profane always be funny? I hope so. Jimmy Kimmel’s Unnecessary Censorship was the first one that I saw…here are some others I’ve run across recently: Sesame Street’s The Count sings about how he loves to BLEEP, Barney the dinosaur talks dirty, Spongebob BLEEPing Squarepants, censored cartoons, more censored cartoons, and Cookie Monster BLEEPs the BLEEP.
Update: This commercial for Knorr is pretty good as well. (thx, oscar)
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