Okay, we all know what “Gangnam Style” is, right? Jordan Hass already did and article on it and he said he was late to the party then. That was almost a month ago, so I’m doing this only because I can make some broader point about Internet memes and YouTube content. “Gangnam Style” is already old hat for a lot of people but nevertheless it persists. I still see it posted on my Facebook feed every day, new parody videos, videos of various television broadcasters doing the dance on air because that’s what the people demand, all that shit.

In case you’ve not seen the original, here it is…

This has been the big thing to go out and parody this year, remember “Friday”? “Gangnam Style” is this year’s “Friday”, but magnified because I think “Friday” took a hell of a lot longer to start showing up on my TV and I sure as shit never heard it on my radio.

Now there are parody videos everywhere about every topic; Gundams, condoms, Mitt Romney, everything. Hell, there is even “Spartan Highschool Style” which is basically the best thing ever. I hope to see more high quality shit from Spartan Highschool.

Here is the problem with these parodies though; “Gangnam Style” is already a joke. I imagine people looked at the video, with the funny Asian man doing all these strange things and just assume it’s all just another weird artifact of Asian culture, like Japanese game shows and Anime, but those people are probably missing the point.

Gangnam is an actual place in South Korea with a reputation for being incredibly rich and high class. The reason the video is so silly and weird is because it’s supposed to be setting up a contrast between the low class, crude humor of the video and the high class lifestyle the song discusses. It’s already a joke guys, and it probably carries a bit more weight to it than most of parody videos it spawned (which isn’t much, but certainly more than any of the videos it spawned.)

I never miss an opportunity to rip on the works of directing duo Seltzer and Friedberg of Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans infamy. There are a lot of reasons to dislike their directorial work but I think the fatal flaw of any of their films is that they have an adolescent, baseline understanding of parody. Parody at its best reveals something about the original work, but the Seltzer and Friedberg school of parody seems to be as follows;

1. Select a popular film, or handful of popular films.
2. Have worse actors reenact scenes from those movies while injecting pop culture references in the place of jokes. (i.e. Having a Liam Neason stand-in save his daughter thanks to an app on his iPhone 5, with the Apple logo prominently featured.)

It’s a simple enough tactic and some people have made it work, but in the hands of Seltzer and Friedberg it falls flat. That’s what I see happening with a lot of the “Gangnam Style” parodies and Internet parodies in general for that matter (Suburban Knights anyone?) the joke isn’t some kind of statement on the work in question, it’s “hey, wouldn’t you get some sweet LOLs if we took something you know about and put it in this other, unrelated thing you know about?”

But like I said before, “Gangnam Style” is already a joke. So not only are the parodies lazily built around the joke that things exist in the same universe as “Gangnam Style”, but they get to coast on the humor already present in the original “Gangnam Style” video. The reason you are laughing at these parody videos is because the original video is funny, not the parody.

This brings me back to “Spartan High School Style” and why I think it is unironically brilliant. However unintentional it may be, “Spartan High School Style” is the dark reflection of every “Gangnam Style” parody ever made. The video shows exactly how stupid you look when you try to get famous with a shitty parody of whatever new viral video has hit big on the web; you look like “Spartan High School Style”.

I love this blog. I really do. I love what it’s about. I love the Blockbuster Buster’s wife was offended enough by our article about him to respond to it anonymously, but left an obvious enough trail of breadcrumbs for me to figure her out. I love that it’s garnered a small audience of three or four dedicated readers who I’ve come to consider friends. I want to be able to post new material all the time, but I simply can’t; I have a job. When the mission statement was drafted up I had a much less demanding part time job but shortly after that I got my very first real adult job thing that eats up loads of my time. I write about 10,000 words a day for that job. For a bit of perspective the Angry Joe article, which I’m almost certain is the longest one I’ve written, is just a little past 1,000. So by the end of the day I just want to veg out and play video games and read comics, but usually end up passing out the moment I get home. I always come up with new ideas for articles, but rarely ever have the time to pursue them. Not complaining, the job pays the bills and by “pays the bills” I mean it affords me expensive retro video games I used to think I would never be able to own.

“The Bills”

But Man-Child Messiah is still important to me. I paid for a domain name well after it was obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to manage weekly content. I’ve been considering the best solution to my content predicament for a a while and I know something has to give.

I need to stop being a lazy fuck.

Plain and simple. I may not hammer out a weekly article like I originally intended, but I can probably afford to churn one out once, maybe twice a month, I’m not that busy. Lord knows I’ve got enough ideas floating around. So here is where I’m at, consider this a preemptive New Year’s resolution from me. I now consider it part of the site’s mandate that I will post a new article every 30 days unless extenuating circumstances dictate otherwise.

Also, here are some ideas I have at the moment…
• A follow up to that Adrian Curry post.
• A (hopefully) final article concerning Demo Reel, relating to the 1st and 2nd episodes.
• A series of posts about Linkara (our one year anniversary special maybe?)
• A series of posts about the Slenderman mythos and the various creative works that comprise it.
• A series of posts about Kickstarter.
• Something else about that Kingsley guy I ripped on in my first post.
• Something about DmC and how fucking stupid Devil May Cry fans are.
• Something about some more YouTubers I still like.

So, that’s that. We’re still alive, I’m a lazy fuck. I’m trying to do better.

See you shortly.

A couple of weeks ago I posted an article reflecting on the end of Doug Walker’s The Nostalgia Critic which had served as the flagship series of our perennial whipping boy gallery, Channel Awesome, since its inception back in 2007. Near the end I discussed Doug’s next project,Demo Reel, and expressed hope that he would work on transcending the low, low bar The Nostalgia Critic set for his work. Then the trailer came out…

Man, don’t I feel like a fucking bitch?

Have you ever seen Be Kind Rewind?

Be Kind Rewind.

The basic premise is that Jack Black erases all the VHS tapes at Mos Def’s titular video rental store and Black comes up with a crazy scheme to fix it; he and Mos Def remake all the movies with low budget equipment, films Black dubs as “sweded”. What sounds like an excuse for Jack Black to goof off for the entire running time actually ends up being a really somber story about the importance of community in an world that is quickly becoming more and more cold and distant, it’s got a lot more heart than the initial premise would lead one to believe.

Watching this trailer, Walker has essentially ripped off the high concept pitch for Be Kind Rewind wholesale, stripped it of the heart and soul that made the movie special, and is now giving it back to us after recrafting it into another poorly conceived ego vehicle. Of course he has cast himself as an egotistical hack film maker, a huge departure from his previous role as an egotistical hack film critic, and his real life persona as a hack film maker (possibly egotistical, but I don’t know the guy personally.)

Expect all the usual movie jokes here, we’ve already seen his HILARIOUS take on the Christian Bale Batman voice/ Tom Hardy Bane voice (Isn’t it funny!? They’re kind of hard to understand!) The difference here being instead of sitting behind a chair and shrilly bitching about these things, he’ll be acting them out with his newest friends.

I will give him credit where it’s due though, his co-stars are not current Channel Awesome contributors, at least not to my knowledge, there are so fucking many of them that it’s kind of hard to tell at this point. The chick seems like a competent enough actress. Sure, she only really has two lines in the trailer, but both of them are jokes and she seems to understand comedic timing, at least insofar as she didn’t shriek them or fake fire a toy hand gun at the camera to punctuate that what we just heard was a joke. The other guy, when he says he’s the writer at Demo Reel, but the final product rarely resembles what he writes, I imagine this was actually a candid out of character vlog about his experiences working on Demo Reel that ended up in the trailer by mistake. I was a little bummed to see that Jaguar Cats doesn’t appear in the trailer, but I can just assume they didn’t want to give all the twists away.

So there you have it, my thoughts on the Demo Reel trailer. The first episode comes out on Tuesday, until then, be still my beating heart…