Midnight Oil & Captain America YouTube Mashup

By Robert C. Moon on Day 5

Last Fall 2007, I took a User-Generated class taught by Clay Shirky and for my final research paper, I looked in depth of the Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” viral phenomenon. Apparently thousands of uncordinated YouTube users participated in a loose video conversation where they video recorded themselves, “cranking that” to Soulja Boy’s first single. Along with peole doing the dance, editors also started remixing and reappropriating other video (typically cartoons) to this explicit track. Anime Musiv Videos (AMV) are also a niche group of editors who pride themselves syncing up anime cartoons to popular music songs to create a new personal expression. Once high end software is now readily available to the masses, which brought about such interesting uses of reappropriation of found materials to create something new. Soulja Boy was definitely not the first signs, nor the last of this use of remix. In fact it will definitely gain in popularity.

So last week someone sent me a video (typically viral media is spread) of Bert and Ernie rapping to MOP’s Ante Up and I nearly lost it. I laughed so hard I forwarded it to all my friends because it was so well edited. Coming from an editing background, I was surprised that I never made a remix video, so for my final 5-in-5 project, I decide to use a Midnight Oil song mixing in one of my favorite cartoons, Captain Planet. You can check it out on YouTube here.

August 2nd, 2008