Art 80F The Lunch Club Section H
Project 4: Remix Videos
Bad Hombres, Nasty Women is a remix of the debates and ideas of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. It takes clips from the debates and combines them with a song that re-contextualizes the statements that the candidates made. Their voices are auto-tuned to fit the song which asks "why should you run the show?" with Trump and Clinton giving answers with what they actually said. The creator, schmoyoho, has a series of videos that remix the news and debates into songs. The video also features Weird Al Yankovic, who is known for his musical parodies. They created a new, humorous scenario for the serious topics of the presidential debate.
This video is called Adolf Hitler Anime Opening and throughout the video they used the opening song of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion and altered the opening so that it mainly focused on Adolf Hitler. I think that the point of this video was to recontextualize the thoughts about Hitler. He is known for being the leader of the Nazi Party that included initiated fascist policies that led to World War II and mass murder of millions of Jews. By adjusting the opening of the anime and making it concentrate on Hitler, it takes away the seriousness of Hitler. In this video, the audience could make inconsiderate jokes, that doesn't really pertain to Hitler but the overall video itself. The overall video being the remix of the opening of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Considering that Neon Genesis
Evangelion is a very popular anime because of its religious symbolism, deconstruction of the mecha genre and controversy. Since its been released in 1995, the growing popularity of the anime has increased because this series illustrates the emotions of the Evangelion pilots as they are faced with the inner turmoil between their internal demons and their surroundings. Each episode is supposed to be episodic, showing snippets of the main plot but, they are intertwined since they build on the flaws and pressures that each character struggles with. Along with the characters that parallels with the director’s mental illness, it portrayed a deeper meaning to the mecha genre and revolutionize how people viewed anime.
By remixing the video and having it concentrate on Hitler, it gives these two topics a less serious tone and plays this off as a joke. This video falls under the context of a remix because it grabs at two different topics and intertwined them, beginning a new conversation. This can also relate to Godwin’s Law where he states that any conversation that continues long enough will lead to the topic of Hitler at one point or another. I think this is really interesting because in this example video, it showed exactly how when starting a conversation entirely on anime can undoubtedly lead to Adolf Hitler.
Better Starts Here was an Apple commercial, in an attempt to reveal how Apple has started trying to be more environmentally friendly. Using videos taken from around the world and edited with CGI text and effects to better emphasize their point, Better Starts Here is a compilation of the efforts Apple has made summed to one video. While the video fails to talk about how Apple still has some aspects of its carbon footprint it needs to work on (such as consumer usage and e-waste), it can be expected since this video was made by Apple and thus can be expected to be biased towards Apple. If such a video were made by a non-affiliated party, it would likely include a small compilation of the parts of Apple which are still very harmful to the environment.