Dear Sister: Guns + Slow-motion + Music = Awesome!

So, I'm not sure how many of you watch SNL with any kind of regularity, or if any of you are fans of the OC, but I bet most of you know what youtube is, so I'm sure you've seen several of the SNL Digital Shorts that have basically been the highlight of the show for the last two years since Andy Samberg and his writing partners/Lonely Island alums Akiva Schafer and Jorma Taccone joined the show (Most notably "Lazy Sunday" and "Dick in a Box", which became such a hit that Justin Timberlake brought Samberg on stage to perform it at a NYC concert.) Thanks to NBC/Universal, most of these are no longer available on youtube except where they have been mis-tagged due to misspellings (intentional or not) or have not been linked to/viewed enough to qualify for removal. NBC claims to have them posted on their website, but, if you follow the links on the wikipedia entry on the shorts, I don't think any of them are working. NBC is sure doing a great job of capitalizing on all the exposure these 'viral videos' could be getting them...

Anyway, last Monday I got this youtube (more accurately one like it as it was promptly taken down) in my email:

My first reaction after watching this was 'why has my old trusted friend, comrade in arms for the finer things in life like Trailer Park Boys, whisky, and post-structuralism, sent me this link? This is dumb." And don't get me wrong, I like many dumb things. Again, see Trailer Park Boys.

Then I compulsively watched it six more times. Then I did some research. Apparently, the short is based on this scene from the season 2 finale of The OC.

Now, I have never seen The OC. To the contrary, I have often made statements to the effect of "since shit apples don't fall far from the shit tree, there is no way that a show about Orange County can be good. Unless that show is Arrested Development." I still feel that this a very cogent argument, despite that infectious song that I sing every night while crying myself to sleep in my tiny NYC apartment, 'California' (performed by none other then the douche-patrol themselves, Phantom Planet.) Nevertheless, if this clip is emblematic of the show at large, I may just reconsider that position, because, as we have seen above, Guns + Slow-motion + Music = Awesome. It is funny when it happens once in the OC version, and it is funnier to the 3rd power when it happens three dozen times in four minutes.

As is often the case when an inspired individual happens across a gem like this, the youtube community of bedroom editors were quickly able to spin off dozens of spoofs faster than then Harry Potter DVDs of the new movie hit Chinatown (fyi, this happens generally the same day of the theatrical release. This lag on the part of the Chinatown dvd vendors is due to the fact that they take the trouble to make glossy cover art for the DVDs they produce.) True to this rugged, individualist spirit of copyright infringement, the spoofs take real media clips, add slow motion and music for effect, and voila! test subjects for our "Guns + Slow-motion + Music = Awesome" hypothesis! Here are two favs:

The Departed

(this is a spoiler if you haven't seen the movie)

Lost Season 2

(this is a spoiler if you haven't seen Season Two)

There it is! Hilarity! Don't you want to watch them 10 times in a row! I know I did!

Q: But can we expand this genre, perhaps let it grow into some new places? If so, how?

A: Yes! Like this: Guns The Office tribute clips! + Slow-motion + Music = Awesome + 10!

The Office

I just can't wait to see what spoofs come from last Saturday's mildly explicit "Roy Rules" short. I mean, a Roy/Jim of Office fame seems ripe for the picking...