T w e n t y S i d e d

With over 1.7 million views on YouTube alone, this movie has been around and seen by nearly everyone, although I just discovered it yesterday. It’s a montage made by a man who has traveled the world and filmed himself doing a humorous little dance in some of the most fantastic and exotic places on earth. I actually found it to be quite moving.

The dancing man is Matt Harding, who was an avid gamer and game developer before getting sick of it all and shooting off to the ends of the earth.

Check out the story of his travels. Pretty interesting.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Via Lileks I learn that Mike Nelson, of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame, has a new project out called Rifftrax. It’s a continuation of the MST3k theme, except that you have to provide the movie yourself. You rent whatever movie he’s riffing on, and watch the movie while you listen to his comments on your iPod.

Unlike in MST3k, he doesn’t need permission from the owners of the movie to do it, which means he can take on larger, more mainstream and big-budget films that would never give their consent to a MST3k-style airing.

This is brilliant. I’ve always thought that MST3k would be a good deal funnier if the movies they took on were more widely known. Some were so horrible that enduring them was too awful, even with the heckling to ease the pain. (Mannos, Hands of Fate comes to mind.) A lot of the humor comes from seeing the movie many times. MST3k was one of those shows that would get more funny from repeated viewings, because after a few times though the movie you would begin to see it the way they did and you would be in on the joke. I’d always wanted to see what they could do with a movie that everyone else has already memorized and internalized. The movie doesn’t have to be terrible for it to be fertile ground for derision.

Consider Star Wars:

1. Is dated in its special effects, hairstyles, and ideas about technology.
2. Is almost universally known.
3. Often suffers from wooden dialog.
4. Is fun and exciting to watch.
5. Takes itself pretty seriously.

I think giving stuff like Star Wars, Close Encounters, E.T., and The Matrix the MST3k treatment would be more prone to humor than beating up on some horrible plotless b-movie nobody remembers.

Sadly, it looks like the rest of the cast isn’t in on this. This sort of humor works when you have a few people that can talk to each other. It’s a tough act for one guy to carry alone. It’ll be interesting to see if he can pull it off.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.