Part two. When science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon was asked why 90% of science fiction was crap (or crud, in one version), he replied, "90% of everything is crap," thus formulating what has become known as Sturgeon's Law. In youtube, that percentage seems a little low, as one searches for an elusive video, only to come up with countless amateur performances digitally immortalized, or the song recorded over a picture of the artist--as happened when I tried to find a video of Cat Stevens doing "Here Comes My Baby."
So when searching for "The Shape of Things to Come," not only did I get the Wild in the Streets Version (as well as clips from William Cameron Menzies's move version of H. G. Wells's novel of the same name), I found this compilation video done by Heroes fan StevieOh: stills from the series displayed during a recording of the Mann-Weil song done by the Ramones.
And it works.
I have no idea if the song is used in the show--I've never seen it. But this makes me want to see the show, and seems to capture its spirit, from the little I know of it. StevieOh calls it "Something I threw together during the March-April hiatus," but it seems to be that elusive bit of gold that it's possible to find in the effluvial river that is youtube. I hope NBC doesn't pull this video off of youtube, because it's made one person ready to go out and buy the DVD when it's released.
A Little is Enough
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3 comments:
Sturgeon's law probably only applies to systems with some sort of regulation -- novels have to pass SOME sort of editorial filter in order to reach the public -- but YouTube is accessible to anybody with a webcam and a desire to be seen. Which is pretty much everybody in North America at least.
What drives me crazy is the YouTube equivalent of "fanfic," which is what you mention in the post: people who take a song and play it over some half-baked anime/buffy montage.
MORE annoying to me, though, are people who post hard-to-find videos...but ALTER them first, referring to them as "restorations" or something. For instance, somebody has been posting unique Art of Noise videos, but adding awful digital effects that totally ruin them. Somebody is also doing this with "Nits" videos ("When they sing about clouds, I'll edit in pictures of...clouds! When they sing about a tree falling, I'll edit in footage of...a tree falling!")
That is horrible. I was looking to see if anything had ever been released for the post-Diana-Ross Supremes song "Nathan Jones," discovering that Bananarama did a cover (which I didn't much care for, since they disco-ized the rhythm section by the Funk Brothers--which is what I loved about the original song). There is a version of the original on YouTube--the song is played over a video of a record playing on a turntable. Why do it?
Mute, inlgorious Miltons everywhere, I guess.
Give a person Windows Media Encoder or iMovie, and they'll create a monster. The kind of monster that just wants to be loved by everybody but is spurned because it's so darned ugly.
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