Information Super-Heffalump

The internet, when it first became popular, was dubbed the "information superhighway", and this is a moniker which is still used from time to time today. It's one that I occasionally question, as for every website of a newspaper or corporation, there are websites such as Facebook (which has nothing to do with "information" in the intended sense really) and YouTube (which, whilst being a great outlet for certain forms of information and entertainment, is also crammed full of crap). And then, occasionally, I find out about something that I simply wouldn't have been able to if the internet didn't exist.

A short while ago I was researching something on Wikipedia (I actually forget what that something was, but never mind, it just goes to show how gripping what I ended up finding out about was), when I came across, in the "See also" section, a link to a page about an elephant called Topsy. Topsy lived in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries and was put down after killing three people (at least one of whom seems to have been incredibly cruel to Topsy and so, in my opinion, had it coming to him). It is the method and circumstances surrounding Topsy's execution that are so fascinating. Topsy was executed by electrocution in a similar way that a person would be executed in an electric chair. But the most fascinating part of all is that Thomas Edison decided to film the execution, calling the resulting film Electrocuting An Elephant.

At this point, I was incredibly curious about the whole story, and wondered if Edison's film had made it onto YouTube. A quick search later showed me that it was not only available, produced several results of varying degrees of quality, with the best two here and here (N.B. - The film is now available to view directly on the Wikipedia page, but at the time it wasn't and it's a pretty small video, so the YouTube results are still very much worthwhile).

My morbid curiosity led me back to Wikipedia and to the stories of other executed elephants, in particular Mary, also put down for killing a person (and again, a person who treated her cruelly), who was hanged from an industrial crane. I think it's the fact that even though both Mary and Topsy's deaths happened only just over one hundred years ago, but feel so alien to anything that we would be likely to see in today's society, that make their stories so engrossing. It's almost impossible to imagine what seeing either of these events would have been like, and even watching Edison's video requires at least some suspension of disbelief for me.

In returning to these pages to write this entry, I've also come across yet another elephant-related practice that I'd never come across before either, which is almost the opposite of the previous subject: exectution by elephant, where someone is sentenced to execution through literally being crushed and gored by an elephant.

So, quite a morbid post in many ways, but why have I chosen to share all of this? Well, as I said, all of these pieces of information would have almost certainly remained unknown to me if not for the internet. I don't necessarily need to know about elephant execution, but I'm glad that it's something that I was able to find out about. In particular, I'm pleased that I've got to see a film shot by Thomas Edison, as that's pretty cool in itself. I'm fairly certain too that, without YouTube, I would never have got to see that film clip either. So sometimes, despite all the shite you have to wade through to get to it, the internet is still a superhighway of information.

Anyway, to round things off nicely with a YouTube-and-elephants flavour, and to end on something slightly less grim than elephants being killed, here's an incredibly trippy Disney clip:

Good scenes in not-so-good films

Okay, so not all these films are what I'd call "bad" per se, but certainly none of them are classics. Here's my offerings, although I'm sure there's plenty more that I could mention.


You Don't Mess With The Zohan - opening chase scene



Zohan by and large is a stinker. Misfire after misfire at political and ethnic satire, crude sex jokes that are about as subtle as a baseball bat to the scrotum, and Rob Schneider as a "foreign" cab driver. It sits firmly in the Adam Sandler pile labeled "ones to miss". But watching the first ten minutes, you would be mistaken (as I was) to think that maybe the film is a well-observed action/secret agent film parody. The chemistry between Turturro and Sandler is excellent, and the jokes by and large mainly hit the mark fairly well. Not perfect, but a very funny scene. Shame the rest of the film is such a steaming pile of Schneider.


Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story - The Beatles scene



Walk Hard is not a bad film. It's actually a fairly good film in many ways. But it's also a film that suffers from having long sections that are distinctly average, jokes that either don't go far enough or are done to death, and some parts that you really wish were funnier. The standout scene for me was definitely the fantastic Beatles parody provided through cameos from Paul Rudd, Jason Schwartzman, Justin Long and Jack Black. The Liverpudlian accents range from poor to almost unrecognisable, but that just makes it all the more funny. The reference to Yellow Submarine works well. But it's the interaction between the four "Beatles" that just cracks me up every time. "I've got a song about an octopus!".


Matrix Revolutions - The final battle between Neo and Smith



Towards the end of the third and final Matrix film, after all the needlessly drawn out stuff about giant mechanoid fighting machines and all the religious imagery, the Wachowskis remembered what a lot of people went to see The Matrix to watch: kick ass kung fu fighting scenes with ace choreography. And whilst it's not flawless, the final fight between Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving under a raging thunderstorm whilst an infinite number of Weavings watching this shit go down, is simply great.


Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End - Jack in Purgatory



Much like the third Matrix film, the third Pirates film suffers from simply being too long and overindulgent, giving us overlong sea battles, a huge amount of confused pirate mythology and folklore and generally not a great deal to care about. This scene is one of the film's few saving graces, being as it is gloriously surreal and very well executed, so much so that it doesn't really feel like part of the same film. Johnny Depp is on top form, giving us a truly classic Jack Sparrow moment that rivals any other from all three of the Pirates films so far. It's a shame that for the majority of the film Depp's character takes a backseat to the long list of other characters and scenes such as Geoffrey Rush marrying Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley during a pirate battle, with Rush in full Captain Birdseye/Sea-Captain-from-The-Simpsons mode.


I'll leave the list there for now, but there are a few more that are coming to mind even as I type this, so I may do a second installment of something along these lines. Essentially, the way I've presented these clips - by the power of YouTube - shows that having one standout scene in a film isn't necessarily a hindrance to the film these days. The internet, and even DVD scene selection, means you can enjoy the ten minutes worth watching out of a two hour film full of mediocrity with relative ease. Then move on to the next bitesize piece of entertainment, I guess. Good or bad, it's the age in which we live.

Trailer Mash

And so comes my time to enter into the Blogathon Of Destiny. I considered a few things to write my inaugural post on, and whilst what I settled on may be a slightly softer option than a few of the things I've decided to put off for another day, I still think it's worthy enough to be entry number one.

I read Empire's website fairly regularly, and find the lists they put up there, if not entirely original, enjoyable to read the vast majority of the time. Their most recent list is The 50 Best YouTube Move Trailer Mashups, a genre of internet videos that has featured on this blog in the past. Not entirely impressed with every trailer mashup I've watched so far on the list, but most of them have been entertaining. Some of them are truly inspired however, with personal favourites including numbers 43, 27, 13, 10, 9, 7, 4, 3 and 1, with 2 being my overall favourite (although all of the top four are masterful).

Even though the more obviously entertaining ones are those that take the images from one film and the sound from another, and when these match up well it's wonderful to watch, the most well-crafted and authentic mashup trailers are by far those that simply take clips from just one film and use them in a new way. The power of suggestion is truly a mighty weapon, and (apart from one or two tiny additions here and there) the top four of Empire's fifty use just that to take one film and turn it against itself to fit it into an entirely different genre. That's why number 2 is my overall fave: I don't think I've ever seen it done better than in that short video.

Anyway, maybe something a little weightier for tomorrow's entry, but I just couldn't resist the English teacher geekery available in writing about this list.

Entries towards Destiny: 1

Awareness Test

I was first shown this during a professional development course. I think it's fantastic. Just watch.

Snow White And The Seven Recycled Scenes

An interesting video that's doing the rounds at the moment, demonstrating how Disney has "recycled" several of the same sequences in a number of their animated films over the years.



And stories covering the video in The Telegraph and The Times.

My thoughts...

The video, if nothing else, is compelling viewing. It's crafted to perfection, flowing seamlessly from one film clip to the next. The most surprising thing that's come out of this is the reaction from the "Disney fans" (read: people who commented on YouTube). From The Times:

“I feel so ripped off now. All the money I spend on this crap, they could at least come up with some original scenes,” wrote one viewer. “Our childhoods were based on a lie,” said another.

A little melodramatic, maybe? Oh wait, this is YouTube commenters. Maybe not then.

As a fan of Disney, do I feel "ripped off" or that my childhood is now "based on a lie"? Definitely not. The fact that a handful of scenes from a small number from Disney's dozens-strong canon of animated films have used the same animation sequences is fascinating to see, but certainly doesn't destroy the legacy that Disney has crafted. I find it surprising that the broadsheets would report the YouTube commenters as genuine commentators.

Returning back to the video itself, I found it remarkable that the video referencing system was used as late as 1991's Beauty And The Beast, and that the sequence reused was one from Sleeping Beauty, a film over years old at the time. I'll also be interested to see if any further compilations of this technique, from Disney films or otherwise, surface in the near future.